This is a blatant hijack, but I never realized you live in the Land of Entrapment, Jill. Place of my birth and still first in my heart (and based on my recent shipment from Hatch, first in my freezer). I knew I liked you for a reason. 
We actually covered this once before, and while I don’t know if we made any progress on giraffes, it’s certain that elephants can swim.
Will let you know on the giraffes (back to the drawing board…)
- Jill
According to several University and zoo websites, giraffes CANNOT SWIM. So add that to the list. I have not yet confirmed this with a live human being, though. (You know, I can’t picture them swimming at all.) - Jill
Steinbeck said they raised the IQ in both states?
“And I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
a place where even squares can have a ball.
We still wave ol’ glory down at the courthouse,
and white lightning’s still the biggest thrill of all.
In Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A.” - Merle Haggard
Yup, Dippers were one of my favorite birds when I lived in Colorado. (I never heard anyone call it a Water Ouzel there, though). They not only “fly” underwater, they also stroll around on the bottom clutching the pebbles with their feet against the current. The name is not so much from their “taking a dip” in the water, but from their constant bobbing up and down while above the surface. They have a lovely song as well.
This swimming technique for (nine-banded, rather than long-nosed) armadillos seems to be documented many places, along with the idea that it sometimes doesn’t bother, because it can hold its breath for something like six minutes and walk along the bottom.
Which, I suppose, makes it the only animal in danger of drowning if it farts.
What I want to know, is when it walks along the bottom, how does it know the creek or whatever is narrow enough for it to make it across in under six minutes? I don’t think they have very good eyesight.
Presumably it does this to get to someplace where it can give birth to its litter of identical quadraplets or die of leprosy. Provided it doesn’t jump straight up in the air and impale itself on the front of a Kenworth on the way. Wierd creatures.
For sure, crickets cannot swim. Every fall, my house gets invaded by crickets moving indoors in search of warmth and moisture, and I have a merry time catching and evicting them. Once in a while, one will get into my kitchen sink and, if I’ve left a dirty dish full of water to soak, I’ll often discover the drowned corpse floating in the middle, unable to get out of even a shallow plate of water.
Just as a clarification, the common names “Nine-banded” and “Long-nosed” Armadillo often are used to refer to the same beast, Dasypus novemcinctus, ranging from the southern US to Argentina, the familiar armadillo of Texas and Florida. The term “long-nosed” armadillo is sometimes also used as a general term to refer to all the species of the genus Dasypus, which in fact have longer pointier snouts than other 'dillos. There are about six species in the genus (depending on who’s counting). The best known besides the Nine-banded is the Seven-banded Armadillo, Dasypus septemcinctus, of southern South America. As an example, one field guide, Louise Emmon’s “Neotropical Rainforest Mammals,” calls them the “Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo” and the “Seven-banded Long-nosed Armadillo” respectively. So “the long-nosed armadillo of South America” could refer to a number of different species.
Given the general similarity of build and physiology of armadillos, it would be surprising if the other species in the family couldn’t swim just as well as a Nine-banded.
As Chronos’ excellent memory can attest, we covered this subject before, and yes, it seems that elephants can swim.
The thread also discusses the swimming capabilities of other animals.
Ok, I’m confused. Was the original question really asking about all Animalia? Or just Chordata? Or just Mammalia?
Let’s see, the title of the link in the OP is “Is the camel the only animal that can’t swim?”
Hm. Let’s check the dictionary.
Animal
1 : any of a kingdom (Animalia) of living things including
many-celled organisms and often many of the single-celled ones (as protozoans) that typically differ
from plants in having cells without cellulose walls, in
lacking chlorophyll and the capacity for photosynthesis,
in requiring more complex food materials (as proteins), in being organized to a greater degree of complexity, and in having the capacity for spontaneous movement and rapid motor responses to stimulation.
2 a : one of the lower animals as distinguished from
human beings b : MAMMAL; broadly : VERTEBRATE
So the question still holds.
Is it definition 1 (Animalia)
or definition 2a (Mammalia or Chordata)
Personally I think the question is more interesting for Mammalia. There are a lot of insects which can’t swim.
Whoa. Dueling dictionaries. Which one is that? My American Heritage Dictionary has:
an·i·mal n. 1. A multicellular organism of the kingdom Animalia, differing from plants in certain typical characteristics such as capacity for locomotion, nonphotosynthetic metabolism, pronounced response to stimuli, restricted growth, and fixed bodily structure. 2. An animal organism other than a human being, especially a mammal. 3. A person who behaves in a bestial or brutish manner. 4. A human being considered with respect to his or her physical, as opposed to spiritual, nature. 5. A person having a specified aptitude or set of interests: “that rarest of musical animals,…
Sorry, folks, this is gonna be kind of long, but this personal observation establishes fershure that eagles swim.
