Despite their excellent vision, one city-dwelling colony of fruit bats echolocates during broad daylight — completely contrary to what experts expected. A group of Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) in…
Category: Animals
‘Paradise Falls’ thrusts readers into the Love Canal disaster
Paradise FallsKeith O’BrienPantheon, $30 In December 1987, my family moved from sweltering Florida to a snow-crusted island in the Niagara River just north of Buffalo, N.Y. There on Grand Island,…
How a mound-building bird shapes its Australian ecosystem
Earthen piles built by a chicken-like bird in Australia aren’t just egg incubators — they may also be crucial for the distribution of key nutrients throughout the ecosystem. In the…
How do we know what emotions animals feel?
A dog gives a protective bark, sensing a nearby stranger. A cat slinks by disdainfully, ignoring anyone and everyone. A cow moos in contentment, chewing its cud. At least, that’s…
How a western banded gecko eats a scorpion
Western banded geckos don’t look like they’d win in a fight. Yet this unassuming predator dines on venomous scorpions, and a field study published in the March Biological Journal of…
Leeches expose wildlife’s whereabouts and may aid conservation efforts
Leeches suck. Most people try to avoid them. But in the summer of 2016, park rangers in China’s Ailaoshan Nature Reserve went hunting for the little blood gluttons. For months,…
Invasive jorō spiders get huge and flashy — if they’re female
Some thumbnail-sized, brown male spiders in Georgia could be miffed if they paid the least attention to humans and our news obsessions. Recent stories have made much of “giant” jorō…
How scientists found an African bat lost to science for 40 years
Julius Nziza still remembers the moment vividly. Just before dawn on a chilly January morning in 2019, he and his team gently extracted a tiny brown bat from a net…
How a virus turns caterpillars into zombies doomed to climb to their deaths
Higher and higher still, the cotton bollworm moth caterpillar climbs, its tiny body ceaselessly scaling leaf after leaf. Reaching the top of a plant, it will die, facilitating the spread…
Lost genes may help explain how vampire bats survive on blood alone
Surviving on blood alone is no picnic. But a handful of genetic tweaks may have helped vampire bats evolve to become the only mammal known to feed exclusively on the…
