Tropical house crickets raised in Ottawa, Canada, happily gobbled polyethylene microplastics mixed into their feed, treating them much like normal food. The work appears in Environmental Science & Technology and followed the insects for seven weeks as they grew roughly 20 times heavier without obvious stunting despite chronic plastic exposure. The team used fluorescent plastic … 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
Before a young orangutan ever forages alone in the forest, its mind is already carrying a crowded library of cultural knowledge. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and based on 12 years of field data from Sumatran orangutans, shows that this library does … Read more
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
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
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
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
Nature’s Secrets, Scientifically Told.