Eyes on Ears and Mouth on Toes

Despite the clever if misleading title, we will not be talking about mouths on toes today (although many creatures such as butterflies can taste with their feet).  I just said that to make it sound like the line from the classic song "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" by Bob Dylan.  Instead, we are going to be talking about eyes on ears: eyespots, at least!

A picture of one of the Amur tigers at the Denver Zoo.  See those white bars surrounded by dark fur on the ears of the cat?  Those are the topic of today's discussion.

On the cover of the August/September issue of the National Wildlife magazine, there was a picture of a drinking bobcat, its ears folded back in the posture that some refer to as "airplane ears."  On both of its ears were two white bars that made the ears look a lot like eyes.  I never really paid attention to this pattern on the coat, but once my friend Aidan Cook pointed it out, it got the proverbial gears going.  I remembered that servals also had the eyespot-like patterns as well, but did other cats?  Turns out a lot of them do, with just a few shared throughout the post.  Notice how defined the eyespot is in both the bobcat (top) and the serval, below.

To learn more, I consulted my "Wild Cats of the World" book by Mel and Fiona Sunquist.  The authors state that many cats have this pattern on their ears, "almost as many species" have the ear eyespots that are "poorly defined or absent."  One of the many examples that they include is the lion.  As you can see in the pictures below, lions do have this pattern to a certain degree, but nowhere near as derived as in the serval or the bobcat.  Below we have pictures of a young adult male lion, two of females, and one of a cub, and you can see that none of them have a very well defined eyespot.

Mountain lions also generally don't have it as well defined.  It seems like some mountain lions really don't have that much black on their ears at all, and some have a higher degree of black and white.  Presumably, whatever the function the eyespot serves in other species, it is not as important for the mountain lion, and natural selection therefore does not favor it highly one way or another.

It's a little tough to tell in the picture below, but the sand cat is another one of those cats that has a poorly defined eyespot.

Cheetahs also don't have terribly well defined eyespots.

Yet another cat that does not have very well defined eyespots, the ever fantastic Pallas cat!

I thought I had read somewhere that the eyespots served to help communicate between individuals when they were hunting.  This doesn't make that much sense, though, because most cats are solitary individuals, with the main exception being lions, and we already noted that their eyespots are not quite as specialized.  The Sunquists state in their book that the exact function of the eyespots is unknown, although some scientists believe that they serve as a "follow me" signal to their young, which "may be especially important in low-light conditions."  I assumed that this might mean that the young cats wouldn't have the eyespots, but this is clearly not true, as you can see the photograph of Sochi, the new male Amur leopard cub at the Denver Zoo.  There, you can see that Sochi (named after the Russian city that is holding this years Olympics) also has the ear spots.  So while this doesn't necessarily support the idea of a "follow me" signal to the young, it doesn't really not support it either: it's just something interesting that I wanted to point out.

We already talked about how tigers have a pretty well developed eyespot, but here are two more pictures of tigers to drive the point home.

I can't remember for certain if the picture below was a bobcat or a lynx, but I am pretty certain it is a bobcat, looking at the size of the feet.  (Lynx spend a lot more time in the snow, and therefore have larger feet, a snowshoe-like adaptation to keep them from sinking in.)  This cat, one of many at the Wild Animal Sanctuary, seems to have much smaller feet in proportion to the rest of the body.  Regardless, you can see the well defined eyespots.

The snow leopard, one of my favorite cats, has well defined eyespots as well, which you can kind of see in both of these pictures.

Photo Credit: Masaki Kleinkopf 

The fishing cat is another cat that has these well defined eyespots.

And finally, the Canadian lynx, much like its bobcat relative, also has pretty well defined eyespots!

Works Cited:

Animal of the Day: Addax

The Addax (Addax nasomaculatus) sometime called the screwhorn antelope, is a "Critically Endangered" member of the group of animals known collectively as the antelope.  The addax is found in the Sahara desert.  The Addax has been extirpated, or made regionally extinct, in the countries of Egypt, Algeria, Western Sahara, and Sudan.  Nowadays, the Addax can only be naturally found in the countries of Chad,  Niger, Mauritania, and has been reintroduced into Morocco and Tunisia.  The Addax has earned its "Critically Endangered" status due to the immense and very frequent hunting of its horns, and is still often hunted on game reserves in the United States.  The meat and leather obtained from the Addax are also highly prized.  Their diet consists of primarily grass, as well as the leaves of various shrubs.  Rarely drinking, they instead gain most of their moisture through the plants that they eat.  The Addax is a slow moving animal, leaving it vulnerable to attacks from cheetahs, leopards, lions, African wild dogs, and humans.  The calves can also be killed by servals, caracals and hyenas.

There is also a Spanish motorsport team named the Barwa Addax Team, but I was unable to ascertain whether this team was named after the animal or not!
 

