The Icelandic Yule Cat Jólakötturinn

So every year for several years now, a lot of artists do all the Inktober daily art prompts, and there are now a whole slough of various prompts. There are even a fairly large number of #sciart prompts. I thought I would do the "AI weirdness" neural net generated prompts by Janelle Shane called #Botober2021. I think the only way to manage daily brand new art is to keep it low key, so I'm keeping it simple, posting to Twitter (@minouette) and my Instagram stores (@the.minouette) only. Mainly there's pen and ink sketches. I am going to try and fit in a couple of linocuts. There's an upcoming prompt which made recall a mythological creature I have previously considered. I rather like all the various holidays (many pagan and ancient) which coincide roughly with Christmas time and how some of them are more spooky than festive, as we, in the northern hemisphere, approach the solstice and the longest nights. The prompt is "way too much cat" and what came to mind was the Icelandic Yule Cat, Jólakötturinn.

Linocut print Yule Cat, by Ele Willoughby, 2021

The first written accounts of Jólakötturinn, enforcer of good behaviour leading up to Christmas, date to the 19th century but the stories of the monster cat likely date to the Dark Ages. In Iceland, good children who did their chores received new clothes, but the lazier ones risked meeting the giant Yule Cat, who towered over houses. If there were no new clothes amongst their gifts the Yule Cat would eat them! The Yule Cat was intended to also inspire generosity and encourage giving clothing to the less fortunate.

I have added a couple of sets of hand printed Yule Cat cards to my shop. I think I might get some digitally printed so I can make more cards.

You can find Bjork singing a carol about Jólakötturinn here, and if you haven't already done so, do yourself a favour, and check out Luke Pearson's Hilda graphic novels or the animated Netflix series - where you'll also find the Yule Cat and other trolls and Yule lads from Icelandic folklore.

Snowflake Beetle

Snowflake Beetles, linocut with chine collé 18 cm x 18 cm, Ele Willoughby 2016

This is a whimsical mini lino block print of a couple of Snowflake Beetles a widely unknown, and quite possibly, completely imaginary creature. These miniscule insects are camouflaged to match their environment, the fresh fallen snow. Each of their hexagonal shields (the elytra) are disguised as snowflakes. Through an extraordinary instance of biomimicry, each pattern is as unique; it is believed that no two Snowflake Beetles are the same.*

Both their minute size and their successful camouflage adaptation have long hid the Snowflake Beetle from discovery. The Coleopterans include more species than any other order, and the diversity of beetles is very wide. Yet, the Snowflake Beetle is exceptional in several ways. At a typical size of 1.5 m (0.06"), they belong to the Ptiliidae, a highly diverse yet poorly known group of minute beetles, and are amongst the smallest beetles anywhere in the world. Like other ptiliids they have feathery wings and are colourless to white throughout their lifecycle. But unlike any other beetles, they thrive in high latitudes, high altitudes and polar regions where snow is abundant. Other arthopods do live in snow, including mites, snow fleas and some spiders, but insects and beetles in particular were previously unknown in such cold conditions. It is believed that they make a warm little burrow or igloo in the snow and farm fungus for food. Like aquatic beetles, it is believed they hold a pocket of air between their abdomen and elytra (the snowflake shield) to breathe when "diving" in snow.

*It should be noted that the adage "no two snowflakes are alike" is in fact just an adage. It is virtually impossible to prove the non-existence of any naturally occuring snowflake twins. Simple hollow collumn snowflakes are quite common and observers do report (subjectively) identical flakes. Essentially identical snowflakes - even complex ones with hexagonal plate symmetry and elaborate dendrites - have been produced in the lab. While photographic evidence of naturally occurring identical snowflakes may be lacking, it's actually unlikely that they never occur. So, strictly speaking it is more precise to say that Snowflake Beetles are as variable in pattern as snowflakes in nature. Familiar snowflake forms including hexagonal plates, triangular patterns, 12-point star patterns, sectored plates, radiating dendrites, simple stars, stellar dendrites and fern-like stellar dendrites have all been observed on Snowflake Beetle shields. The six-fold symmetry, as in snowflakes themselves, is generally not perfect... though it may appear so at a glance.

