Animal Spotlight: Aurochs

This post is the birthday post of Govind Kamath!  Happy birthday, Mr. Kamath!  If you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!

Over the years, you may have pondered, "Where does my burger come from?"  You probably just meant where was the cow that it came from.  But now here is something else for you to ponder.  Where the heck did the cow even come from?  Do you ever just see wild, black and white cows?  Well, I am here to tell you all about the evolution of the cow.

A Watusi/Longhorn pileup!  They actually crashed into each other, though!  Trust me, I was there, you can even see my sweatshirted elbow in the mirror thingy!

During the Pliocene Epoch, from around 5 to 2 MYA, the planet went through a cooler spell.  The frequent ice ages were a part of this cool spell, as was the most frequent Ice Age.  This colder weather caused many of the worlds forests to decrease in area, which in turn caused the world's grasslands to expand.  This led to the evolution of many large grazing animals, and helped contribute to the Pleistocene Megafauna, often called the Ice Age Megafauna.  One of these large animals that evolved was the Aurochs.

The Aurochs (Bos primigenius), first became domesticated during the Neolithic Age, or the "New Stone Age," probably around 12,000 years ago.  As a matter of fact, two waves of domestication occurred.  As you can see in the map below, there were three different subspecies of the Aurochs; one in northern Africa; one for Europe and Asia; and a third for the mysterious subcontinent of India, as Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali says in "The Big Bang Theory."  The two different domestications happened with the Eurasian subspecies, Bos primigenius primigenius, and the Indian subspecies, B. p. namadicus. 

These two different domestications of these two different species of cattle led to two different domesticated cattle!  In India, we have the Zebu cattle, which has been given its own scientific subspecies name, Bos primigenius indicus.  The other, Eurasian kind has become the cow that we know today from driving down the street and the Chik-fil-A ads.  While other types of bovines (members of the family Bovidae, a group of ungulates that includes water and African buffalo, yaks, bison, and, of course, cattle) have been domesticated throughout the years, specifically the water buffalo, the south-east Asian Banteng, and the Indian Gaur, it is cattle that have remained the most widely used, for a wide variety of purposes, too.

The Aurochs is now extinct.  The very last recorded female passed away in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland.

There are two particularly interesting breeds of domesticated cattle that I would like to now draw to your attention.  Back in December of 2011 on our trip down to Texas to visit my gramma, on the same trip where we visited the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country and saw the Acrocanthosaurus footprints, we also visited the San Antonio Zoo, as well as the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch near San Antonio.  This is an awesome place for EVERYONE to visit!  You get to roll down your windows as you drive through a park chock-full of deer, antelope, zebra, and bovines, and you get to drop food for them!  There are also three members of the order Struthioniformes (aka the ratites), like the South American rhea, the Australian emu, and, most terrifying of all, the African ostrich.  The ostriches was absolutely terrifying, and I will talk about them in a later blog post!  But also at the ranch they had two pretty crazy types of cattle!

The first was the Ankole-Watusi, often called simply the Ankole cattle or the Watusi.  Originally bred in Africa, the Watusi was named after the Watusi tribesmen (now the Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi).  This type of cattle has enormous horns that can span over six feet!  Both genders have these horns, and they can grow from between 1,500 - 1,800 pounds!  Below are some pictures that my family and I took of the cattle walking by our car!

A Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

Another Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

A baby Watusi!  HOW CUTE!

The second crazy type of cattle is the Texas Longhorn.  The Texas longhorn is, of course, native to the Lone Star State, and reports of the longhorn enduring thirst while still being able to fight off packs of wolves, as well as bears (presumably grizzly bears), from the pioneer times is not uncommon.  The longhorn, like the Watusi, also has six foot horns possessed by both sexes.  According to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch Adventure Guide Book, the longhorn "helped form the basis of the ranching industry of the American West during the 19th century."

A Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

Another Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

The aftermath of the Watusi/Longhorn pileup seen above!

Whoever said cows weren't interesting!

Simba, Pumbaa, and Other Swahili Names From "The Lion King"

Recently I decided to learn a bit of Swahili, and I have stumbled across a few things that I thought were quite interesting!  For instance, did you know that "Safari" meant "Trip" in Swahili?  I certainly didn't!  And the old movie entitled "Hatari!" actually means "Danger!" in Swahili!  Who knew! 

As I continued to learn more, I came across something else interesting.  As I was learning the animal names, I found that "Duma" meant "Cheetah," which excited me, as one of the main cheetah stars from BBC's "Big Cat Diary," one of the later seasons, is named Duma.  Next, I found out that "Chui" meant "Leopard...." and guess what?  There was a leopard named Chui, too!

Then, I found that "Simba" meant "Lion."  There was, of course, a lion that went by the name of Simba, in the first season of Big Cat Diary, I believe.  I had just assumed he was named after Simba from "The Lion King," which is still a possibility, but it could really go either way.


But I think it clear where the name of "Simba" came from for the Lion King.  As a matter of fact, many of the characters have names that mean something else in other languages.  For example, Ed, the hyena, is actually short for "Edward" in English.  Below is a list of others.

1. Nala - Gift
2. Pumbaa - Simpleton
3. Rafiki - Friend
4. Sarabi - Mirage
5. Shenzi - Uncouth
6. Sarafina - Bright Star
7. Banzai - Skulk, or Lurk

The Cichlids of the African Rift Lakes

Three of the largest lakes in the world reside in the 3,700 mile long Rift Valleys of Africa.  These lakes, Lakes Victoria (located in the countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), Tanganyika (split between Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], Tanzania, and Zambia), and Malawi (located between Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania), rank among the top ten largest lakes in the world; third, seventh, and ninth, respectively.  (For some reason, these rankings differ upon where you look.  Lake Victoria as the third largest lake seems pretty universal, but the ranks of Tanganyika and Malawi differ for whatever reason.  You'd think that it would be pretty universal, but I suppose not.)  Besides being such large lakes, these lakes are important for other reasons, perhaps the most important reason (for biologists, at least) being their isolation.

You see, the three great lakes are islands, of a sort.  According to Websters, the definition of an island is "a land mass smaller than a continent and surrounded by water."  The Rift Valley lakes are essentially the opposite; "a body of water smaller than an ocean and surrounded by land."  For our purposes, an island is just something that has been isolated for a time, and allowed its flora and fauna to flourish in new and interesting ways.

And flourish it did in the Rift Valley lakes.  If you were to visit these lakes, snorkel or scuba in their waters, you would most likely notice a wide variety of fish.  You would not be wrong in this assessment; however, you might be surprised to find that most of these types of fish are belonging to a group called the cichlids (SICK-lids), and that all 1,650 plus species of these cichlids descended from a common ancestor.  While the dates of when the common ancestor of the various cichlids came to be trapped in their respective lakes, it has been estimated that the cichlids of Lake Malawi all evolved from a common ancestor trapped 700,000 years ago, and those of Lake Victoria around 12,000 years ago.  Trapped in these growing lakes while they were being formed, this small group of fish quickly came to dominate their new home, exploding in biodiversity to adapt to the wide variety of niches left open to them.

Tenuous can this biodiversity be, as recent logger-based erosion has shown.  Logging nearby to one of the lakes resulted in rapid erosion.  This erosion caused a great deal of silt to build up in one of the lakes.  This, of course, caused the water to become quite murky; think about your average beach, and how murky the water often is near the shore.  Many of the cichlids that lived in this area relied upon visual identification to recognize members of the same species for mating purposes.  With the cloudy, muddled water, this became quite difficult.  As a result, many fish from closely related species ended up mating with each other and, in the case of many of the couplings, resulted in viable offspring.  These viable offspring in turn bred with other species, lowering, at least temporarily, the biodiversity of the cichlids in this particular corner of the lake.

Blantyre on Dwellable