Meet Captain Cook’s Kickboxers

A recent addition to the Dehiwala Zoo are two kangaroos from Japan’s Nagoya Higashiyama zoo. Initially shy, this pair is now fully acquainted with their new environment. ZooLander this week reports about the Zoo’s new residents.

British explorer James Cook landed in the then unknown lands of Australia, in 1770, on his voyage to find a new continent in the southern seas. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef had damaged his ship, and they had to move inland and anchor it in a river. While the ship was being repaired, Captain Cook and a team decided to explore the hitherto unvisited new paradise in the company of the locals - the indigenous Aborigines who spoke a language named Guugu Yimithirr.
Suddenly Captain Cook had seen a strange looking creature hopping fast, scared by the people that had penetrated its territory. It had a long tail, strong hind legs but small fore limbs – and the animal had to bend awkwardly to touch the ground (in a manner touching it with all 4 legs.) Puzzled by the strange animal, Captain Cook asked the Aborigines “what is this animal..?”. The native replied kangaru which in his language meant ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand’. Driven by excitement the explorer failed to realize that the Aborigine had not understood his question and the name has been kept since then.
This is the common myth about the origin of the name “kangaroo” and this story has become  Australian legend. Other fictions  behind the origin of the name includes variations of the above. Explorers are said to have mistaken the Aboriginal word for go that way (kangaroo) when an Aborigine pointed in a direction that a kangaroo happened to be headed. Another story says that when explorers asked the indigenous people what the first kangaroo they saw was, pointing at it, the natives replied “kangaroo!” meaning “That’s your index finger!”
However, these stories are only myths and later language experts conclude that the word “kangaroo” has been derived from the Aboriginal word gangurru, a Guugu Yimidhirr word referring to the Grey Kangaroo. Whatever the reality is, the legend surrounding  how the ‘kangaroo’ got its name is as fascinating as the pair of kangaroos now resident at the Dehiwala Zoo, and which you have the opportunity to closely observe.

Shipped from Japan
This pair of kangaroos has been shipped from Japan’s Higashiyama Zoo located in Nagoya.
The Kangaroos were very shy on the first few days in their enclosure at the Dehiwala Zoo. They had rarely come out from their cage to the open area, though they have been given a fairly large enclosure to play around in. It had taken few weeks for them to gain confidence. Now it is a pair of different kangaroos that hops around the enclosure. The large male also likes to rest in the shade during the hot afternoons and  would remind you of a celebrity laying on a beach. The female is smaller in size and more energetic and wants to keep on exercising, hopping around the enclosure unlike the lazy male.

Hopping for a living
You would have seen lots of small animals hopping as a way to move around, but kangaroos are the only large animals who hop as a means of locomotion. Kangaroos can continue hopping for about 20-25 km/h (13-16 mph), and can reach of speeds of up to a 70 km/h (44 mph) when it is running to escape from impending danger to its life. Hopping is largely energy efficient for kangaroos because of the way its body is designed and zoologists believe this fast and energy efficient method of travel has evolved because of the need to regularly cover large distances in search of food and water – rather than the need to escape predators.
The kangaroo has a very strong tail and it can stand on its tail like a tripod. Also when the kangaroo moves at slow speeds, it uses the tail to form a tripod with its two forelimbs then raises its hind feet to move forward. It is said that kangaroos can also swim in emergencies. Many have witnessed kangaroos jumping into waterways and swimming away to escape predators. If pursued into the water, it is also said that a kangaroo might use its forepaws to hold the predator underwater so as to drown it.
The pouchy mom kangaroo is indeed a distinctive animal and is also a marsupial - which has a pouch on its belly to rear its baby. A kangaroo carries its baby in its pouch and usually have one young annually. The young kangaroo, or joey, is born alive at a very immature stage; after a gestation period of 33 days an embryonic young weighing about  one gram is born. This ‘jellybean’ will then crawl up from its mother’s cloacae into the pouch where it will attach itself to a vacant nipple and there it will stay for around the next 34 weeks. After emerging from the pouch the young will continue to suckle from its mother for a further four months.  After several weeks, little joey becomes more active and gradually spends more and more time outside the pouch, which it leaves completely when its about 7 to 10 months of age.
Even when quite large the joey still drinks milk from a teat in its mother’s pouch and will jump into its mother’s pouch head first when frightened. Even after they grow up, they sometimes jump into the pouch with utter difficulty, to try to fit into it - luckily the mother tolerates the young.
The kangaroo can have three young simultaneously, all at different stages of development, one in diapauses, one pouch young and an at-foot joey. Mating occurs at any time of the year but only with receptive females. Kangaroos also have a reproductive adaptation called “delayed implantation.” The fertilized egg will cease development and wait.
Depending on the growth of the joey in the pouch or the weather that season, the fertilized egg will begin development when the mother kangaroo is ready. Kangaroos raise on average three young every two years.
The kangaroo is a herbivore that mainly feeds on grass. They are more active at dusk when the environment is cooler. It is said that on the Australian coat of arms the emu and the kangaroo were selected as symbols to represent the country  because they are always moving forward and never move backwards – indicative of progress.
There are 47 varieties of kangaroo, ranging in size from the two-pound Rock Wallaby to the 6-foot, 300-pound Red Kangaroo. When the Europeans first arrived in Australia, the Red Kangaroo was the biggest mammal on the continent. With the settlers came foreign species that pushed the indigenous  kangaroo down the list, to rank 13, behind the introduced camels, buffalos, bantengs, cattle, horses, donkeys, pigs and several species of deer. The kangaroo doesn’t have a natural predator in Australia, but people have introduced animals such as dingo dogs that have started hunting kangaroos.
Male kangaroos often “box” among themselves, playfully, for dominance, or in competition for mates. The dexterity of their forepaws is used in both punching and grappling with the foe, but the real danger lies in a serious kick with the hind-leg. The sharpened hind claws can disembowel an opponent, so it can also be dangerous to go closer to a kangaroo as an accident can happen anytime. But in the wild, it is fascinating to watch the kangaroo opponents fight each other in the way human opponents do ‘kick boxing’.