One summer evening in 1997 I was cycling the ring-road around the University of British Columbia in Vancouver BC Canada, and stopped for a breather at a viewpoint above the mouth of the North Arm of the Fraser River. Below was a wide, slow-running river with many log-booms and high dolphins, and a long slough along its southern bank. A small flock of grebes was in a small bayou along the opposite river-bank. An adult Bald Eagle–a common resident and abundant wintering raptor in Vancouver, by the way–planed in and began diving on the grebes, which would escape it by diving. The eagle’s hunting technique for seabirds is simple: force them to dive many times and eventually they become exhausted, then the next time they come up to breathe, the eagle can pick it off the surface as gracefully as a head waiter scooping up a twenty. After several attempts to snare a grebe in its talons, the eagle bashed whole-body into the water with a huge splash, then just floated there, its wings outstretched on the water. Uh-oh, I thought. It has just come Face To Face With The Consequences Of Its Own Carelessness. What now?
The eagle rested on the water for perhaps a full minute. I began to think about finding a telephone from which to call the Coast Guard to see if they’d do a rescue-and-rehab mission, make some good ink for them, but the nearest phone would be a couple of miles away. Knowing that Bald Eagles are sea-eagles, I figured they’d have this situation come up now and then and wondered what their response to total immersion would be, so I decided to watch for a while. The eagle, not looking very majestic at this point, began this slow, ungainly butterfly stroke like an arthritic old ex-Olympian trying to recollect former glories and set its course for the closest dolphin some two hundred meters away. It reached the pole–and kept on swimming. Fine, I thought, it’s heading for the log-boom about another two hundred meters further on. It eventually reached it. And kept on swimming, resting every few minutes. Certainly, the sight of it whomping its great wings into the water with each stroke offered a different look at an animal we normally think of in terms of power and grace, like seeing Fred Astaire lurching along the street in low-rider jeans and high-top too-bigs.
The eagle flopped another several hundred meters, passing many likely haul-out places. By now, it had become medium twilight–heck, it’s getting dark, for pete’s sake–and I’m really becoming concerned about this bird. I begin to make plans to cycle the couple of miles or so to the nearest telephone to make that rescue call. Suddenly the eagle stopped, reared back and took off from the water vertically with one or two powerful wingbeats, and back into regular flight.
From the time of first immersion to lift-off, the eagle was in the water–and I timed this–forty-seven minutes. It covered a distance I estimated at nearly three-quarters of a kilometer, or nearly half a mile, entirely on the surface of the water. As its easy take-off showed, it was clearly in no distress at any time: far from being in trouble, the eagle was there because it wanted to be, and did what it did because it wanted to do it.
Why? I don’t know. I know eagles aren’t the brightest lights in the birds’ intellectual firmament, but it must have had its reason. Perhaps it was still lugging a grebe it had caught in its final attack. Maybe it was doing something sensible such as using this as a way of dislodging parasites, a sort of extended hygienic bath. But I like to think that it just wanted to, just for the hell of it, a long swim before dark, and bed-time. I’ve seen something similar twice, perhaps involving the same bird, but never for anywhere near so long or for so far. I also heard anecdotal confirmation of this behavior from a salmon fisherman who was crossing the Strait of Georgia (about 30 km, or 20 mi wide at that point), and found an adult Bald Eagle similarly splayed out floating on the swells in mid-Strait. Likewise, he thought it in distress only to watch the bird blast off from the water vertically.
For any sea-eagle (genus Haliaeetus), this is probably pretty routine; it’s just that they don’t do it often. I’d not expect it from a Golden Eagle (genus Aquila), a bird of broken, dry habitats, or from other terrestrial raptors. But I’ve had to learn the hard way that one should never say never when it comes to animal behavior.
Not really dueling. I used Merriam-Webster’s
You’ll note definition 1 of your AH dict is same as MW’s. Definition 2 is pretty close to MW’s definition 2a.
And I think you can infer that from the fact there was no 2b given, that I trimmed all definitions that didn’t seem relevant to the discussion in question. Including ones similar to 3,4,5 of AH.
Cool eagle story. (How long you been waiting for a thread like this??) I saw a bald eagle just this morning, above the Rio Grande in New Mexico.
- Jill
Bald eagles? They’re so common around here that Jessie Helms is considering an open season.
I thought you did give a 2b–that that was the point of contention, even.
you’re right.
So does this mean you’re going to help settle which the original question was intended to be about?
Let’s ask Roddy and Stewart.