Zoo Spotlight: The Living Desert

So at least a few times now, I have used pictures from a zoo we went to in Palm Desert called "The Living Desert."  An awesome zoo, this place (clearly) focuses a lot more on the desert animals of the world, and introduces you to a number of animals that you immediately recognize, and a number of animals that you might not otherwise be able to see at another zoo.  I thought I could share some of the pictures that I took at this exciting place, and recommend it to one and all as an exciting place to visit if you ever pass by that area!

Sand cat

Let's start off with some of the animals that you might not be able to see at most other zoos.  As regular readers know, I am a pretty big fan of cats, and The Living Desert definitely had its fair share!  For example, the "Near Threatened" sand cat (Felis margarita), the only cat that is found primarily in the desert.  One of my favorite small wild cats, the sand cat is found in the deserts of Africa and the Middle East.

Sand cat

Besides the sand cat, The Living Desert also has a few other small cats, including the Arabian wild cat, one of the many sub species of the wild cat, Felis silvestris.  Unfortunately, this little guy was asleep so I didn't get any pictures, but I did get pictures of two of the other smaller felines: the serval, and the bobcat, each of which we have done an Animal Spotlight on.  The serval is native to Africa, while the bobcat lives all over North America, in both forests and deserts.

Sleeping serval

Bobcat on the prowl

Bobcat....stretch!

Other, larger cats can be found at The Living Desert, as well, including the jaguar and the mountain lion (both of which I got no pictures of), as well as the cheetah.  We saw two or three cheetahs, but they were all doing what cats do best: sleeping! 

Sleeping cheetah!

Another very interesting thing about the zoo is the vegetation.  Many people simply pass over it: but if you do stop to take a look at it, you might notice something interesting: a whole bunch of the plants, both in and out of the exhibits, are very prickly!  This is because the people at The Living Desert have done their best to make the vegetation in their exhibits as accurate as possible.  Pay special attention to the trees once you reach the large exhibit with both giraffes and kudu, a type of African antelope.  These incredibly spiky trees are called acacia trees, and these trees are one of the reasons why the giraffe has such an incredibly long tongue.  I've been able to see this tongue first hand on numerous occasion at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, including the last time I went with my friend Masaki Kleinkopf, as you can see in this incredible video.  The giraffe has been forced to evolve its incredibly long, prehensile in order to circumnavigate through and around these spiny branches in order to reach the leaves. 

Look at those spikes on those acacia trees!

A picture of myself feeding the giraffes at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo

Grazing kudu

Another one of my favorite things at The Living Desert was the Miriam U. Hoover Discovery Center.  Indoor and air-conditioned (which, trust me, was very refreshing after being in a desert for a while!), the Discovery Center had a number of things for younger kids to do, but it was definitely worth stopping in, because they had an exhibit talking about the Pleistocene (2.5 MYA - 12,000 years ago) residents of California!  Here are what some of the coolest fossils were.

Mounted giant ground sloth skeleton

A full skeleton of the eight-foot-tall giant ground sloth.  The relationship between extinct South American ground sloths and the extant tree sloths was one of the most important things that influenced Charles Darwin into his Theory of Evolution, more so than the case of the Galápagos finches that most textbooks cite.  During the Great American Interchange, at a time when many South American species were going extinct due to competition from animals coming down the Isthmus of Panama from North America (like Thylacosmilus), the giant ground sloths were actually able to move the other way, with remains being found even as far north as Alaska.  

The skull of Panthera atrox, the North American lion

A skull of the North American lion (Panthera atrox), as well as a skull from Smilodon, colloquially known as the "saber-toothed cat."

The skull of Smilodon

Skulls of Camelops (a type of camel); a dire wolf (Canis dirus), a significantly larger relative of the extant gray wolf; and the Teratorn, one of the members of the family Teratornithidae, a group of birds of prey that lived in North and South America, and includes the largest flying bird known, Argentavis.  Finally, there was a life-sized picture of a mammoth on the wall with a fossil tusk sticking out which was pretty cool as well!

The skull of Camelops

The skull of the dire wolf

The skull of the Teratorn

A size comparison of a mammoth and a human, myself

Now, back to the living!  Here are some more pictures of some of the really cool animals that we saw!  

The "Critically Endangered" addax (Addax nasomaculatus), native to the Sahara Desert

The "Endangered" African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), native to (you guessed it) Africa

American badger

Bighorn sheep

Burrowing owl

Dromedary camel

Caracara

Sleeping fennec fox

Another sleeping fennec fox

Giant tortoises eating

Mexican wolf

Another Mexican wolf.  Despite the fact that this wolf looks like it is snarling, it actually wasn't!  I don't actually know what was going on!

A Mexican wolf running

Pronghorn

There were also tons of lizards running around all over the place!

There was also a really cool, huge, giant train set!  Here are a bunch of pictures of it!

Incredibly detailed: the Monticello vineyards!

Incredibly detailed: Mount Rushmore!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So would I recommend The Living Desert to anyone who is going to be in the area?  You bet I would!  Not only is it an excellent zoo, it gives the visitor an interesting and often difficult-to-find view of desert life from around the world!

South Palm Desert on Dwellable