Published olakdbimaNews on 28.04.2012

Did animals sense the tsunami coming?

Panic resulted from last week’s tsunami warning.While we are all dependent on the Meteorology Department and the Disaster Management Centre to warn us about an impending tsunami, animals are said to be have acute senses that help recognize environmental changes. There are some very interesting accounts of how animals responded just before the tsunami waves hit in 2004.

According to the National Geographic website, and eyewitness reports, in 2004, elephants are said to have screamed and run to higher ground, dogs had refused to go outdoors, flamingos had abandoned their low-lying breeding areas and  animals at zoos rushed into their shelters and could not be enticed to come out. Some speculate that the animals have a ‘sixth sense’ that we do not posses, but wildlife experts believe that animals are endowed with more acute hearing and other senses that might enable them to hear or feel the earth’s vibration, tipping them off of  approaching disasters – long before humans realize what’s going to happen.

The concept of an animal’s ‘sixth sense’ was also raised as very few animals had died at the Yala National Park, which was also devastated by the tsunami wave. A number of human lives were lost, but most of the animals managed to escape. So it is clear that animals somehow sense impending disaster and could run inland to get themselves away from the disaster. Perhaps, their ability to run fast, and knowledge of the terrain too, helped in their escape.

Even other experts say that animals can sense changes in the environment. In an interview for National Geographic, Joyce Poole, an elephant expert conducting  research on acoustics, said the reports of Sri Lanka’s elephants fleeing to higher ground didn’t surprise her. She said that research on both acoustic and seismic communication indicates that elephants could easily pick up vibrations generated from the massive earthquake-tsunami, she said.

Elephants during earth tremors

Poole has also experienced this firsthand.  “I have been with elephants during two small tremors, and on both occasions the elephants ran in alarm several seconds before I felt the tremor,” she said at the interview.

One of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries is Japan, where devastation has taken countless lives and caused enormous damage to property. Researchers there have long studied animals in hopes of discovering what they hear or feel before the earth shakes. They hope that animals may be used as a prediction tool. Some U.S. seismologists, on the other hand, are skeptical. Though there have been documented cases of strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes, the United States Geological Survey, a government agency that provides scientific information about the earth, says a reproducible connection between a specific behaviour and the occurrence of a quake has never been made. “What we’re faced with is a lot of anecdotes,” said Andy Michael, a geophysicist at USGS. “Animals react to so many things -being hungry, defending their territories, mating, predators, it’s hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal.”

In the 1970s a few studies on animal prediction were done by the USGS, “But nothing concrete came out of it,” Michael said. Since that time the agency has made no further investigations into the theory.

