Animals

  1. Animals

    Petite parrots provide insight into early flight

    High-speed video shows that tiny parrots direct their hops to use the least amount of energy necessary.

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  2. Life

    How a flamingo balances on one leg

    Flamingos’ built-in tricks for balance might have a thing or two to teach standing robots or prosthesis makers someday.

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  3. Animals

    Orangutans take motherhood to extremes, nursing young for more than eight years

    Weaning in orangutans has been tricky to see in the wild, so researchers turned to dental tests to reveal long nursing period.

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  4. Climate

    Higher temperatures could trigger an uptick in damselfly cannibalism

    Experiments in the lab suggest that increases in temperature could indirectly lead to an increase in cannibalistic damselfly nymphs.

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  5. Animals

    Blennies have a lot of fang for such little fishes

    Unlike snakes, blennies evolved fangs before venom, through probably not because of any need to hunt big prey.

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  6. Animals

    Watch male cuttlefish fight over a female in the wild

    For the first time, researchers have observed the competitive mating behaviors of the European cuttlefish in the field.

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  7. Genetics

    Selfish genes hide for decades in plain sight of worm geneticists

    Crossing wild Hawaiian C. elegans with the familiar lab strain reveals genes that benefit themselves by making mother worms poison offspring who haven’t inherited the right stuff.

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  8. Paleontology

    Ancient whale tells tale of when baleen whales had teeth

    A 36 million-year-old whale fossil bridges the gap between ancient toothy predators and modern filter-feeding baleen whales.

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  9. Animals

    Why create a model of mammal defecation? Because everyone poops

    Mammals that defecate in the same fashion as humans all excrete waste within the same time frame, no matter their size, a new study finds.

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  10. Animals

    Seabirds use preening to decide how to divvy up parenting duties

    Seabirds in poor condition may communicate this information to their partner by delaying or withholding preening.

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  11. Animals

    In Florida, they’re fighting mosquitoes by meddling with their sex lives

    As an alternative to genetically modified mosquitoes, Florida skeeter police are testing one of two strategies that use bacteria to meddle with insect sex lives.

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  12. Animals

    Trackers may tip a warbler’s odds of returning to its nest

    Geolocator devices that help track migrating birds could also hamper migration survival or timing.

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