A Field Guide to ALL of the Carnivores! (Almost)

Posted on: November 27, 2011 12:00 PM, by Greg Laden

Why would you want a field guide to all of the carninvores? They live everywhere, so there is no reason to carry around a field identification guide with ALL of them unless you were going everywhere in the whole world on one trip!

Yet, there is such a field guide, Carnivores of the World, and the truth is, this is ONE OF THE COOLEST BOOKS I'VE EVER SEEN! All the carnivores (almost) in one book. Interestingly, it turns out to be possible. There are fewer than three hundred species of terrestrial carnivore in the whole world, and that is fittable in a single book.

That itself is an interesting fact, in proper context. Indeed, when I went through this book, spending a bit of time on each and every page, a number of interesting thoughts about carnivores came to mind....

Regarding taxonomy, diversity, and disparity (the former = number of species, the latter = how different they are), carnivores are fairly unique, but in a way that applies as well to primates. Looking only at the regular terrestrial carnivores first, they are all very similar in certain respects yet there is a fair amount of variation among them, including a huge range of body size from the smallest carnivore that could easily hang out in an open soda can to the largest being the northern Bears (either polar or brown, depending on how you measure a species "size"). There are almost 30 orders of Mammalia, and Carnivora is about the fifth most speciose. Yet, Carnivora has fewer than 300 species. Compared to some other animal Classes (Mammalia is a Class). the mammals, for all the interest we have in them, are fairly low density in respect to species (there are something like 10,000 Birds!), high in disparity (the "hooved animals" includes whales and bats fly like birds!) and are rather cryptic with respect to how visible they are on the landscape (compared, again, to birds, which are always rather in your face).


more

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/11/a_field_guide_to_all_of_the_ca.php

I have a field guide to birds of North America, even though I'm only concerned with identifying the ones in my area. But from time to time you'll see one which is far outside what you'd find listed as it's normal habitat.

For that matter, a year and a half ago, driving home I caught a glimpse of what I'm pretty sure was a mountain lion, which aren't supposed to still exist in New York State according to the DEC.

You very well may have seen one.

Mountain lion from SD killed in Connecticut

I can't find the photos right now, but it was two very clear pictures of what was undeniably a group of three cougars (most likely a mother and two yearlings) standing in somebody's driveway out in rural south-central NY state.

Officially, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation, there is no wild cougar population in New York State, and any that anyone sees are ones released by humans, pranks, hallucinations, etcetera. Unofficially, a lot of people (myself included) believe that that's crap. There's an ongoing suspicion that Adirondack State Park (a "state park" marginally smaller than all of Massachusetts) plays host to a breeding population of wild cougars, as well as whatever ones wander through the state on their own.

Sometimes I just like to pull it up on Google Earth and see that huge unbroken stretch of deep greens and blues and let my mind wander. So few places like that left in the US, certainly nothing like it in the East.

According to the experts there are no wild cougar populations left in the east except for the Florida panthers. I know historically they used to range all up and down the Appalachians. I hear old family stories of seeing them back in the day, but at least as far as Virginia is concerend, we wiped them all out or drove them all off decades ago. Im mixed on whether or not we should try to reintroduce them. The biologist in me thinks we should try to get things back to the way they were but the future dad in me thinks otherwise.

Carnivora does NOT equal "all the worlds carnivores" by a LOOOOOOOOOONG shot, LOL. The relatively few species in Carnivora-- between 260 and 300-- represent only the carnivores among the placental mammals, which themselves are a tiny evolutionary branch within the vertebrates. This book omits all the worlds carnivorous birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, just for a beginning. There are probably more species of carnivore arthropods, for example, in my backyard right now than there are species described in this book, and probably more than all the vertebrate carnivore orders combined (the group that this book barely scratches the surface of).

All the world's carnivores, indeed! That's the most laughable claim I've heard all day! :rofl:

Disclaimer-- I spent most of today writing an entomology lecture on insect HERBIVORES, which account for the overwhelming majority of the Earth's herbivores, just as they also account for the majority of the carnivores.