Published on LakbimaNews on 22.04.2012

Today is Earth Day: Road to the Earth Summit: RIO + 20

Today is World Earth Day. The world’s environment keeps on degrading due to acts of humankind, which is also adversely affecting all its inhabitants. To address these issues of sustainability, environmentalists gathered in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro in 1992. World leaders and others will convene again in Rio to review what has been achieved, and to discuss how to face future challenges. ZooLander reports on RIO + 20:

World Earth Day is celebrated annually with the aim of raising awareness and appreciation of mother earth, and is celebrated in more than 175 countries.  22nd April is also going to be renamed as International Mother Earth Day, by the United Nations, with the aim of highlighting “Earth and its ecosystems are our home” and that “it is necessary to promote harmony with nature and the Earth”. This new description for 22nd April, will apply from 2015 if world leaders agree, but until then it will be the Earth Day, as it has been celebrated around the world since 1969.

There are so many Environment Days, so why another special day allocated as Earth Day..?

It is because we are using the earth’s resources unsustainably and if this mayhem continues, even humankind that initiated this destruction will be severely impacted. Most of us are taking the earth’s resources as a given. But it is not the case and there is a limit to all the resources. Earth’s human population reached 7 billion and is expected to rise further. In this context the resources of the earth will not be sufficient and if not wisely used, will collapse all the life-supporting systems on the  palnet. These which provide us clean air, water and even the ability to produce enough food for all, will come to an end.

Human activities even lead to other disasters. The high level of carbon dioxide and other green house gases already causes global warming that leads to climate change. As a result there are earthslips, prolonged droughts and fierce thunderstorms  recorded.

What is the solution..? The earth’s population is on the rise and how can we make it  a non-losing situation..? For a long time the buzzword given as the solution is ‘Sustainable Development’. Sustainable development is the use of the earth’s resources to meet human needs while conserving the environment; the needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.

But have we been successful in achieving ‘Sustainable Development’ is the question that will be discussed by world leaders and their delegates at the upcoming ‘Earth Summit’ planned to be held in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro. Named as The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development or in the shorter form ‘Rio + 20’, this year is a milestone summit, as it also commemorates the 20th anniversary of the original ‘Earth Summit’ held in June 1992 – with the aim of achieving sustainable development.

The objective of this conference is to secure renewed commitment to sustainable development and to meet new and emerging challenges by focusing on different areas. The delegates will discuss 7 different areas in preparation for Rio+20 covering areas of decent jobs, energy, sustainable cities, food security and sustainable agriculture, water, oceans and disaster readiness – which are becoming daily challenges in this era.

So let’s hope there will be a fruitful outcome from Rio+20 Conference 2012.  After all Venus is too Hot; Mars is too Cold and we can only live only on Earth. So let’s save Mother Earth..!

Published on 22.04.2012on LakbimaNews

Avurudu Panchi a game with cowries Meet a live cowry at the Zoo Aquarium

Avurudu is still fresh  in our homes. Relatives who have not met up in a while are still visiting and Avurudu games that were forgotten are now being played. The rattle of the Panchi is also heard, though it is not as common as in the past.  But do you know that cowries which are used  in a game of panchi are in fact the shell of a sea mollusc and you can get a rare chance to see one alive, and its in the zoo’s Aquarium?

The panchi rattle was a familiar sound during the Avurudu season, decades ago. This clatter sound brings to mind the shiny stones hitting at one another and which pitch on different sound levels. Even if you have never played a game of panchi before, you would have seen it in Avurudu telecasts. But have you paid attention to these attractive milk white and yellowish cowries used in a game of panchi?

On initial look, these cowries’ looks like some kind of stones. But they are in fact the shells of the marine snail popularly known as cowry.  There can be different colours and shapes of cowry shells that belongs to different species, but the yellowish white cowry known as money cowry is mostly used in the game - panchi.

These cowry shells often float to the beach, and you can pick up plenty of them. But since these creatures live in the sea, only deep sea divers could see them live. But have you thought that you could also get a chance to see a live cowry one day? Yes, you can. What you have to do is to visit the zoo’s aquarium. There is no description about the live cowry in the tank it lives in, but you may go to the tank of the marine moray eel. This eel is a nasty looking neighbour for anybody, but even he seems to be tolerant of the live cowry that has suddenly come to share his tank. There is no description or at least mention about the presence of this cowry in the tank indicating that the cowry could be an accidental addition, by its look this cowry seems to be a tiger cowry.

Mollusc in the sea

Cowry is actually a kind of a sea snail which is a mollusc which lives in the sea. Scientifically, they belong to a family of Molluscs Cypraea. The cowry shell is oval shaped like an egg, but the underside is flat. There is also a long, narrow, slit-like opening known as the aperture which is often toothed at the edges. The soft body of the sea snail and the broad muscular foot it uses for crawling could be retracted into the shell, when it feels danger approaching.

