Animals
- Animals
Smells Funny: Fish schools break up over body odor
Just an hour's swim in slightly contaminated water can give a fish such bad body odor that its schoolmates shun it.
- Animals
Eat a Killer: Snake dines safely with strategic delays
An Australian snake kills dangerous frogs then waits for their defensive chemicals to degrade before eating them.
- Animals
Crowcam: Camera on bird’s tail captures bird ingenuity
Video cameras attached to tropical crows record the birds' use of plant stems as tools to dig out food.
- Animals
Tough-guy bluebirds need a frontier
As western bluebirds recolonize Montana, the most aggressive males move in first, paving the way for milder-mannered dads to take over.
- Animals
Not Your Ordinary Amphibians
They resemble mondo worms or perhaps eels and snakes. But caecilians (seh sil yenz) are actually legless amphibians, and along with deep sea fishes are among the least well known vertebrates on the planet. Some run to a meter or more in length. Although information on these elusive animals and photos of them are hard […]
- Animals
Honeybee mobs smother big hornets
Honeybees gang up on an attacking hornet, killing it by blocking its breathing.
- Animals
Hybrid Power: Salamander invader ups survival of rare cousin
Mixed offspring of the endangered California tiger salamander and an invasive cousin survive better than either pure-bred species, raising tricky questions for conservationists.
- Animals
Fish Switch: Salmon make baby trout after species, sex swap
Salmon implanted with trout reproductive tissue bred to produce a generation of normal rainbow trout.
- Animals
Hive Scourge? Virus linked to recent honeybee die-off
A poorly understood virus seems to have a connection to the recent widespread demise of honeybees.
- Animals
Cicada Serenades
One sound that characterizes American summers is the cicada chorus. The insects’ long, drawn out serenades can be loud and ethereal, reminiscent of some cross between the sounds of rustling and scraping. Half a world away, Borneo’s cicadas belt out very different melodies. Although some sound fairly familiar, one available at this German site is […]
- Animals
Bats hum for sugar too
Some nectar-feeding bats metabolize sugars as rapidly as hummingbirds do.
- Animals
High Volume, Low Fidelity: Birds are less faithful as sounds blare
In noisy surroundings, normally faithful female zebra finches flirt with unfamiliar males.
