Animals

  1. Life

    Fast and furious: The real lives of swallows

    In the fields of Oregon, scientists learn flight tricks from swallows.

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  2. Life

    Flying animals can teach drones a thing or two

    Scientists have turned to Mother Nature’s most adept aerial acrobats — birds, bees, bats and other animals — to inspire their designs for self-directed drones.

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  3. Animals

    That’s how shrimpfish roll

    A tails-up swimmer makes rare moves.

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  4. Animals

    Humboldt squid flash and flicker

    Scientists capture the color-changing behavior of Humboldt squid in the wild.

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  5. Animals

    If pursued by a goshawk, make a sharp turn

    Scientists put a tiny camera on a northern goshawk and watched it hunt. The bird used several strategies to catch prey, failing only when its targets made a sharp turn.

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  6. Animals

    Diving marine mammals take deep prey plunges to heart

    In spite of their diving prowess, Weddell seals and bottlenosed dolphins experience irregular heart rates when they venture beyond 200 meters under the sea.

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  7. Animals

    Cringe away, guys — this spider bites off his own genitals

    After sex, a male coin spider will chew off his own genitals, an act that might help secure his paternity.

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  8. Animals

    Cone snail deploys insulin to slow speedy prey

    Fish-hunting cone snails turns insulin into a weapon that drops their prey’s blood sugar and eases capture.

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  9. Animals

    Lemurs aren’t pets

    The first survey of lemur ownership in Madagascar finds that thousands of the rare primates are held in households.

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  10. Life

    Fossilized fish skull shakes up the evolutionary history of jaws

    Analysis of a 415-million-year-old fossilized fish skull suggest that the earliest jawed vertebrates probably looked a lot like modern bony fish.

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  11. Animals

    Mountain migration is a roller coaster for bar-headed geese

    Bar-headed geese rise and fall to match terrain below them when migrating over the Himalayas.

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  12. Animals

    Earth’s magnetic field guides sea turtles home

    Over 19 years, geomagnetic fields changed slightly and so did loggerheads’ nesting sites.

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