Animals
- Animals
Magnetic field tells nightingales to binge
Young birds that have never migrated before may take a cue from the magnetic field to fatten up before trying to fly over the Sahara.
- Animals
Wild gerbils pollinate African desert lily
Scientists in South Africa have found the first known examples of gerbils pollinating a flower.
- Animals
Poison birds copy ‘don’t touch’ feathers
A subspecies of one of New Guinea's poisonous pitohui birds may be mimicking a toxic neighbor, according to a new genetic analysis.
- Animals
Shrimps spew bubbles as hot as the sun
With the snap of a claw, a pinkie-size ocean shrimp generates a collapsing air bubble that's hot enough to emit faint light.
- Animals
Meerkat pups grow fatter with extra adults
Meerkat pups growing up in large, cooperative groups are heftier because there are more adults to entreat for food.
- Animals
Shhh! Is that scrape a caterpillar scrap?
A series of staged conflicts reveals the first known acoustic duels in caterpillars.
- Animals
Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!
Hungry chicks cheeping in their nest have inspired a whole branch of scientific inquiry.
- Animals
Social Cats
Who says cats aren't social? And other musings from scientists who study cats in groups.
- Animals
Even deep down, the right whales don’t sink
A right whale may weigh some 70 tons, but unlike other marine mammals studied so far, it tends to float rather than sink at great depths.
- Animals
It’s a snake! No, a fish. An octopus?
An as-yet-unnamed species of octopus seems to be protecting itself by impersonating venomous animals from sea snakes to flatfish.
- Animals
Big woodpeckers trash others’ homes
Pileated woodpeckers destroy in an afternoon the nesting cavities that take endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers 6 years to excavate.
- Animals
When rare species eat endangered ones
To cut down on their salmon smolt catch, Caspian terns were encouraged to move from one island to another in the Columbia River.
