An adult female stops mid-path on the upper slopes of the Rock of Gibraltar, crouches against a roadside cutting of exposed red clay, and begins picking small fragments loose with a precision grip, bringing them to her mouth one by one. Seven minutes earlier, she had finished someone’s ice cream. A Cambridge University researcher notes … Read more
Set a crab down on a beach and watch what happens. It doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t pivot awkwardly like a dog trying to reverse. It simply goes, sliding sideways as if the lateral direction were always the natural one, as if moving perpendicular to its own body axis were the most obvious thing in the world. … Read more
Off the coast of Dominica, in water deep enough to swallow a skyscraper, a female sperm whale draws breath and dives. Somewhere below, she clicks. Not randomly. Not reflexively. She clicks in sequences with internal structure: rhythm, duration, a vowel quality she actively controls and that her neighbours recognise. Until recently, we had no idea … Read more
In tissue samples drawn from elephant skin biopsies across 17 African countries, in collections that have sat in biobanks for more than thirty years, something like a historical record was waiting to be read. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and their collaborators have now done exactly that: sequenced 232 whole genomes from both savanna … Read more
Something odd started happening beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in 2018. Gray whales, those barnacle-crusted migrants that normally barrel past the California coast on their way between Arctic feeding grounds and the lagoons of Baja Mexico, began turning left. They swam into San Francisco Bay, lingered for weeks at a time, and then some of … Read more
On a June morning in 2015, two clusters of chimpanzees approached each other near the centre of their territory in Kibale National Park, Uganda. This sort of encounter happened all the time. Chimps at Ngogo lived in a fission-fusion society, splitting apart and reuniting throughout the day as they moved through the forest. But this … Read more
Sound moves differently through water than through air. It travels faster, farther, and with more force, and the problem for a fish is that its body, being mostly water itself, offers the waves nothing to push against. They pass straight through. For a fish to actually hear, rather than simply be buffeted by pressure, it … Read more
The collar weighs about a kilogram and transmits six times a day. Fitted to an adult female somewhere in western Hudson Bay, it relays her position to a satellite, which passes that fix to a server, which adds it to a database that now contains more than 230,000 such locations collected from 355 individual bears … Read more
The specimen arrived in Japan sometime before the Second World War. It was a small, limbless reptile collected in Taiwan, formally described by the zoologist Kishida in 1930 and given the species name formosensis, after Formosa, the old Portuguese name for the island. And then, somewhere in the chaos that followed, it vanished. The type … Read more
Three days after swallowing a rat whole, a Burmese python’s blood is doing something extraordinary. Its heart has expanded by roughly a quarter. Its metabolism has accelerated thousands of times over. And coursing through its circulatory system is a molecule that, until now, nobody in the field of obesity research had thought to look for. … Read more
Nature’s Secrets, Scientifically Told.