Woolly What?

I started wondering why there were only 2 animals that had once evolved into wooly renditions. Times were cold during the ice age. Surely there were other animals that made adaptations, too, in order to survive? And then I remembered, way back in my childhood, of hearing about another animal that was called 'woolly'.

The woolly caterpillar!

Quickly, I set out to find what information I could on this remaining ice age creature.

It is known by many names; woolly bear caterpillar, fuzzy bear caterpillar, woolly worm, and hedgehog caterpillar. But apparently, nobody calls it a woolly caterpillar! I can only guess that one of my childhood playmates shortened 'woolly bear caterpillar' into 'woolly caterpillar', or I did it myself, possibly without even realizing I had done it.

The woolly bear caterpillar is the larval form of the Isabella tiger moth. It has black fur at the front and back, with a band of reddish brown around the middle.

They can usually be found in the autumn, after they have stuffed themselves on a variety of grasses and weeds, including dandelion, nettles and plantain, and are then in search of a dark and sheltered spot where they can hibernate for the winter.

There are those who believe that the amount of black on the woolly bear in the autumn predicts how severe the coming winter will be. But the truth is that its coloring is dependent on how well it stuffed itself, its age, and the species (there are about 260 species of tiger moth).

The isabella tiger moth's larval form occurs in the United States, Greenland and Canada. It can be found in many cold regions, including the Arctic. The Arctic woolly bear caterpillar emerges from the egg in the fall. It spends the winter in its larval form, frozen solid. First, its heart stops beating, then its gut freezes, its blood, and finally the rest of the body. It survives by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissues. In the spring, it thaws, and resumes eating. It will go through 7 winters in the frozen state before it finally becomes a moth. As an adult moth, it has about 1 week to mate, lay eggs, and die.

It is not recommended to handle the woolly bear caterpillar because their sharp hairs may cause dermatitis in some people.

The larval form of the isabella tiger moth should not be confused with the larval forms of the Grammia incorrupta or the garden tiger moth, both of whom are also called woolly bear caterpillars.

Woollybear Caterpillar festivals are held in several locations in the fall: Vermillion, OH; Banner Elk, NC; Beattyville, KY; Oil City, PA; and Little Valley, NY.

Well, that was not what I expected. I was thinking an ice age megafauna, maybe 4 or 5 feet tall at the shoulder, able to provide a feast for dozens of humans at a time. Or maybe they would trample right over humans. Something that when it finally hatched, would produce an adult about the size of Mothra!

Still, that freezing in order to get through the winter, that's kind of neat. I'll have to remember that and work it into some story or other.

 

https://ccswoollybearcaterpillarbaum1.weebly.com/information.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrharctia_isabella

https://www.weather.gov/arx/woollybear

Woolly Rhinos

I don't have the warm feeling for woolly rhinoceroses that I've got for woolly mammoths, but I do have some curiosity about a species that would go to that much trouble to survive in such an inhabitable environment. Why didn't they just move south to a milder climate? I suppose they weren't migratory to begin with, so they wouldn't have had any idea that the climate was different anywhere else.

Woolly rhinos are now extinct, but they were common throughout Europe and Asia during the last glacial period. No remains of them have been found in North America, so it would seem they did not travel across the Bering Strait Land Bridge.

There were 2 sub-species of woolly rhinos, both covered with long, thick hair in order to survive the extremely harsh, cold mammoth steppe. They had large humps reaching up from the shoulders, and fed mainly on grasses and sedges, which are flowering grass-like plants. It had a wide upper lip that allowed it to pluck vegetation directly from the ground. It also ate woody plants such as alders, conifers and willows.

The remains of woolly rhinos had been known for a long time before the species was described. Often, they were attributed to some mythical creatures. Some believed their horns were the claws of a giant bird. One skull was assumed to be that of a dragon.

The oldest known woolly rhinoceros fossil was 3.6 million years old, discovered on the Tibetan Plateau in 2011. A study of DNA samples indicate that the closest living relative of woolly rhinos is the Sumatran rhinoceros.

An adult woolly rhino could measure up to 11.8 ft (3.6 metres) from head to tail, could have stood 5.2 ft (1.6 metres) tall at the shoulder, and weighed as much as 2 tons. Both males and females had 2 horns, a long one of 4.4 ft (1.35 metres) near the end of the nose, and a shorter one of 1.56 ft (47.5 centimetres) between the eyes. These horn measurements are for fully grown specimens. The woolly rhino had a longer head and body and shorter legs than other rhinos. Its shoulder hump was used to support the animal's massive front horn, but it also held fat to aid survival through the desolate winters when food was scarce. It is believed that woolly rhinos could reach the age of 40.

Based on frozen specimens, the rhino's fur coat was reddish-brown, with a thick undercoat under a layer of long, coarse hair. The tail was no longer than 20 inches (50 centimetre). Females had 2 nipples on her udder, indicating they probably gave birth to one calf at a time, although there might occasionally be two. Births would have occurred every 2 to 3 years.

Not only were their tail relatively shorter than those of hot climate rhinos, so were their ears, reaching no longer than 9.5 inches (24 cm) compared to the 12 inches (30 cm) of other rhinos. Woolly rhinos also had thick skin, ranging up to 5/8 inch (15 mm) on the chest and shoulders.

The woolly rhino skull's length gave the head a deeply downward-facing slant. Strong muscles in its neck held the massive skull in place. Like other rhinos, they did not have incisors, only premolars and molars, with which they ground up the vegetation they ate.

Adults had few predators, because of their massive horns and size, but young individuals could be attacked by hyenas, cave lions and other such animals. One skull indicated an attack from a feline, but that individual survived to adulthood.

