The colorful kea. Image provided by Dan Clem.

Cute, huh? These little guys live on the South Island of New Zealand, mostly in high-altitude forest. People often come across kea at ski areas or on mountain hikes. Kea typically eat berries and shoots. They’re very inquisitive, perhaps even destructively so. In kea country, cloth-top Jeeps are a bad idea. Here’s a video of kea systematically dismantling an SUV (and a very patient person’s boots).

Very mischievous and cute, right? So it stands to reason that starting in the late 1800s, humans tried to systematically exterminate them. (That was sarcasm, for those who can’t tell.) But there’s more to this particular reckless slaughter than the normal human idiocy. There’s a mystery involved.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1906 article entitled Notes on the Flesh-eating propensity of the Kea (Nestor Nobilis), by W.B. Benham, who was a professor of biology at the University of Otago at the time.

In or about the year 1867 it was observed that on certain sheep-runs in Otago, in the neighbourhood of Lake Wanaka, sheep were wounded in a rather mysterious manner. It was noticed in the case of sheep killed for food that a healed wound occurred sometimes in the loin or sides; when shearing, too, similar healed and even open wounds were found in or about the region of the loins; also, when mustering, sheep were seen with more or less pronounced wounds, raw and bleeding, and even with entrails hanging out of large holes in the side of the abdomen.

Some assumed the wounds were due to disease, but the sheep’s owners also instructed their shepherds to look for any other possible cause of these injuries. The answer came back: the kea. Cute by day, but don’t feed them after midnight.

Here’s what pasture owner Henry Campbell wrote in 1904, recounting events he observed in 1868:

There I saw the kea at work. He would come down from the rocks, settle on a sheep’s loin, and peck into the sheep, which would run through the mob; but [the bird] stuck to the sheep all the time till he got a piece out of the sheep, then he would fly to the rocks.

Below is a video of a kea attack. Note: not for the squeamish, or those easily frightened by demonic-looking birds at night. The second half of the movie shows how hunters attracted kea, a practice that is now illegal.

Word spread about the sheep-pecking, and pasture owners began to award a bounty for each kea beak brought in. There isn’t a record of these transactions prior to 1898, but between that year and 1929, hunters turned in 54,204 kea beaks for the reward. By the time the New Zealand government protected the kea in 1970, over 150,000 of the birds had been shot for bounties.

Kea still have problems. The International Union of Concerned Naturalists (IUCN) lists them as vulnerable. Although hunting by humans has (mostly) stopped, introduced mammals such as stoats and cats have spread into their range. It’s not known how widespread their predation is.

In addition, the famous curiosity of the kea puts them at risk. Kea like to eat shiny, lead-filled objects like flashings on houses and nail heads. Conservationists are working on kea repellents to keep them away from buildings, and are also trying to convince builders to use lead-free materials.

In the meantime, as we continue to threaten the existence of the kea, at least they know how to prank us back.

Let’s start with big and scary: Haast’s eagle. Up until about 500 years ago, this beast ruled the skies over New Zealand. It weighed 40 pounds (18 kg) and had a ten foot (3m) wingspan. Before humans landed on the island 750 years ago, Haast’s eagle and the 440 pound (200 kg) flightless moa were the largest animals on the islands. When humans arrived in the Thirteenth Century and started killing off the moa, they took away the Haast’s eagle’s main food source. By the time European colonists reached the islands in the 1800s, the eagle was just a memory.

Haast's eagle takes on moa, NZ

Until recently, scientists thought Haast’s eagle mainly scavenged on dead moa. But in a September entry in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, scientists from New Zealand and Australia assert that the eagle was a predator. They CT scanned Haast’s eagle skeletons and determined that while the birds lacked sensory equipment that is typical of scavengers, they had the claw nerves of an avian murderer. The verdict was that the eagle was built to kill. Specifically, the giant moas.

The idea that Haast’s eagle took down large animals dovetails with Maori tales of the Hokioi or Pouakai, giant birds of legend. Here’s one Maori description of these birds, as reported by a missionary in 1878:

“A Pouakai had built its nest on a spur of Mount Tawera, and darting down from thence it seized and carried off men, women, and children, as food for itself and its young. For, though its wings made a loud noise as it flew through the air, it rushed with such rapidity upon its prey that none could escape from its talons.”

