In Yingku village, in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh, entomologists have described an ant colored like polished sapphire, a shade almost unheard of among the world’s 16,724 described ant species and subspecies. Paraparatrechina neela measures about a sixteenth of an inch (roughly 1.6 mm, under 2 mm by total length), and its blue … Read more
Five Harvestmen Walk Into the Same Rainforest… At the Panguana Biological Research Station in the Peruvian Amazon, five harvestman species share the same patch of forest floor, the same nocturnal hours, and roughly the same body plan. Under a normal flashlight, telling them apart takes a trained eye. Under a UV light, it takes no … Read more
Ninety-Six Percent Scientists at the Federal University of Santa Catarina examined 53 skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) caught off the coast of southern Brazil and found parasitic worms in 96% of them. The total count across the haul exceeded 1,600 individual worms. The infected tissues included the muscle: the flesh sold at fish counters, served in … Read more
They Keep Coming Back to the Same Trees Stone piles sit at the base of specific trees in the savanna-woodland of Boé National Park, Guinea-Bissau. The bark above them is gouged and scarred. Some of those piles have been there since the mid-2010s, and the western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) that built them have been … Read more
The Worm That Outlived the Expectation A pill already prescribed for high blood pressure made roundworms live longer, in living Caenorhabditis elegans worms, with a maximum mean lifespan increase of 19% compared to untreated controls, in a study published January 20, 2023, in Aging Cell. The drug is rilmenidine, used to treat hypertension, with a … Read more
The Teenager Who Already Had the Skull for a Fight A Zavacephale rinpoche individual that had not finished growing was already carrying a complete cranial dome, the dense, mineralized skull cap that defines the pachycephalosaur group. Unfused sutures in the scapula and coracoid confirmed the animal was still growing; two growth rings in a cross-section … Read more
The Vacancy Sign Off Gansbaai Every one of the 14 GPS-tagged great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) being tracked off Gansbaai, South Africa, fled the area whenever two specific orcas (Orcinus orca) arrived. Not most of them. Not the juveniles. Every tracked individual, every single time. A 2022 study led by marine biologist Alison Towner of … Read more
A Coral That Walks Itself to the Light Cycloseris cyclolites, a solitary, disc-shaped mushroom coral roughly 1.6 to 2 inches (4 to 5 centimeters) across, crosses the seafloor under its own power. Not drifting, not rolling in a current: walking. A study led by Brett Lewis at Queensland University of Technology, published in PLOS One … Read more
It Travels Inert. Then It Meets a Cell. The venom enzyme that makes a Chilean six-eyed sand spider (Sicarius levii) dangerous does essentially nothing while it moves through a body, no membrane disruption, no tissue attack. It circulates inert until it physically contacts a cell surface, and then it switches on. That activation-on-contact finding is … Read more
She Tucked Grass in Her Ear for No Reason. Her Friends Copied Her. She Died. They Kept Doing It. In 2010, a female chimpanzee named Julie at Zambia’s Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust inserted a stiff blade of grass into her ear and left it hanging there. No purpose announced itself. Seven group-mates gradually took up … Read more