The cowry shells are extremely smooth and shiny because in the living animal, the shell is nearly always fully covered with a skin: the mantle. The shell-producing this mantle tissue has two special folds that extend outside the shell in the cowry. These mantle folds keep the shell clean and polished, and prevent damage to the shell surface. The mantle is covered with frilly, branched projections called papillae that look like small fingers. The functions of the papillae are not clear: they may provide camouflage for the animal by breaking up the snail’s outline; or may allow absorption of oxygen from seawater.

The cowry uses its mouth tube to feed on. The Algae is its main diet in their natural habitats and is mostly active at night. During day time it usually hides in its natural habitat, but the cowry in the zoo can be seen attached to the glass wall of the tank throughout the day.

Cowri in Dehiwala Zoo with its neighbor
- Murray Eal

Travel using fleshy foot

The cowry travels by using the “foot” that can be extended from the aperture of the underside. This muscular organ is long and is spread underneath the body and the cowry is able to move forward by making a sort of ripping motion using its foot, say marine experts.  When it moves, the snail leaves behind a bit of slime, which coats the area that it is trying to move along on.  If you watch a snail on a dry surface, you can see that it leaves a trail of slime behind it.  Sea snails are very slow moving creatures and could spend the better part of a day just trying to travel across the yard.

The eyes of the cowry can be found at the base of one pair of tentacles; however, some other species of snails don’t have eyes at all.  They breathe through gills or sometimes through a thin tissue layer called the mantle that wraps around the body of the snail like an envelope.  Sea snails use their gills like a fish would, to retrieve oxygen out of the water.  The gills are found in the cavity of the mantle.

Other sea snails

If you visit the beach, you would find many different kinds of cowries and other shells. These are differently coloured and differently shaped. There is enormous diversity of sea snails say marine biologists. Marine snails make up the majority of the snail family population and they can often be found in fresh water as well as in  salt water. 

Sea snails do have teeth -- not in the common perception of what teeth look like.  They technically have radulas, a very hard organ that looks like a ribbon in appearance and has tiny rows of teeth on it. Some will only have a few teeth while other snails have thousands.  As the teeth wear down, new ones grow. They do not exactly chew their food but rather grind and tear it.  Sea snails are often popular in aquariums, as an accessory, to eat debris from the sides of tanks.

Predators of cowry

The very narrow toothed aperture of the cowry shell keeps the adult sea snails out of danger, frustrating predators. However there are some smart predators which learn the art of how to reach the softer parts of the cowry. Some tropical crustaceans can break the dorsum of a cowry shell and some mollusc-eating cones can inject venom to the cowry’s flesh. The cone then extends its stomach into the cowry shell through the slit and completely digests the flesh.

However, the octopuses are the most fascinating cowry hunters. Some octopuses can make a small hole in the strong cowry shell using a special barb/tooth and an acidic secretion. In the beaches, have you noticed some of the cowry shells have strange looking holes on them..? Perhaps those are the unlucky victims of these cowry eating octopuses.

Game of Avurudu Panchi

Being shiny objects, cowries are often used in jewellery by coastal communities. In some other instances, the cowries have also been used as money. These are known as ‘money cowries’ and the ones used in playing panchi. They are small in size and is of a yellowish marble, off white colour.

When playing panchi, there are two groups and they use lead-filled cowries in a coconut shell and rattle it inside shaking hard and releases them on to another coconut shell. After each toss of the cowries, those that had come to rest with the flat surface upturned scores a point. The points scored by each side are registered by moving one or more of a set of pawns, along a pattern of squares outlined on a wooden board, towards a home-base. The first team to take all the pawns to the home base wins.

Remember - the live cowry can be seen in the murray eel’s tank, at the zoo aquarium. So make a visit this Avurudu season to observe a living cowry which is not a common sight.

Published on 15.04.2012

Day of the Jackal - Canis aureus naria alias Naria

Last Sunday 1st of April was Fool’s day. Got snared by a cunning joke last Sunday..? On the 1st of April, ZooLander visited the zoo to meet the Jackal family
– most famous for fooling others..!!

