Mirrors are tricky. Even humans aren’t born with an intuitive understanding of them; we have to learn how they work. Now, scientists have discovered that the California two-spot octopus (Octopus…
Category: Animals
A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting
Last fall, scientists documented the greater noctule bat snatching songbirds out of the air for a snack. But while this was a finding relatively new to science, a Renaissance artist…
A whopping 14 million species of insects — or more — may roam Earth
A new estimate of insect diversity suggests there are at least 14 million to 20 million species buzzing and crawling around the globe. That’s double or triple other recent estimates,…
Giant, deep-sea roly-polies steal a gene to endure starvation
A kilometer down in the ocean, football-sized roly-polies slowly clamber along the seafloor. Their metabolism is so slow that they can go years between meals. Now, researchers have found a…
The New World screwworm has returned to the U.S. Now what?
Flesh-eating, hooked-mouth maggots have wriggled their way back into the United States. As of June 21, 15 cases of New World screwworm have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico in cows, goats, sheep and even…
Sea cucumbers harbor ‘zombie’ tissues that won’t die
There’s no such thing as Thing, the disembodied hand that loyally skitters around the fictional Addams Family in the popular television series Wednesday. But at least one species of sea…
A textbook assumption about early land vertebrates may be wrong
New fossil evidence is overturning a long-held assumption about how vertebrates first transitioned from water to land. The hatchlings of three different animals related to the earliest land-goers show that…
A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
WASHINGTON — Microbiologists are used to looking at gross pictures and hearing scary statistics. So when a moderator of a session on emerging fungal infections at the ASM Microbe meeting…
How real is the Cyclops in ‘The Odyssey’?
The iconic one-eyed monster coming to movie screens in July in The Odyssey might have more in common with tiny water critters than with humans.
Songs prep the brains of finches yet to hatch for a hot world
Zebra finches sing their young into biological preparedness for hot weather, all before they even leave the egg. As the heat punishes sun-crisped Australian woodlands, the adult birds make a…
