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.
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
Large kangaroos recycle landing energy through long ankle tendons, helping explain why their oxygen use changes little across fast hopping speeds and why their energy cost per meter can fall.
Aug 23, 2026
Size matters far less than ingenuity when a capuchin monkey tackles a problem that should require a body twice its weight.
Aug 23, 2026
Bumblebees combined separately learned facts to reposition a ball beneath an unreachable reward, including when the goal location was hidden.
Aug 22, 2026
Reindeer seasonally retune a collagen reflector behind the retina, increasing winter sensitivity while sacrificing some spatial precision.
Aug 22, 2026
Bilateral neural recordings show submillisecond coordination during zebra-finch song but largely independent replay of vocal fragments during sleep.
Aug 21, 2026
Field observations of juvenile reef octopuses separate short defensive clashes with territorial fish from longer encounters with nonterritorial followers.
Aug 21, 2026
In a controlled study, dormant common eastern bumblebee queens survived up to seven days underwater, though later colony founding was not tested.
Aug 21, 2026
Solitary trees that appear to thrive after clearings are often silently dying from severed root networks and lost forest protection.
Aug 21, 2026
The end-Permian extinction devastated the oceans before dinosaurs existed. Its link to the Siberian Traps depends on not just immense lava volumes, but magma heating volatile-rich rock.
Aug 21, 2026
Dimetrodon lived in the Permian, before dinosaurs, and belonged to Synapsida, the same major evolutionary branch that later produced mammals.
Aug 21, 2026
A luxury fiber so rare that the animal producing it cannot be domesticated—and thrives only in the thin air of the highest Andes.
Aug 20, 2026
A species abandoned by climate change six thousand years ago still clings to existence in Earth's harshest landscape, waiting for a rescue that may never come.
Aug 20, 2026
A cemetery in upstate New York harbors more bees than people live in Manhattan—a discovery that could reshape how we think about pollinator habitat.
Aug 19, 2026
