The only insect that truly floats Chaoborus, the genus known as the phantom midge, holds a strange record: its larvae are the only insects classified as truly planktonic. They do not cling to a leaf, swim hard against the current, or sink to the bottom. They hang suspended in open water, neutrally buoyant, for long … Read more
One Mother, Two Species A single ant queen in Sicily raises sons from two different species. One kind is Messor ibericus, the Iberian harvester ant she is herself: reddish brown, hairy, unremarkable. The other is Messor structor, a species that split from hers more than 5 million years ago. Geneticists sequenced both kinds of sons … Read more
The Drum Section of the Family Tree The Surprising Fact Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hit the buttress roots of rainforest trees, the huge wooden flanges that fan out at the base of the biggest trunks, and they do not do it the way a toddler bangs a pot lid. A team led by Vesta Eleuteri at … Read more
A Pekingese breathing hard at the dog park is treated as cute. A Bulldog breathing hard the same way is treated as a warning sign. A new study says that gap in how we read the two breeds makes no physical sense. In a Cambridge-led study of 898 dogs across 14 brachycephalic breeds, only 10.9% … Read more
The Number That Doesn’t Belong in a Spiderweb A newly described spider living in the rainforests of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, in Queensland, catapults ants into the air at accelerations of up to 1,367 meters per second squared, roughly 140 times Earth’s gravity. That’s about 15 times the most extreme g-force a trained fighter pilot … Read more
The Number That Looked Fine, and the One That Wasn’t Nine Italian honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera ligustica) at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic apiary in Mesa, Arizona, held their hive-wide brood temperature inside the textbook-healthy range of 93°F to 97°F (34°C to 36°C) through a three-month summer that regularly climbed past 104°F (40°C). Every colony-wide … Read more
One Snake, Two Kill Switches The Eastern Brown Snake (Pseudonaja textilis) kills more people in Australia than any other snake, and it does it with two different venoms depending on where it was born. A 2025 study in Toxins, led by Bryan Fry’s team at the University of Queensland, ran venom samples from brown snakes … Read more
A Lifespan Long Enough to Get Rounded Up The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is considered the longest-lived vertebrate known to science, and the number behind that title is more interesting than the round figure that usually gets repeated. A 2025 preprint led by a University of Tokyo research team puts the species’ estimated lifespan at … Read more
A Worm That Keeps Making the Same Mistake A male Caenorhabditis elegans worm will eat a bacterium that is actively making him sick, over and over, long after a hermaphrodite worm of the same species has already walked off the same plate. Both are the identical species: a thread-thin roundworm about 1 millimeter long, invisible … Read more
The Crocodile That Vanished Within a Lifetime For more than 250 years, sailors and early naturalists wrote about crocodiles on the beaches of the Seychelles the way you’d write about gulls: just there, a common and unremarkable sight on an Indian Ocean archipelago, noted in passing by people who had no reason to think the … Read more
