Animals
- Animals
Skewed gender ratios turn bird world into a soap opera
Infidelity, divorce and polygamy become more common among birds when one sex is rarer and has more choice in partners.
- Animals
Mama frog’s care includes a gift of poison
Strawberry poison frog tadpoles get defensive chemicals through unfertilized, nutritious eggs provided by mom.
- Animals
A parasitic cuckoo can be a good thing
Great spotted cuckoo chicks show that brood parasites may benefit their hosts.
- Animals
Owl monkeys’ fidelity linked to males’ quality of parenting
The evolution of animals’ sexual fidelity is probably linked to the intensity of male care, the researchers suggest.
- Animals
Like a boomerang, relocated python comes back again
Burmese pythons, which have invaded the Everglades, can find their way home when people move them dozens of kilometers.
- Genetics
Giant moa thrived before people reached New Zealand
Humans probably caused the extinction of giant wingless birds called moa in New Zealand, DNA evidence suggests.
- Animals
How to count a sea turtle
Trends, not absolute numbers, matter more when it comes to conservation efforts for sea turtles.
- Animals
There’s plenty of bling in the natural world
Beetles that look like solid gold are just the start to jewel-like and metallic looks in nature.
- Animals
Amphibian diseases flow through animal trade
Discovery of chytrid fungus and ranaviruses in frogs and toads exported from Hong Kong shows how pathogens may spread.
- Animals
Sing a song of bird phylogeny
A new study challenges assumptions about birdsong, finding that the majority of songbird species have female singers.
- Animals
Chimps catch people’s yawns in sign of flexible empathy
Chimpanzees may show humanlike empathy, as evidenced by their contagious yawning.
- Animals
Elephants can tell men’s voices from women’s
Amboseli elephants may pick out age and gender — and even distinguish between languages — when listening to human voices.
