Biology

Jul 4th, 2025 - Thirty‑five millennia may sound like a long time, yet for a mammal, it is practically yesterday. A new study uses whole‑genome data to show that the Norwegian lemming, Lemmus lemmus , split from its Siberian cousin only about 35,000 years ago. "The Norwegian lemming is a key ecological species in the Fennoscandian tundra. Among other things, it serves as primary food for many predator species , including some threatened ones such as the Arctic fox," said David Díez del ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - Dodging fire-ants, snakes and millions of nighttime creepy-crawlies, a group of trekkers advances through the humid Bornean rainforest, scanning with flashlights for some of the jungle's most unlikely stars: frogs. "There's another one! And it's massive," British tourist Lauren Heywood exclaimed as she spotted the telltale reflective glint off a pair of blinking eyes, seemingly waiting to be photographed by admirers. "Frogging", or the hunt for the exotic amphibians that call the rainforest ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - Tropical greenery once blanketed the supercontinent of Pangea, recycling carbon and regulating climate. Then, 252 million years ago, those forests collapsed – and with them, Earth's primary brake on rising CO2. A new study led by researchers at the University of Leeds and China University of Geosciences shows that the disappearance of lush low-latitude vegetation after the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction . This collapse triggered a climate feedback so powerful that ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - A pair of orcas have been caught 'kissing' in the wild for the first time during a chance encounter with a group of citizen scientists off the coast of Norway. A video taken by the group shows the pair nosing up together and 'tongue nibbling', where one whale gently mouths the other's tongue. While this kind of behaviour has been seen in captivity before, it's the first time animals free-roaming in the wild have been observed doing it. The footage was taken when the orcas were just 10 to 15m ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - , Phys.org A study by Dr. Martin Ebert and Dr. Martina Kölbl-Ebert examined the remains of some 4,200 Tharsis fossil specimens. They found that some of these fish, all of which were subadults, would occasionally attempt to or accidentally swallow belemnites (squid-like cephalopods), leading to the Tharsis choking to death. The work is in the journal Scientific Reports . The Tharsis fish is an extinct genus of late Jurassic fish which is commonly found in the marine fossil deposits of the ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - Poke around a British rockpool and you may spot a shell shuffling over the sand. Inside is a hermit crab – an animal that spends much of its life testing the outside world before deciding whether it is safe to venture forth. New research from the University of Plymouth reveals that the speed of that decision, a trait biologists call boldness, hinges on a crab's built-in sensory toolkit. The study focuses on microscopic hair-like structures called sensilla that pepper the claws of Pagurus ... [Read More]

Jul 3rd, 2025 - New research uncovers a "fat factory" run by Neanderthals 125,000 years ago, revealing they planned and processed bone grease on a scale and with a complexity long thought unique to our own species. Study: Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago . Image Credit: Adobe Firely In a recent study published in the journal Science Advances , researchers and archaeologists present and elucidate data from Neumark-Nord (Germany), comprising the remains of bones ... [Read More]

Jul 3rd, 2025 - How a Parasitic Bird With No Parents Learns What Species It Is Cowbird mothers abandon their eggs in the nests of other bird species, but the chicks somehow manage to find their flock and learn what they really are. In P.D. Eastman's classic picture book "Are You My Mother?" a baby bird hatches alone and goes on a quest. It asks a cow, a dog, and even an excavator whether they might be its mother. Finally, the chick and its true mom reunite. In nature, cowbirds also hatch without their parents ... [Read More]

Jul 2nd, 2025 - Saint Helena 's trio of peaks pierce through a sea of cloud, six hours after our flight departs South Africa—a blink of time compared to the six-day sea voyage required until 2017. Located 2,000 kilometers from the continent, and almost halfway to Brazil, this shard of basalt—often grouped with its sister islands, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, which lie only marginally closer—forms one of the most isolated territories on Earth. What secrets would Saint Helena reveal in the ... [Read More]

Jul 2nd, 2025 - Sharks have a reputation for being vicious apex predators and it turns out they don't even pretend to be nice during mating with each other. Instead of hugs and snuggles, sharks use their teeth in brutal ways, experts say. An example surfaced the final week of June, when the Oregon-based Sulikowski Shark and Research a female blue shark Her skin was laced with long gashes, photos show. "In many shark species, mating can leave a mark — literally," the lab wrote in a July 1 Facebook post. ... [Read More]

Jul 2nd, 2025 - By It's midnight in a pitch-dark parking lot. Trying to unlock your car, you fumble and drop the keys. You squat down and run your hand across the invisible pavement. To the left, you feel a firm, rubbery tire. Reversing course, you pass over jagged pebbles and papery leaves. Finally your fingers discover—and instantly close around—a notched piece of metal. This kind of tactile exploration may be the closest we can get to imagining the experience of dolphin echolocation , say the ... [Read More]

Jul 2nd, 2025 - When thinking about fossils, we often picture dinosaurs. But reefs can also hold an ancient history. Tiny fish bones and shark scales also become fossils in these habitats, quietly preserving the story of ancient oceans. A striking study from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute ( STRI ) has now revealed how humans disrupted Caribbean reefs in the past. Scientists analyzed fossilized coral reefs from Panama's Bocas del Toro and the Dominican Republic. These reefs, exposed and ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - Scientists recorded 34 times orcas offered prey to humans over 20 years. Jared Towers was standing aboard a research boat off the coast of Alert Bay in British Columbia, watching a pod of killer whales feast on seabirds. Then something strange happened. A young female orca named Akela surfaced with a limp bird in her jaws. She swam directly to Towers, dropped the bird in front of him, and lingered. Her younger brother, Quiver, soon followed suit. Both whales watched. Then, they picked up the ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - What can a tiny wasp with a rather gruesome parasitic life cycle teach us about evolution, behavior and human developmental diseases? In a new paper, researchers led by István Mikó and Holly Hoag at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) suggest that it may be a lot. The research team took a thorough three-dimensional look at four species of Nasonia wasps. The paper, on the cover of the Journal of Insect Science , describes subtle structural differences in the lower head regions ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - Light pollution is a growing concern for the wellbeing of different animal species . Now researchers have found that artificial light is negatively impacting the brains of social birds. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , focused on the zebra finch ( Taeniopygia guttata ) – a small bird found across Australia and islands of Indonesia. Zebra finches are a "model organism" widely used in studies in various scientific fields. Artificial light at night (ALAN) is ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - Scientists have long sought to understand why sea spiders keep some of their most important organs in their legs. The knotty sea spider has a fundamental physical difference from land-based spiders: It has no abdomen. Instead, it stashes its reproductive, digestive and respiratory organs in its legs. This peculiarity, common among all sea spiders , intrigues evolutionary biologists. How did this abdomen-free lifestyle get started? In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal BMC Biology, ... [Read More]