The Coral That Flexes Touch a branch of Leptogorgia chilensis, the red gorgonian that lives on rocky seafloor beneath the kelp forests of the Pacific coast from California to Chile, and it stops swaying. One moment it is bending in the current like any other soft coral, an octocoral with no stony, reef-building skeleton to … Read more
The Fact That Shouldn’t Be True Between 1995 and 2019, polar bears on Svalbard got fatter, not thinner, while the sea ice under their paws disappeared at roughly twice the rate of most of the Arctic. Jon Aars and his colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute captured and measured 770 adult bears, 1,188 captures in … Read more
Bruce Never Loses Bruce, a kea (Nestor notabilis) at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve on New Zealand’s South Island, was born without an upper beak, and he is the undisputed alpha of his twelve-bird group, known among kea researchers as a circus. Over a four-week observation period, researchers tracked 227 social and aggressive interactions inside the aviary. … Read more
The jaw nobody believed Nine fossil lower jawbones, pulled from a dry riverbed in a forest near Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, looked at first like nothing more than breakage, exactly what pressure does to bone after 275 million years. Martha Richter, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, first suspected the pieces might not … Read more
The Most Canadian Animal Isn’t the One on the Coin A squat, warty amphibian that most people would walk past without a second look turns out to be more genetically exclusive to Canada than the beaver or the moose have ever been. PhD student Jayna Bergman, working in Professor Julie Lee-Yaw’s lab at the University … Read more
A Dog’s Brain Doesn’t Confuse a Scared Face With a Sad One A dog’s brain treats a frightened human face and a sad one as two separate problems, not one blurry “not happy” signal. That’s the finding from a team led by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a neuroscientist at the University of Vienna, published in the journal … Read more
The livers keep washing up missing Eight great white sharks have washed ashore near Gansbaai, South Africa, since 2017. Seven were missing their livers. A couple had lost their hearts too. Somebody figured out exactly which organ was worth the trouble, and it wasn’t a fisherman. Before 2017, great whites (Carcharodon carcharias) had only abandoned … Read more
A Bee Moved Into a Dead Rodent’s Mouth A solitary burrowing bee moved its nursery into the mouth of an animal that had been dead for a very long time. Paleontologist Lázaro W. Viñola-López, of the Florida Museum of Natural History, and five colleagues were excavating Cueva de Mono, a limestone cave southwest of the … Read more
A false killer whale in Hawaiian waters lost about 500 pounds (227 kg) in roughly ten weeks, shedding close to 28 percent of its body mass. Researchers caught the loss on drone footage as part of a seven-year study of a population that now numbers fewer than 140 animals. The species is Pseudorca crassidens, the … Read more
A Toxoplasma gondii infection does not have to take over a mouse’s brain to mess with it. It just has to change what a few neurons are saying to their neighbors. A research team led by Emma Wilson and Emily Tabaie at the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine infected cultured mouse neurons, grown … Read more
