15,000 Times More Likely to Die, and There Won’t Be a Single Extra Ship By 2100, a free-ranging whale shark (Rhincodon typus) could be up to 15,000 times more likely to be struck and killed by a vessel than it is now. The shipping fleet is not growing by a factor of 15,000. That multiplier … Read more
The Animal That Rests at Peak Hour A Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) can hold its breath for 96 minutes and reach depths exceeding 2,952 feet (900 meters), and it systematically avoids deploying those capabilities when hunting conditions are best. A 2024 study in Communications Biology, led by Michelle Shero at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with … Read more
The oldest crocodile relative you’ve never heard of just rewrote the map Eighty million years ago, in what is now Egypt’s Western Desert, a crocodile relative roughly 11 to 13 feet (3.5 to 4 meters) long was already perfecting the marine lifestyle that would eventually let its descendants outlive the dinosaurs. The skull it left … Read more
Half a gram. Gone. A sable shearwater chick on Lord Howe Island, weighing roughly 1.4 lbs (620 g) at fledging, can have its entire reproductive future erased by half a gram of plastic. A 15-year study of the Ned’s Beach colony, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 17, 2026, … Read more
The Baleen Whale That Hunted Like a Shark Twenty-six million years ago, off the coast of what is now southeastern Australia, a compact whale measuring approximately 7 feet (2.1 meters) long was hunting individual prey with sharp slicing teeth and large, forward-facing eyes. Its closest modern relatives are blue whales and humpbacks. That is not … Read more
A fishing rod that rewired the spinal cord Vertebrate motor neurons are predictable residents. In every species studied so far, the neurons commanding each fin or limb occupy a characteristic zone in the ventral horn (the anterior region of the spinal cord’s gray matter that governs movement). Dorsal-fin neurons cluster at the ventrolateral zone, the … Read more
Nine Turtles. Three Years. Nobody Left. All nine satellite-tagged yellow-morph green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) tracked inside the Galápagos Marine Reserve stayed there for the entire study, not one crossed into open ocean, despite the expectation that at least some would eventually head west across the Pacific. That finding comes from a study published August … Read more
The navy’s sonar wasn’t loud enough to be legal trouble, and the dolphins left anyway A study published October 23, 2024, in Royal Society Open Science ran controlled sonar exposures on 34 groups of short-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus delphis delphis) and long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus delphis bairdii) off Santa Catalina Island, southern California, with groups … Read more
A hundred years of nothing, then a baby For a century, the heaviest invertebrate on Earth existed, as far as science was concerned, as a collection of fragments: arm fragments from whale stomachs, beaks from whale and seabird stomachs, a few dead animals taken as bycatch. British zoologist Guy Coburn Robson formally described Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni … Read more
The Oldest Ant in the World Was Already a Monster The oldest confirmed ant in the fossil record was already, at 113 million years old, carrying one of the most extreme predatory jaw systems in insect evolutionary history. That ant is Vulcanidris cratensis, described by entomologist Anderson Lepeco and colleagues at the Museum of Zoology, … Read more