A toad’s winter refuge could be a biohazard. Some young Yosemite toads emerge from their first winter underground infected with the deadly chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, researchers report…
Category: Animals
Here’s how brain-eating amoebas may infect people
Naegleria amoebas’ exploration skills and crawling behaviors could help explain how the brain-eating variety travel into human brains.
A video of a humpback whale and her dead calf reveals the animals’ bond
Scientists had a rare view of what could be humpback whale mourning when they spotted a female attending the body of a dead calf. The sighting suggests that baleen whales…
Peru’s penguins are on the brink. A super El Niño could make it worse.
The first time I was in Punta San Juan, the desert was flooded with birds. It was 2012, and I was making a short documentary film about the cormorants, pelicans…
Meet the newest living cat species, the first described in 100 years
Genetic testing of two tiny tiger cats from Bolivia revealed a new species, adding a new branch to the feline family tree.
Meet Swiftiephylus, an Australian bug named after Taylor Swift
If you’re down under and you give the right tree a rustle, you might encounter a record-breaking, globally recognized music icon. Or at least a bug named after her. Meet…
These deep-sea spiders give off an otherworldly glow
In the deep, dark Australian Abyss, what’s visible can be scarier than the unseen. There, giant sea spiders with glowing 25-centimeter-long legs may scuttle like disembodied apparitions. Photos of these…
Historical art can hide scientific secrets
In the upper right corner of his 1611 painting “Air,” Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder drew a bat holding a songbird in its jaws. While the painting might have…
Could a whale swallow a person whole?
In the movie Whalefall, a sperm whale accidentally swallows a scuba diver. It’s technically possible, but unlikely to play out in real life.
Winter work shows it really pays to be a smart mountain chickadee
A mountain chickadee waking up in the Sierra Nevada range on a snowy morning has no time to dawdle. Weighing about as much as a pencil, it needs to find…
