Most spiders shut down when temperatures slip below freezing, but Clubiona spiders keep hunting through subzero nights in European orchards, an improbable winter endurance that depends on potent antifreeze proteins flowing through their bodies. In work published November 19, 2025 in The FEBS Journal, researchers from Queen’s University in Ontario and collaborators in Czechia analyzed … Read more
Sperm whales may shape their clicks into something closer to speech than code. New research from UC Berkeley linguists and Project CETI suggests their calls contain vowel like structures with a human style complexity that challenges long held assumptions about animal communication. In a new acoustic and computational linguistics study in the journal Open Mind, … Read more
A guppy swimming through a cluttered stream and a dove pecking at seeds on bare ground live in radically different visual worlds. Now, scientists have put both species to the test with one of psychology’s oldest party tricks: the Ebbinghaus illusion, where a circle surrounded by smaller circles looks bigger than an identical circle ringed … Read more
In the dim blue waters off New Zealand, a shadow larger than a car slips beneath the waves. Minutes later, it plunges more than a kilometer below the surface, into a realm of darkness and crushing pressure. What drives such a dive is the mystery researchers set out to solve by tagging oceanic manta rays, … Read more
In the forests of California’s Sierra Nevada, what once looked like destruction is turning out to be renewal. A new study finds that low- and moderate-severity wildfires can benefit bird populations for decades, offering fresh evidence that fire is not always the enemy of wildlife it is often made out to be. The research, published … Read more
When a reed warbler in Zambia spots a cuckoo near its nest, it lets out a distinctive whining call. Halfway across the world in Australia, a fairy-wren does exactly the same thing. The two species have never met, separated by thousands of miles and 53 million years of evolutionary history. Yet they speak the same … Read more
Scientists in Thailand have discovered that Asian elephants pay remarkably close attention to how humans position their bodies, but not quite in the way you might expect. The finding suggests these intelligent giants aren’t just responding to our presence—they’re analyzing whether we’re actually looking at them before deciding to communicate. Hoi-Lam Jim, a researcher at … Read more
Marine researchers have captured the most comprehensive catalog ever assembled of how octopuses wield their eight arms in the wild, documenting nearly 4,000 arm movements from 25 creatures across six diverse underwater habitats spanning the Caribbean to Spain. The findings, published this week in Scientific Reports, reveal that octopus arms operate with a sophistication that … Read more
Our brains grew as our thumbs stretched. That is the striking conclusion of a new study in Communications Biology, which finds that primates with longer thumbs also tend to have larger brains. Using data from 95 living and fossil species, researchers at Durham University and the University of Reading report that the link holds across … Read more
Michigan’s only rattlesnake is quietly losing ground. A new 15-year study shows that inbreeding among Eastern Massasauga rattlesnakes is reducing survival and reproductive success, raising alarm for the federally threatened species. The research, led by Michigan State University conservation biologists and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, traced family histories of … Read more