Ellie Harper

A Nest Without Her Turns Into a Fungal Graveyard Take a small carpenter bee larva, Ceratina calcarata, and raise it without its mother present, and something specific happens inside it: it fills with fungus. A team led by Sandra Rehan at York University in Toronto, with lead author Katherine Chau, raised C. calcarata larvae with … Read more

The worms that ate dinosaur-era sea monsters A graveyard full of tiny tunnels More than 130 fossil bones and teeth, examined one by one, turned out to be riddled with tunnels: three plesiosaurs, two mosasaurs, one ichthyosaur, plus ancient whales and turtles. That survey, led by PhD student Sarah Jamison-Todd and published in the journal … Read more

The Loner That Wins Alone A paradise fish, dropped alone into an unfamiliar tank, maps the space faster and more confidently than a zebrafish given the identical empty tank and the identical isolation. That is the headline finding from Zoltán K. Varga and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and the HUN-REN Institute of Experimental … Read more

A wolf tooth from 120,000 years ago matches one alive in Poland right now Picture two sets of fossil wolf teeth from Britain. One set is roughly 200,000 years old, worn smooth and simple, the kind of wear you get from slicing soft meat. The other is about 120,000 years old, pitted and crosshatched, the … Read more

A mouse plays medic More than half of the mice in a study from the University of Southern California bit at the mouth of an unconscious cage-mate and pulled on its tongue. Researchers led by Wenjian Sun published the findings on February 21, 2025, in the journal Science: across repeated trials, mice spent an average … Read more

580 Visits, and the Fat Bears Showed Up Just as Often Between 2011 and 2021, trail cameras at three camps in Wapusk National Park and at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre recorded 580 polar bear visits along the west coast of Hudson Bay, Manitoba. The decade-long project, led by Dr. Douglas Clark at the University … Read more

A jaw that bites twice Picture a fossil jaw dredged out of a Nova Scotia creek bed, curved and bristling with teeth, and nothing else attached to it. That single bone is the entire known body of Sphyragnathus tyche, an extinct ray-finned fish that swam in an ancient inland lake roughly 350 million years ago. … Read more

A kitten, a case report, and twenty-four hours In May 2024, two indoor-only house cats in separate Michigan households died of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented both cases in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published on February 20, 2025, in the middle of an outbreak that … Read more

The Headline That Changed Its Mind The honeybee did not cheat. That is the real headline behind a reanalysis by Mirko Zanon, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Italy, and Scarlett Howard, a zoologist at Monash University in Australia, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Their target was a … Read more

The Whales That Stopped Growing on Purpose Shorter, Same Ocean Some gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) skip the family trip north. Instead of migrating to the Bering and Chukchi seas like the rest of their population, 212 of them spend the warm months close to home, feeding along the coast of Oregon, northern California, Washington, and … Read more