Woolly rhinos probably used their horns for moving snow to uncover vegetation during winter, as well as for combat. Some cave paintings depict 2 woolly rhinos fighting each other.

The woolly rhinoceros lived mainly in dry to arid climates in lowlands, plateaus and river valleys, with migrations to higher elevations in favorable climate phases. It could not easily cross heavy snow and steep terrain of mountain ranges, so it avoided them. Other large herbivores, such as the woolly mammoth, giant deer, reindeer, saiga antelope and bison, lived alongside it.

By 130,000 years ago, woolly rhinos lived throughout most of Europe, the Russian Plain, Siberia and the Mongolian Plateau, which gave it the widest range of any rhinoceros species.

Humans shared that habitat, but evidence that they interacted is rare. However, many cave paintings do depict woolly rhinoceroses. About 20 such drawings of woolly rhinos are dated at over 31,000 years old.

It is postulated that the woolly rhinoceros went extinct because of the changing climate as the ice age neared its end. There are indications that some population survived until about 10,000 BC in western Siberia. Many rhino remains have been found in the permafrost region. The known history of these discoveries starts in 1771.

All in all, I don't want to meet one of these critters in a cold, dark alley. Or anywhere else, come to think of it. I assume they couldn't see any better than their present-day brethren, but they probably made up for it by attacking anything that moved, whether they knew what it was or not.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_rhinoceros

Back When Elephants Wore Coats

The Wooly Mammoth was one of the last mammoth species to become extinct. Its closest still-living relative is the Asian elephant. Mammoths used the Bering Land Bridge to migrate from Siberia to North America. Present day Alaska and Canada (and some of New England) were home to the Wooly mammoth, while another species, the Columbian mammoth, lived in the area covered today by the 48 mainland states, and as far south as Costa Rica. Recent DNA studies indicate that that Wooly mammoths and Columbian mammoths could and did impregnate each other.

The Woolly mammoth evolved in Siberia some 400,000 years ago. Some of them entered North America about 100,000 by crossing the Bering Land Bridge. I found several dates for extinction, such as 5,700 years ago in the Yukon (Canada), 5,600 years ago on St Paul Island (Alaska), 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island (Russia), to 3,900 years ago on the Taymyr Peninsula (Russia). So yes, they co-existed with humans, who used mammoth bones and tusks for making art, tools, dwellings and as food.

Woolly mammoths are among the best studied prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses (Siberia & N America), as well as teeth, stomach contents, dung, and the depiction of them in prehistoric cave paintings. This species became known to Europeans in the 17th century, but had been known in Asia long before that.

Woolly mammoths were roughly the same size as modern African elephants. Males could reach shoulder heights of 11 ft and weighed up to 6 tons, while females reached a shoulder height of about 8 ft, and weighed up to 4 tons. A newborn calf weighed about 200 lbs, and would have been nursed for 3 years before being weaned to a diet of grasses and such. An individual could probably live for 60 years.

Well adapted to the cold ice age, the Woolly mammoth was covered in fur, which varied from dark to light. The ears and tail were short to minimize frostbite and heat loss. It had long, curved tusks, which it used for manipulating objects, fighting and foraging. Its diet was mainly grasses and sedges (a large family of flowering grass-like plants). Its habitat stretched across northern Eurasia and North America.

A genome project for the woolly mammoth was completed in 2015. It has been proposed that the species could be revived, but none of the methods proposed are yet feasible. One article I read postulated that reviving the species could possibly help stabilize the tundra areas of the far north, helping to mitigate the climate change those areas are experiencing, but their reasoning didn't make much sense to me. Having these large creatures roam through the thawing tundra, even if they drag seeds along with them, is not going to halt the thawing of the permafrost. The woolly mammoths could not survive when the rising temperatures melted the huge glaciers of the ice age, and I don't see how they would survive now, when the temperature is even higher.

In my opinion, bringing ice age critters back to life now would only be dooming them to a short, miserable existence before they once again go extinct.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth

Marketing - the Bane of Writing

I decided to write about marketing this week. It's been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I'll tell you why.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a blog about how authors could market themselves and their work globally. Nothing they suggested in their blog seemed too far out there or difficult to do. So I took their 10 suggestions, broke them into small chunks, and scattered them throughout my infamous To Do List to be tackled over the next couple of months.

Four days ago, I was cleaning out my email box when I found I had been sent Lesson 1 in a 7-part series of lessons on how an author can best and most easily market their goods. I was familiar with the teacher, so I went through that first lesson and took copious notes. Turns out those are DAILY lessons for a full week, so I have been going through each lesson every day, taking detailed notes. I have to take notes, because the lessons take up so much of my time, I can't actually act on what he wants me to do.

And I'm not very tech-savvy. When I set up my last website, following his instructions, it took me 3-4 months to get it ready to publish. He had at least twice as many books to include as I did, and got his done in an afternoon.

And unfortunately, I don't get a lot of support for my marketing efforts. Granted, they haven't done much good so far, but if you want to get anywhere, you have to persevere, right?

I have a good friend (who also writes books), who tells me to forget about marketing. "Just write your books, get 10 or 12 printed, hand them out to friends and family and be done with it." He has a different philosophy about writing than I do. I want to entertain people by telling them stories. And yeah, I'd like to make some money doing it, if I can.

This friend has no concept of what I'm telling him. Every time this subject comes up between us, he gets mad because I won't give in and live life the way he thinks I should. "But you hate marketing! Life is too short to make yourself miserable. Just do the writing, which you enjoy."

It's true, I haven't found any 'fun' in marketing. So far. Maybe because I haven't yet managed to find anything that works. But now I am gathering new steps to take, things to research, tweaks to make... I have a goal to reach for.

It's hard to make progress when you don't know where you're going.