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An aside: Okay... the joy of my producing my "quite possibly imaginary" cryptozoology creature series is in inventing the fictional science and I would love to produce a book of them where I never explicitly stated this is SF. The point is to make a sort of scientific pastiche. The reader isn't literally supposed to be hoodwinked**... but needs to suspend disbelief to enjoy it. But, allow me to stop being coy and tell you a bit about the process of creating creatures. Hitting the balance of 'not quite plausible enough to fool' but 'real enough for us all to pleasurably pretend it's out there' is harder than I imagined, for an unexpected reason. Namely, the animal kingdom is a hell of a lot weirder and more varied than most of us know. For instance, I can safely assume that my far-out hybrids, like the Cactibou, Winged Walrus and Mandriltee, will be recognized as unreal animals. Though, hybrids are more common than I realized when I started this project. Merely playing with scale, habitat and amping up more unusual skills like biomimicry on the other hand, may not be enough. I think I inadvertently fooled someone with my Iceberg Squid. Likewise, I imagined the Snowflake Beetle, only to later learn that, of course, there are arthopods who live in snow... luckily for me, they happen to have the wrong number of legs to be insects or beetles in particular. I shouldn't be too surprised. A recent study which got a lot of press, showed that even our homes are complex biomes filled with thousands of insects and other arthopods. They're everywhere! Sometimes, like here, I rely on one peculiar, someone would say magical, attribute to indicate that the animal in question is "quite possibly imaginary". In this case, the idea that each one has its own pattern, as unique as a snowflake, may be the only thing which is unlikely enough to be untrue. Other "facts" are indeed true of existing beetles, including the surprising act of fungus farming or holding air bubbles under their elytra wing covering to breathe if submerged. The beetle igloo though might also be a tip-off.

**Friends will tell you I'm generally horrified when anyone is hoodwinked by pseudoscience, whatever its intentions.

Æeolian Jellyfish

Æeolian Jellyfish, linocut with chine collé and glow-in-the dark in, 18 cm x 18 cm, by Ele Willoughby, 2014

This is a whimsical mini lino block print of the Æeolian Jellyfish, a widely unknown, and quite possibly, completely imaginary creature. Unlike other jellies, the Aeolian Jellyfish floats in the upper ocean of air, which blankets our planet.

The printed area is only 10 cm (3.9 inches) squared. The jellies have collaged or chine collé fine translucent white Japanese paper with visible fibres. The jellies are printed in UV-activated glow-in-the-dark ink. If exposed to ultraviolet light, including direct sunlight, the jellies glow. Each sheet is 18 cm (7.1 inches) squared and printed on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper. There are 15 prints in this first edition.

The Aeolian jellyfish (Æolia noctiluca) looks much like its sea-borne cousin Pelagia noctiluca (where "Pelagia" means of the sea, "nocti-" refers to night and "luca" to light). Similarly "Æolia" and Aeolian come from the Greek Æolus, the keeper of the winds, and refers to its air- or wind-borne nature. Also, both jellies are bioluminescent. That is, they have the ability to glow in the dark. There are some important differences between the two, including, of course, habitat. While both animals have radial symmetry, the Pelagia noctiluca has a single body cavity, called the gastrovascular cavity. In contrast, the Aeolian jellyfish has both an outer gastrovascular cavity and an inner air bladder. This latter organ performs analogously to the swim bladder found in some variety of fish (though more closely related to the swim bladder found in Siphonophore colonies like the Portuguese man o' war). It is essentially an enclosed, impermeable, gas balloon, which can expand and contract to allow the Aeolian jellyfish to rise or fall in the air column by adjusting its shape such that the pressure in the air bladder matches that of ambient pressure. The Aeolian jellyfish also has a special adaptation to evade predators like birds; it can rapidly metabolize any food to produce a flash of heat in the gastrovascular cavity wall, lining the swim bladder. This allows the trapped air balloon to be heated, causing it to rapidly expand and the Aeolian jellyfish to rise. To move laterally, the Aeolian jellyfish employs its tentacles to ride the winds.

