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bestanimal · 3 months ago

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Round 3 - Mammalia - Peramelemorphia

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

The marsupial order Peramelemorphia contains the living families Peramelidae (“bandicoots”) and Thylacomyidae (“Greater Bilby”).

Peramelemorphs all tend to have a characteristic shape: a round, arch-backed body with a long, delicately tapering snout, upright ears, relatively long, thin legs, and a thin tail. They range from the size of a rat to the size of a rabbit. They are omnivorous, feeding mainly on soil-dwelling invertebrates, as well as seeds, fruit, and fungi. They possess a well-developed sense of smell and eyes that are adapted for nocturnal habits. They are are generally solitary, with females taking care of their young.

Female peramelemorphs have a pouch that opens to the rear, to protect their young while they dig for insects and their larvae. The gestation period of peramelemorphs is the shortest among mammals, at just 12-14 days. As in other marsupials, peramelemorph joeys are born as tiny, relatively undeveloped neonates and must crawl their way from the vagina to the pouch to latch on to a teat, where they will complete the rest of their development. Peramelemorph growth is fast, with bandicoots setting off on their own and becoming sexually mature at just three months of age. Female bilbies reach sexual maturity at five months of age, and male bilbies become sexually mature at eight months. This allows a given female to produce more than one litter per breeding season and gives peramelemorphs an unusually high reproductive rate compared to other marsupials.

Peramelemorphs originated in the Late Oligocene. Both the oldest modern bandicoot (Peramelid) and the oldest bilby (Thylacomyid) are known from Middle Miocene fossil deposits (around 15 million years old).

Propaganda under the cut:

The name bandicoot is based on the animal’s ratlike appearance. The name comes from an English corruption of an Indian word "pandi-kokku" meaning "pig-rat".

The smallest peramelemorph is the Mouse Bandicoot (Microperoryctes murina), which is 15–17.5 cm (5.9-6.9 in) long.

The Golden Bandicoot (Isoodon auratus) is especially adapted for life in hot, semi-arid environments. It has a low body temperature that is constantly changing, making it heterothermic. This allows the internal body temperature to fluctuate in response to extreme environmental temperatures without inhibiting and denaturing necessary proteins. Additionally, its low metabolic rate correlates to less heat being produced by the body, and a low thermal conductance does not allow the animal to capture and store heat well. A highly efficient panting mechanism allows for a low rate of evaporative water loss when cooling the body, conserving precious water.

The Northern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon macrourus) is one of relatively few native Australian ground-dwelling mammals that is able to survive in urbanized landscapes, due to their generalized diet and habitat requirements.

The Eastern Barred Bandicoot (Perameles gunnii) (image 1) is the basis for the popular videogame character Crash Bandicoot, and was selected from a number of Tasmanian mammals by creators Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin for its appeal and relative obscurity.

Described in 2014, a fossil species of Miocene bandicoot found at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area was given the genus name Crash. It was given the species names bandicoot. Because paleontologists are just Like That.

Wiped out due to predation from introduced foxes and domestic cats, as well as land-clearing for farming, the Victorian subspecies of the Eastern Barred Bandicoot (Perameles gunnii) was declared Extinct in the Wild. Thanks to 30 years of conservation efforts, breeding the bandicoots in human care and establishing fox and cat-safe sanctuaries, the mainlaind population was changed from Extinct in the Wild to Endangered in September 2021, a first for Australian conservation!

The Giant Bandicoot (Peroryctes broadbenti) (image 3) is more than twice the weight of other bandicoots and adult males of the species can attain weights well in excess of 4 kg (8.8 lb).

Unlike bandicoots, Greater Bilbies (Macrotis lagotis) (image 2 and gif) are excellent burrowers and build extensive tunnel systems with their strong forelimbs and well-developed claws. Burrows spiral down, making it hard for predators to get in. A bilby typically makes several burrows within its home range, up to about a dozen; and moves between them, using them for shelter both from predators and the heat of the day, as they are desert-dwelling animals.

Greater Bilbies are generally solitary, however, there are some cases in which they travel in pairs. Pairs usually consist of two females as the sole caregivers of their offspring.

Greater Bilbies do not need to drink water, as they retain all the moisture they need from their food.

Because rabbits are invasive in Australia, introduced by European settlers, bilbies have been popularised as an Australian alternative to the Easter Bunny. Haigh's Chocolates in Adelaide made 950,000 chocolate “Easter Bilbies” between 1993 and 2020, with proceeds donated to the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, which does environmental work to protect the indigenous biodiversity of Australia.

Today, only the Greater Bilby survives and is vulnerable, but the Lesser Bilby (Macrotis leucura) is a recently extinct relative, having possibly survived into the 1960s. Its extinction was much “quieter” than that of the Thylacine, and was likely due to introductions of invasive predators like the domestic cat and red fox. Other “quiet extinctions” include that of the Desert Bandicoot (Perameles eremiana) which appears to have disappeared between about 1943 and 1960, and the Nullarbor Barred Bandicoot (Perameles papillon) which was last collected in 1928.

Today, many peramelemorph species are still threatened and endangered due to habitat fragmentation and introduced predators, as well as from competition with introduced rabbits. Areas designated to conserve vulnerable populations of bilbies and bandicoots have predator exclusion fences built around them, and must be heavily monitored for break-ins. In Currawinya National Park in Queensland, high-salinity flood waters damaged a predator exclusion fence, allowing feral cats to enter the sanctuary, wiping out all the bilbies in the park.

#animal polls #round 3 #mammalia #to be ENTIRELY CLEAR because I am a conservationist and this is a conservation hot topic and it’s probably going to come up a lot #I LIKE domestic cats and I like red foxes and I like rabbits #they are all 5 star animals to me #the issue here is irresponsible owners who don’t keep their pets contained and Those Pesky Europeans who thought it’d be fun to bring #foxes and rabbits along with them wherever they colonized so they could still recreationally kill them as a little #Memory of Jolly Old England #I do not fault cats and foxes and rabbits for doing what is instinctual to them #but I do think that it is our duty to fix the damages we’ve done to ecosystems by removing these introduced animals #With As Little Cruelty As Possible #and that unfortunately has to include culling them because there are not enough homes that can take in that many feral cats and there are #not enough zoos and sanctuaries to take in that many foxes and rabbits #Alright that’s it for THAT soapbox for now but because introduced animals and specifically domestic cats have done so much #ecological damage I absolutely can not promise it’s not going to come up again #because I am gonna use these to talk about conservation issues when I get the chance #Just Be Kind and Keep Your Cats Inside

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silverwhittlingknife · 1 year ago

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hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are: