Episode 453: The Skeleton Coast

It's October, AKA Monster Month! Let's learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast--which sounds spooky, but actually isn't. Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]: Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is. The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy. Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine. The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes. Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males. The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies. The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals. Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets.