Monarch butterflies laid three times as many eggs on aphid-free tropical milkweed as they did on plants crawling with oleander aphids, according to a nursery study out of the University of Florida published in PLOS ONE in July 2023. Bernadette Mach, William Long, Jaret Daniels and Adam Dale ran the experiment in Gainesville, Florida: one … Read more
One Ear, Two Worlds Seals hear equally well in air and underwater. Not “pretty good” in both, not “fine on land and passable at sea”: equally well, according to a study led by Dr. James Rule of the Natural History Museum in London and Monash University, with Dr. Natalie Cooper of the Natural History Museum, … Read more
A Jawbone Older Than Anyone Was Ready to Prove A dog jawbone pulled out of Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England, sometime between 1927 and 1931 belonged to an animal alive roughly 14,300 years ago. A second jawbone, from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, is older still: about 15,800 years ago. Both have now had their whole genomes … Read more
Ten Thousand Sounds, Zero Audience A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) living completely alone in a Danish channel was recorded making 10,833 separate sounds over 69 days, between December 8, 2022, and February 14, 2023. The count comes from a study led by cetacean biologist Olga Filatova of the University of Southern Denmark, published in the … Read more
Raise an Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) chick by hand instead of by wild parents, and it will fly worse on its first trip south. Track it a second time, and you cannot tell it apart from a bird that never spent a day in captivity. Raised by Hand, Flies Like It A team from Ben-Gurion … Read more
The Bite You Didn’t See Coming Half the trained mosquitoes in this study flew straight past a bare hand and landed on one coated in DEET, the chemical that’s supposed to send them the other way. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology on May 15, 2026, Claudio R. Lazzari and four … Read more
The organ that turned out to be a side door Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) have an organ humans and other mammals simply don’t: the bursa of Fabricius, a pouch near the tail end of the gut. It was identified as the birthplace of B cells, the white blood cells that produce antibodies, so long ago … Read more
The Fact: A Mummy That Shouldn’t Exist A mummified cub of Homotherium latidens, the scimitar-toothed cat, has come out of Siberian permafrost with its fur, muscle, and paws still on it. Radiocarbon dating places the cub somewhere between 31,808 and 37,019 years old, a range the team that studied it treats as the honest answer … Read more
HEADLINE: New monkey species Colobus congoensis identified from 114 photos, no specimen ARTICLE: Between 2018 and 2022, patrol teams working the rainforest between the Lomami and Congo (Lualaba) rivers in east-central Democratic Republic of Congo photographed the same unfamiliar monkey 114 times. Nobody ever trapped one. Nobody ever brought one into a lab. The entire … Read more
3,300 Feet Off Florida, Something That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There On June 30, 2019, a jellyfish the size of a shot glass came up in a suction sampler off the Florida coast, pulled from 3,300 feet (999 meters) above the Blake Escarpment by the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer, working NOAA’s Windows to … Read more