Jackals are some of the most difficult animals to photograph and the ZooLander team’s experience was not easy either. These creatures  walk from one corner to another restlessly, without waiting in one place, fooling those who attempt to photograph them, resulting in our photo shoot attempts most often ending up with blurred images or capturing only Jackals in part  - sometimes only the tail, though we clicked while the Jackal was in full frame. But last Saturday, quite unusually the Jackal duo was out of their enclosure and in a playful  mood.
Perhaps Jackals were in a thinking mood, getting ready to celebrate the next day– the 1st of April - April Fool’s day. Interestingly the Jackals performed in front of us, as if chiding us for wasting our time in trying to snap them, so many times (rasthiyadu). Perhaps, the Jackals had decided, to be featured in LakbimaNews on the ZooLander page to mark their day - April fool’s day, them being the best in the animal kingdom to fool others..!
Whatever the reason this gave the Zoolander team an opportunity to take good photographs of the Jackals.
Here are some interesting facts about these great cheaters of the animal kingdom.Jackal known scientifically as canis aureus naria is the only wild canine found in Sri Lankan forests.  Have you noticed the third part of that scientific name..? Yes, it wasn’t a mistake, and as the name indicates ours is a sub species of the golden jackal, and to recognize that it is a subspecies, it was named  canis aureus naria.
They are also called the Sri Lankan Jackal and are also known as the Southern Indian Jackal as they can also be found in India. On the Asian mainland, the Sri Lankan jackal is found in most southern parts of the Indian Peninsula. The golden jackal (canis aureus), also known as the common jackal is indigenous to the north and north east Africa, south eastern and central Europe according to popular web based Wikipedia.

Social Species
Jackal is a social species. They usually live in pairs in the wild. Sometimes the current offspring or offspring from a former litter can also be associated with them making them a perfect jackal family. However, sometimes they can also be found alone roaming around Sri Lanka’s wilderness areas mostly in the dry zone. It is also said that jackal pairs are good lovers and their courtship rituals are remarkably long, during which the breeding pair remains almost constantly together - sometimes about a month. Though they are cunning to outsiders they are perfect partners as both should be cunning enough to keep the other with them.
After a gestation period of 60 - 63 days, golden jackals give birth to a litter of 1 - 9 young. They are weak  and after a few weeks, the parents start giving regurgitated food  in addition to the milk. Young jackals reach sexual maturity between 1 and 2 years of age.

Masters in adaptability
The jackals are adaptable to changes in their environment and can be found on the edges of villages, sometimes intruding into poultry farms to grab a chicken at night and getting caught. Jackals are carnivores: usually hunting  on small birds, eggs, and rodents. They  are also omnivorous and opportunistic foragers feeding on fruits and vegetables too.
Jackals are in the habit of hiding food when they get more than what they can feed on. This also helps them build a store which helps them to eat at times food is scarce. In areas where jackals have access to beach land, it is said that they also dig turtle nests looking for tasty eggs to feed on.
Jackals could be seen even in isolated patches in Colombo suburbs. In a recently published book The diversity of Sri Lankan Wildlife’ authored by Jayantha Jayawardane, there is an account about a group of jackals being spotted in a garbage dump in the Piliyandala area.
The jackal’s howl is the unmistaken sign that betrays  its presence, but is getting silenced as most areas are getting urbanized.

Trickster in the wild
Cunning is the most apt description for this little canine. Folklore gives many examples of their smartness, but sometime back a famous environmentalist reported a clever trick played by a jackal in Yala. Jackals being opportunistic feeders most often steal food from the prey of other predators such as leopards. The leopard is in the habit of eating enough to satisfy its hunger and guarding the carcass for a few days with the aim of eating the balance some other time. A hungry jackal who found an unattended carcass carefully approached it, but being greedy  had forgotten to pay attention to the surroundings.
The leopard had appeared from nowhere, and becoming angry on seeing the jackal getting a free meal out of the its hard earned kill, had charged towards the jackal and easily caught it. But that isn’t the amazing part. Not trying to flee, the jackal had played dead. The leopard had shaken the apparently lifeless jackal and as no movement was sensed, left its grab, thinking the jackal dead. Then, the jackal looking around suddenly starts running and escapes from the leopard, fooling the powerful predator...! Such is the cunning of the jackal.

Jackals, Foxes, Coyotes, Wolves and Dogs - all confusing..?
Canidae is the biological family of carnivorous and omnivorous mammals that includes wolves, foxes, jackals, coyotes, and domestic dogs. A member of this family is called a canid.Canids form one of the most prominent families of carnivores, with 36 interesting taxa in 13 genera that occur throughout most of the world. Foxes, dholes, dingoes, wolves, jackals, coyotes and various dogs comprise the family, and they find human raised livestock irresistible prey. As a family, canids occupy every continent except Antarctica. The grey wolf, alone, was originally the most widely distributed terrestrial mammal; its successor to the throne is another successful canid, the red fox. Thus, canids have borne a high proportion of the conflict between humans and carnivores.

Published on LakbimaNews on 08.04.2012