Æeolian Jellyfish, glowing in the dark

As you might expect for a bioluminescent animal, the Aeolian jellyfish is noctunal. During the day the jelly passive rises as it warms in the sun and its air bladder heats and expands. Thus it spends the heat of the day in the stratosphere, out of reach of predators. As temperature falls at sunset, so does the Aeolian jellyfish, disguised as a twinkling star to the flying insects who are its prey. Hence, while lulled to complacency by this lovely light display, it's death from above for these unsuspecting insects.

Like many jellyfish (but not the Pelagia noctiluca), the Aeolian jellyfish begins its life as a bottom-dwelling polyp - where "bottom" refers not to the seafloor, but the ocean-air interface. They have been found on certain recently-discovered very shallow seamounts in the Pacific. Thus the polyps rest with their holdfast on these plateau-like features, bathed in seawater, while their "mouths" reach out into the air. When they metamorphose into the medusa form, the jellies float up into the sky.

The Batbearoo

Batbearoo (Dasychiroptera ursus)
The Batbearoo shares a common ancestor with the marsupial quoll family of Australia, and diverged from the quoll line in the mid-Miocene. While glider possoms are well-known, until the discovery of the rare Batbearoo in the wild and the fossil record, bats were believed to be the only true flying mammals. Unlike the glider possoms, but like the bats, the Batbearoo forelimbs form webbed wings and it does indeed fly, rather than simply glide, by flapping the outspread digits of its forelimbs - or, essentially, wing. This is an instance of convergent evolution; the Batbearoo fills a similar niche to the bats and hence their ressemblance, despite the lack of any close relation to placental mammals.

Batbearoos can grow to 25 cm (10 inches) in length and weigh up to 1 kg (2.2 pounds) and are usually mistaken for various members of the bat family.

Like all marsupials, the Batbearoo carries its young in a pouch, like this female. The young are born quite immature and spend up to 24 months being carried in their mother's pouch. When sufficiently grown to fly on their own, the mother batbearoo tightens her abdominal muscles and dives from a great height, causing the young to slip out of the pouch and instinctively spread its wings. It can safely glide for great distances before venturing to flap its wings and truly fly. The Batbearoo parents can be seen spiralling around, roaring and perstering their young to encourage them to flap their wings.

The Batbearoo is most active in the evening. Like their cousins the quolls they are carnivorous, preying on small mammals and insects. Their variable blue colouring makes them virtually invisible against the sky and rarely spotted in the shadows of the evening forest.

The Cactibou

Cactibou (Felis Cactaceae)
Unexpectedly, this strange and elusive desert cat has traded some genes with local cacti species. Like the golden jellyfish who live symbiotically with algae-like zooxanthellae in order to produce food from sunlight, this animal has evolved to feed itself through photosynthesis, in times of scarcity of prey during harsh desert droughts. Hence its strong green colour, indicative of chlorophyll pigments. Much like the camel, who thrives in the desert thanks to its water-filled hump, the cactibou carries its own water by adopting the cactus' water-storing strategy. Its outer, plant-like shell is rich with water. It has likewise adopted the cacti's defense, with its sharp spines. The brightly-coloured tail flourish, resembling a flower is used by the male of the species to attract a mate. Surprisingly, though the antlers do resemble miniature saguaro cacti, they are in fact antlers - bony extensions of the skull, like those grown by caribou and other deer. They apear to play a role in sexual selection, as large elaborate saguaro-antlers attract female cactibou, and the males employ them when fighting with other males. The antlers help cool the cactibou in the heat, by providing a large surface area of skin above a dense network of blood vessels, like the oversized ears of the jackrabbit or gerboa. The antlers are shed in the fall (insofar as there is a fall or autumn season in the desert) and regrown in the spring. Ethnobotanists report the widely-held local belief that the shed antlers can be caught in wind-blown tumble-weed and spread to a new location where they grow roots and a new cat emerges from the ground beneath the next spring. The veracity of this belief has been a point of contention amongst scholars since the Middle Ages.