The Blink That Won an Award A secretary bird catches a locust, and as it swallows, its eye turns into a smooth blue ball. Not a blink. Not a squint. A translucent membrane balloons up over the eyeball like a marble dropped into the socket, too fast to see without a high-speed shutter. Biologist and … Read more
The Monkeys Whose Reaction Saved Them Some capuchins reacted harder, and it saved them Between 2008 and 2013, a wild population of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus) at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve in Costa Rica went through six years of the ordinary kind of drought: dry seasons that made food scarcer but killed almost … Read more
The bat that never carb-loads A team led by Kenneth Welch at the University of Toronto Scarborough, working with Giulia Rossi, ran 24 adult common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), all captured along known flight paths in the forests of Belize, on tiny treadmills. The bats were tested at three paces, 10, 20, and 30 meters … Read more
The Number That Shouldn’t Exist On April 3, 2026, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation announced that 105 kākāpō chicks had hatched from 256 eggs laid during the season, the best hatch count in the 30 years the agency has kept records on the species. Set that number against the total wild population before the season … Read more
A Newborn Smaller Than a Jellybean A newborn koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is smaller than a jellybean, under 1 inch (2.5 cm) long and weighing less than 0.035 ounces (1 gram). It’s born blind and hairless, and it crawls on its own, unaided, into its mother’s pouch to keep developing. It stays there nursing for roughly … Read more
The old cat on the radiator, and your grandfather Some cats lose their memory in old age for the same biochemical reason some people do. Dr. Robert McGeachan and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, working with researchers from the University of California, the UK Dementia Research Institute and Scottish Brain Sciences, examined post-mortem brain … Read more
The Orgy That Kills Them Off the California coast, thousands of California market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens, also called the opalescent inshore squid) crowd onto shallow sandy seafloor once a year, at a time and place nobody can predict, and mate themselves to death. Males flash red down their arms to signal readiness and pair with … Read more
A Dinosaur That Sat Nameless for 150 Years A skeleton small enough to fit on a dining table just got its own name: Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae. It came out of a commercial quarry in Colorado in 2021 and 2022, standing about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall and a little over 3.3 feet (1 meter) long. Prof. … Read more
A River Short Enough to Swim, Never Crossed The harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) living in Alaska’s Iliamna Lake are separated from the open Pacific by just 68 miles (110 km) of navigable river, a distance they could cover in a couple of days if they felt like it. A 2024 study in Biology Letters, led … Read more
The Fish Finger Has a Death That Lasts Longer Than Your Commute A rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) killed by standard asphyxiation, the ordinary method of pulling it out of water and leaving it to suffocate, suffers an average of 10 minutes of moderate to intense pain, and can suffer as much as 22 minutes, before … Read more
