Deep in the African night, it turns out that lions are not just roaring, they are speaking in two different roaring voices that computers can now tell apart with remarkable precision. In a new observational study published in Ecology and Evolution, researchers led by the University of Exeter used machine learning to show that African … Read more
At mealtimes, rabbit sized Australian bettongs turn into nut cracking powerhouses that can splinter seeds tougher than popcorn kernels. In new imaging analysis led by Flinders University and published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers used 3D scans and geometric morphometrics of 161 skulls from all four living bettong species to uncover … Read more
When the air around them turns desert dry, Madagascar hissing cockroaches do something surprisingly tender: they press their bodies together and ride out the stress as a crowd. In a new piece of research from Binghamton University, biologists show that these big, familiar classroom insects change how tightly they pack together depending on humidity, using … Read more
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