At one end of the family sits the tsetse fly, a strong flier with big eyes that picks out a buffalo or a person from across an African clearing. At the other end live the bat flies, eyeless or nearly so, scuttling through fur in the dark and almost never leaving their host. Two ways … Read more
The queen is not in charge. Not really. In a bumble bee colony, the most consequential decisions about who gets to become the next monarch are made by workers, those smaller, supposedly subordinate females that spend their days hauling pollen and tending to brood. A new study from Penn State has confirmed something rather unsettling … Read more
Somewhere in a basement drawer at the Natural History Museum in London, sealed in a jar of ethanol that has since outlived the man who collected it, a snake has been sitting. It arrived in 1860, brought back from the Garhwal Himalaya by the brothers von Schlagintweit during a four-year expedition on behalf of the … Read more
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