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
They Weren’t Just Sharing a Rock Nineteen juvenile hicatees, the Central American river turtle, Dermatemys mawii, were fitted with sonic transmitters and tracked daily by canoe through a stretch of Belizean river. The animals moved in groups; in some cases, one turtle never strayed more than about 3 feet (1 m) from its nearest neighbor. … Read more
The Hobbit ate the leftovers. A Komodo dragon had already finished dinner. On Flores, roughly 100,000 years ago, a Komodo dragon ate first. Homo floresiensis, the small-bodied hominin known as the Hobbit, standing about 3 feet 6 inches tall and weighing between 55 and 71 pounds (approximately 25–32.5 kg), got what was left. A taphonomic … Read more
The Spider That Runs a Firefly Trap A sheet web spider in a Taiwanese conifer forest has been filmed catching fireflies and then deliberately not eating them. Psechrus clavis, a nocturnal sit-and-wait predator native to subtropical East Asia, was documented at National Taiwan University’s Xitou Nature Educational Area doing something that had not been recorded … Read more
One Female, Two Males, 110 Seconds, and a Battery That Had One Job On July 12, 2024, postdoctoral researcher Hugo Lassauce was snorkeling above Abore Reef, roughly 9.3 miles (15 km) off the coast of Nouméa, New Caledonia, when three zebra sharks (Stegostoma tigrinum) arranged themselves on the sandy seafloor below him and mated. The … Read more
One Bird. Two Birds. Neither Could Tell. For well over a century, every ornithologist who studied the Giant Hummingbird agreed: one species, Patagona gigas, the largest hummingbird on earth. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May 2024, led by Jessie Williamson at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and senior … Read more
Every barreleye fish ever examined in a laboratory was already missing its most important feature Winteria telescopa was formally described in 1901. Scientists have been collecting, preserving, and dissecting specimens ever since. The anatomical drawings that resulted were accurate, accurate to what arrived in the net. What arrived in the net was missing the most … Read more