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.
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
The new species, Pristimantis milpe, is one of the most widely distributed Pristimantis frogs in the Ecuadorian Chocó, and the reason it stayed nameless is an error in how a name was matched to a population rather than any difficulty in finding the animal.
Sep 8, 2026
A 55-metre specimen stranded on a Scottish beach in 1864 made the bootlace worm a contender for the longest animal on Earth. In 2018, Swedish researchers found its mucus contains a peptide neurotoxin that paralyses crabs and kills cockroaches, while leaving mammalian nerves largely untouched.
Sep 8, 2026
A seven-night study estimated the number of migrants whose behavior changed near the memorial beams. Brief shutdowns dispersed the birds; the 1.1 million estimate was not a death toll.
Sep 8, 2026
Across 64 hours of watching at a single beach club, the team logged 14 ball-making attempts and eight finished balls, and recorded no ball-making at all at a comparable site roughly 30 kilometres away.
Sep 8, 2026
The authors say direct conclusive experimental evidence that a tree straightens itself by sensing its own bend had been lacking until now. Their result revises the textbook view of tension wood as a tissue that forms only on the upper side of a leaning trunk.
Sep 7, 2026
Community reports and direct observations showed a difficult bin-opening technique spreading socially through Sydney cockatoos and developing local variants.
Sep 6, 2026
Machine learning found receiver-specific information in 469 Kenyan elephant rumbles, and 17 wild elephants responded faster to calls originally directed at them.
Sep 6, 2026
Seven Seattle crows learned one masked face during a 2006 banding. The warning moved through the local flock and across generations before a 2023 walk finally drew silence.
Sep 6, 2026
What began as one couple's attempt to heal a ravaged landscape has become proof that even severely degraded ecosystems can recover far faster than science predicted.
Sep 6, 2026
