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
The bones were so small that at first glance they looked like they might belong to juveniles. But Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes reckoned otherwise. Scattered across the Burgos Province site in northern Spain, the delicate fossils represented at least five individuals—all adults, all impossibly tiny for dinosaurs. … Read more
Off Canada’s coast, in the cold waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, something extraordinary is quietly happening. Three species of baleen whales—creatures so massive they seem to belong to another era—are changing what they eat. They’re doing it together, shifting their feeding patterns as the ocean warms. But this isn’t the violent competition you … Read more
The ice in Bristol Bay closes down hard by November, locking away the whales for months in the icebound waters beneath it. When researchers finally arrive in spring with their small boats and biopsies, they’re after something most people never think about: who’s sleeping with whom, and what it means for survival in one of … Read more
Watch a centimeter-long aquatic worm wiggle through a dish of scattered sand, and something peculiar happens. The grains gradually gather into compact piles. The mess disappears. It looks intentional, except the worm has no brain worth mentioning and cannot sense the particles it is moving. Physicists from the University of Amsterdam, Georgia Tech, and Sorbonne … Read more
Tropical house crickets raised in Ottawa, Canada, happily gobbled polyethylene microplastics mixed into their feed, treating them much like normal food. The work appears in Environmental Science & Technology and followed the insects for seven weeks as they grew roughly 20 times heavier without obvious stunting despite chronic plastic exposure. The team used fluorescent plastic … Read more
Most of us would probably try to downplay an illness, but for ant pupae, the best way to protect family is to scent their own death. Researchers at IST Austria have found that when young ants catch a truly deadly infection, they sound an invisible chemical alarm. The result isn’t a rescue. It’s a swift … Read more
Before a young orangutan ever forages alone in the forest, its mind is already carrying a crowded library of cultural knowledge. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and based on 12 years of field data from Sumatran orangutans, shows that this library does … Read more