Animals
- Animals
Spiders get bigger in the big city
City-living golden orb-weaving spiders tend to be bigger than those that live in the countryside, a new study finds.
- Animals
Magpies don’t like shiny things
Magpies’ reputation as thieving birds that will steal shiny objects is all wrong, a new study finds.
- Animals
Antarctic midge sports tiniest insect genome
Antarctic midge‘s genetic minimalism achieved by skipping a lot of repetitive stretches.
- Animals
Corals, fish know bad reefs by their whiff
Compounds drifting off certain overgrown seaweeds discourage young corals and fish from settling in failing reefs.
- Animals
Bumphead parrot fish declare their arrival with a crunch
Months of swimming with the coral-biter bumpheads exposes the animal’s extreme digestion and also a conservation dilemma.
- Animals
Seeing past the jellyfish sting
Jellies don’t get nearly as much love as their cousins, the corals, but they deserve credit for providing homes to some creatures, dinner to others and more. They’re an integral part of the oceans.
- Animals
These lizards may be able to learn from each other
An experiment with skinks provides the first evidence of social learning in lizards.
- Animals
Hummingbirds evolved a strange taste for sugar
While other birds seem to lack the ability to taste sugar, hummingbirds detect sweetness using a repurposed sensor that normally responds to savory flavors.
- Animals
Orcas and other animals may speak with complexity
From finches to orangutans, animal vocalizations may be more complex and not as distant from the structure of human language as previously thought.
- Animals
Olinguito’s bio built by crowd-sourcing
Crowd-sourcing fleshes out the bio of little-known raccoon relative, the olinguito.
- Animals
New subspecies of Philippine tarsier discovered
Genetic tests settle a taxonomic debate surrounding Philippine tarsier, one of the world’s smallest primates.
- Animals
Zebra finches go mad with mercury, and other animal updates
Mercury exposure makes zebra finches bold and hyperactive, and additional research from the 2014 Animal Behavior Society Meeting.
