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
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
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 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
Submerged to the nostrils in warm, slow water, the animal waited. It had been waiting a long time, probably; crocodiles are good at that. Around it, the Hadar floodplain spread out in a patchwork of gallery forest and open grassland, lakes edged with sedge, streams running amber with silt. And somewhere along the bank, at … 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 species boundary is one of biology’s oldest fictions. A line we draw, then argue about, then redraw. In the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, a group of small brown frogs with tooth-like projections on their jaws has been making that argument embarrassingly concrete for the last two decades, and a new genomic study has now … Read more
The nurse sharks swimming through Miami’s glowing coastal waters at night aren’t getting much sleep. Their blood tells the story: melatonin levels suppressed, circadian rhythms disrupted, all because the city never really goes dark. For the first time, researchers have measured the hormone in wild sharks and found that artificial light is throwing their biological … Read more