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…
Category: Animals
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…
Here’s how boa constrictors squeeze their dinner without suffocating themselves
The boa constrictor’s choke hold is an iconic animal attack. By coiling around its prey, a snake can squeeze the life out of a victim in mere minutes before gulping…
Lithium mining may be putting some flamingos in Chile at risk
Flamingos may be a kind of canary in the coal mine when it comes to warning of a hidden cost of green technologies. Lithium mining appears to be a major…
A new saber-toothed mammal was among the first hypercarnivores
Nearly 42 million years ago, a fearsome bobcat-sized creature prowled the forests of what is now San Diego. Unlike most animals at the time, it was a hypercarnivore, built to…
How to make irresistible traps for Asian giant hornets using sex
Male Asian giant hornets captivated by the chemical signals of a ready-to-mate queen could one day find themselves stuck in a trap instead. In a new study, scientists identified three…
