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
Did Nature’s Only Straight Lines Kickstart the Human Mind? Quartz crystals have been turning up at hominin sites for the better part of a million years. Twenty of them surfaced alongside Homo erectus remains at Zhoukoudian in China, deposited at least 600,000 years ago and possibly earlier. Six nearly complete prisms appeared in an Acheulian … Read more
Buried in a container of pig manure or sewage sludge, a black soldier fly larva spends its first weeks doing something genuinely useful: eating. It consumes the organic matter around it, converts it into body mass, and excretes what it cannot use as nutrient-rich pellets called frass. The process is efficient, well-understood, and increasingly seen … Read more
The fish had never seen a mirror before. It had, however, been injected with a small brown mark on its throat — the sort of patch that, to a cleaner wrasse living on a coral reef, signals something rather alarming. A parasite. The kind of thing you’d want off you immediately. The trouble was, with … Read more
Some of the wolf teeth that Amanda Burtt examined have been sitting in museum drawers since the 1840s. They were pulled from British caves and gravel pits by Victorian collectors who had no concept of climate change, no electron microscopes, and certainly no idea that the scratches on a molar could tell you what an … Read more
Late afternoon in a Costa Rican cattle pasture, and Christine Dahlin is sitting beneath a large tree with an old-school video camera and a directional microphone, waiting. The yellow-naped amazons that nest here won’t show up for a while yet — they spend their days foraging in small flocks elsewhere, only returning to their breeding … Read more