Animals
- Animals
Female moths join pheromone choruses
Female rattlebox moths can detect each other's male-luring pheromones and tend to gather in what may be a scent version of male frogs' chorusing around the pond.
- Animals
Underage Spiders: Males show unexpected interest in young mates
Male Australian redback spiders mate readily with females too young to have external openings to their reproductive tracts, a tactic that reduces the male's risk of getting cannibalized.
- Animals
Seabirds take record summer vacations
Sooty shearwaters that breed in New Zealand have set a new record for off-season travel, covering 64,000 kilometers between visits to their mating ground.
- Animals
Crouching Scientist, Hidden Dragonfly
Although dragonflies are among the most familiar of insects, science is just beginning to unravel their complex life stories.
- Animals
Hot and hungry bees hit hot spots
New lab experiments suggest that bumblebees like warm flowers and can learn color cues to pick them out.
- Animals
Babbling Bats: Do pups talk baby talk as human infants do?
Young sac-winged bats make long strings of adultlike noises and could be the first animals besides some primates and birds that babble when they're babies.
- Animals
Stilts for ants make case for pedometer
Changing the leg length of desert ants upsets their ability to judge distance, providing the first evidence in any animal of a built-in odometer based on stride.
- Animals
Live Prey for Dummies: Meerkats coach pups on hunting
Meerkats easing their pups into the job of handling live prey are among the few animal species shown so far to be natural teachers. With audio.
- Animals
Dawn Sneaks: Old birds sing early, cuckold sleepyheads
Among European birds called blue tits, older males join the springtime dawn chorus extra early—which may signal their charms to philandering females.
- Animals
Fishy Reputations: Undersea watchers choose helpers that do good jobs
Coral reef fish use smart-shopper techniques of looking for satisfied customers before choosing a small fish to provide cleaning services.
- Animals
Naked and Not
The Damaraland mole rat may be less famous than its naked cousin, but both have some of the oddest social structures found in a mammal.
- Animals
Mixed Butterflies: Tropical species joins ranks of rare hybrids
A South American butterfly is one of the few animal species that seems to have arisen via the supposedly rare path of crossing two older species.
