Animals

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.

Animals

Spotted seals hear well in and out of water

Spotted seals, native to the northern parts of the Pacific, hear frequencies that may mean they are susceptible to the effects of anthropogenic noise.

Animals

Pelican spiders: slow, safe assassins

Spiders, thank goodness, haven’t evolved assassin drones. But the specialized hunters of the family Archaeidae can kill at a distance.

Plants

Australian flowers bloom red because of honeyeaters

Many flowering plants converged on similar a color to attract the common birds.

Animals

Chemical in male goat odor drives the lady goats wild

A new study shows that male goats exude pheromones from their skin that could make female goats ready to roll in the hay.

Physics

Flying snakes get lift from surrounding air vortices

When a paradise flying snake leaps into and glides through the air, it’s getting lift from small, swirling vortices in the air around it.

Animals

Peacocks sometimes fake mating hoots

Peacocks may have learned a benefit of deception by sounding their copulation calls even when no peahens are in sight.