Nature and ecology
Natural History is Science Blog's desk for the living world. Animals, evolution, and ecology, reported from the field science and the papers rather than the press releases.
These fleeting episodes of neural activity suggest octopuses may experience a second sleep stage—one that looks suspiciously like dreaming.
Sep 10, 2026
When a politician's legislative dreams died, he spent three decades and his own fortune assembling a wilderness park one deed at a time.
Sep 10, 2026
A London infrastructure megaproject's three million tonnes of excavated clay found an unlikely second life: resurrecting a vanished English wetland and creating refuge for millions of migratory birds.
Sep 10, 2026
The gene work was done on wild flies caught in a Kenyan reserve, because this species is so hard to infect in a laboratory.
Sep 10, 2026
A can of black paint slashed eagle deaths at a Norwegian wind farm—and the finding is reshaping how the industry thinks about saving birds.
Sep 10, 2026
A controlled Kalahari trial tested how live-prey practice helps meerkat pups handle scorpions, building on observations of older helpers providing graduated challenges.
Sep 10, 2026
Ten transplanted wall lizards founded a population with a different diet, stronger bites and distinctive gut anatomy. Follow-up studies examine the roles of plasticity and genetic change.
Sep 9, 2026
Massive ice deposits hidden beneath Utah mountain rubble could reshape understanding of water resources and climate patterns in the American West.
Sep 9, 2026
A half-century of mammal counts on a Panama Canal island is about to become a century-long experiment in ecological change—if the handoff works.
Sep 9, 2026
A Japanese laboratory experiment found that bombardier beetles could escape from toad stomachs. Related studies reveal how their chemical defense works and why the predator matters.
Sep 9, 2026
A decade-long delay in New York's tree-planting goals looks like failure, but the math tells a more complicated story about what's actually possible.
Sep 9, 2026
Idaho’s 1948 parachute relocation moved 76 beavers with one fatality. The original account explains the tested boxes, Geronimo’s role and the limits of the survival figure.
Sep 9, 2026
Beavers are back in Britain after four centuries, but whether they're a climate solution or a nuisance depends entirely on which farmer's land they flood.
Sep 9, 2026
A wartime research mishap sparked an ecological catastrophe that would consume eight decades and thousands of lives—but not all of them rodent.
Sep 9, 2026
