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
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
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
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
For at least 45 million years, global shark and ray diversity has been sliding downhill, not climbing, and today’s crisis looks less like a blip than a long, slow collapse. In a new fossil analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports, an international team led by Manuel A. Staggl at the University of Vienna assembled … 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
High on the misty slopes of Tanzania, a toad the size of a thumb pads along a wet leaf, its skin a patchwork of tawny browns and ash gray. No ponds are needed here. Instead of laying strings of eggs, the female toad will deliver tiny, fully formed toadlets that hop off into the forest. … Read more
At a picnic table, the air shimmers with summer heat. You wave your hand at a faint buzz, but it is too late. A mosquito, guided by invisible plumes of carbon dioxide from your breath, has found you. New research from the University of California San Diego reveals in exquisite detail how this tiny hunter … Read more