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.
Fendouzhe mapped patchy, fault-fed seep communities from 5,800 to 9,533 meters, with microbes converting methane and sulfide chemistry into animal biomass.
Aug 26, 2026
A teaspoon of healthy forest soil holds more individual organisms than Earth has humans, and most of its species have never been named. What sequencing reveals about the invisible community underfoot.
Aug 26, 2026
When a 2004 tsunami reshaped an isolated island, a single arrow confirmed its most reclusive inhabitants had survived.
Aug 25, 2026
A striking study shows how urban birds adjusted their acoustic strategies within weeks when pandemic lockdowns silenced traffic, revealing what evolution usually takes generations to achieve.
Aug 25, 2026
Humans have halved the carbon storage capacity of Earth's plants—and we're only beginning to understand what that means for climate and survival.
Aug 25, 2026
An underground coal fire has been burning beneath an Australian hillside for six millennia, advancing inexorably toward towns and infrastructure with no known way to stop it.
Aug 25, 2026
A 20-year archive revealed non-random plant associations in wild Bornean orangutan diets, identifying candidates for medicinal research without establishing intent or benefit.
Aug 25, 2026
A soft actuator moved and stiffened a natural harbour-seal whisker, revealing how undulated geometry suppresses self-noise while protraction strengthens a wake signal.
Aug 25, 2026
For almost four hours, a camera watched a dense wall of juvenile arapaima moving through an indoor tank.
Aug 25, 2026
Female Cope's gray treefrogs became slower, less accurate and more likely to defer a choice as recorded mate calls increased from two to eight, even when researchers separated the number of options from chorus noise.
Aug 24, 2026
One isolated population of humpbacks—trapped in the Arabian Sea for 70,000 years and genetically unique—has failed to recover even as its cousins worldwide bounced back from the brink of extinction.
Aug 24, 2026
Across 491 species of monkeys, apes and lemurs, same-sex sexual behavior was not distributed at random.
Aug 24, 2026
Twelve photoreceptor classes did not give one mantis shrimp species fine wavelength discrimination. The barcode model explains why, but newer work points to a hybrid visual system.
Aug 23, 2026
Jetting raises pressure inside a common octopus's mantle enough to interrupt venous return and briefly pause its systemic heart. Crawling avoids that circulatory conflict.
Aug 23, 2026