The JVP article’s authors make a point of downplaying the described devastation: “The carrying off of men and women is undoubtedly an exaggeration,” they write. Notably, they have no objection to the idea that Haast’s eagle could have carried off Maori children.

Next up: What looks like a pretty parrot, but eats sheep alive? Answer coming tomorrow…

You see, my sister’s birthday is coming up, and I’m more grateful than ever that she’s just the way she is. Because if she’d been born a Tyrannosaurus, I’d be screwed.

I’d always suspected that having a T. Rex sibling would be bad news, but now I know it. Paleontologists have shown that young Tyrannosaurs bite each other. Hard. The findings are available in the November issue of Palaios.

In 2001, a group of Northern Illinois University researchers dug up a juvenile T. rex in the Hell Creek rock formation in Montana. There aren’t many juveniles in the fossil record, so the team was excited just to find a young Tyrannosaurus in decent shape. Then, three or four years ago, closer inspection revealed some unusual holes in the skull.

The team determined that only another juvenile T. rex could have inflicted the injuries.

The holes happen to be the size and shape of the teeth of a young T. rex. Also, the skull warps to the left, starting at the bite marks. It’s the result of asymmetrical healing. It’s the dinosaur equivalent of a boxer’s nose, said Joe Peterson, an NIU Ph.D. candidate in geology and lead author of the study.

From the NIU website

Bones deform during fossilization, but the researchers knew that the bending wasn’t due to the fossilization process. If it was, Peterson said, it would have been “a lot more bent than it is.”

The team named the dinosaur Jane after a museum donor, although they haven’t been able to determine its sex.

Some T. rex relative skulls bear fight marks like Jane’s, but this is the first time this type of injury has shown up on a juvenile.

When dinosaur relatives like crocodiles and birds* fight members of their own species, Peterson said, they do so for one of three reasons: mating privileges, territory, and dominance. Jane was too young to be fighting for over a mate, he said. Jane died when she was only 11 or 12, and Tyrannosaurs hit puberty around age 14. The need for territory or social dominance are therefore probably behind the fighting, Peterson explained.

The team isn’t sure what Jane died of, but it wasn’t the result of the facial injuries. One very speculative explanation is that an infection in a toe bone could have caused a limp, possibly preventing Jane from catching food, Peterson said.

*Birds aren’t dinosaur relatives so much as descendants. Put another way, phylogenetically speaking, birds are dinosaurs.

Sperm whale versus giant squid

I swear that this blog will branch out beyond whales. But for now, photographers have finally caught sperm whales eating giant squid on camera. For years, the only evidence that sperm whales eat giant squid was in the form of  sucker-shaped scars around the whales’ mouths and squid remains in their stomachs.

Sperm whales are the largest toothed whales alive, and giant squid are some of the largest invertebrates in the world.

Tony Wu, a professional ocean photographer, took the photos during a sperm whale identification study on October 15th. His team was in the same spot roughly 600 miles south of Japan where the first photos of live giant squid were taken in 2006.

Wu observed the whales diving and returning to the surface from the Osagawa Trench, where they dive down to below 1000 m (3200 ft) below the surface to feed.

In a video on his blog, Wu describes his encounter with the whales.

The group that he photographed with the giant squid was very friendly, he said, especially the whale he termed “Whale Number 5.”

“While I was swimming behind it, the whale dived down, then looped back around and came up directly underneath me. Seeing a twelve- to thirteen- meter toothed whale swim directly at you from below can be quite intimidating. Believe it or not, I’ve been in this unnerving situation before, so I stayed completely still and the whale swam within inches of me.”

“In case it’s not completely obvious,” he added, “The highlight of this adventure was seeing six sperm whales together, with one of them chewing on giant squid parts.”

Here’s the link to National Geographic, which has more pictures.

Nature is bull humpback whales rushing for a mate, for instance. As a foretaste of things to come on this blog, here’s the striking BBC video of that very phenomenon.

Moby-Dick is the best metaphor for nature that I’ve come across. The white whale is so primal that Ahab considers the act of attacking the leviathan tantamount to striking back against God. The whale is huge, powerful mysterious, and ancient. One imagines that looking into his eye would be like staring into a forgotten epoch, an age when tree ferns fell in the woods and only shambling giants could hear.

Moby-Dick is awesome, in the original sense of the word. He is also angry.

And the white whale is real.