City Birds Bolt Sooner When a Woman Walks Up
The researchers matched everything they could think of. Height, build, clothing, hair. The birds still found a way to tell them apart, and nobody is sure how.
Field Notes
Retired conservation biologist in Victoria, BC, and virtual contributor to YGBFKM. Life list: nearly 3,000 species. Known at dinner parties for correcting people about poison vs. venom. Has used exclamation points three times in eleven years.
This Microbe Ditched So Many Genes It Can't Feed Itself
It cannot feed itself, yet it may still count as a cell of its own. One-fourth of its DNA does a job nobody has figured out.
An Amphibian’s Poison Glows Blue-Green
A blacklight on a rainy road in Spain gave it away. The same compound runs through the animal's blood, and nobody could identify it.
Some Sperm Don't Race. They Row as a Crew.
One farm pest seals every sperm cell inside its own thick casing. The researchers could not say how those cells move at all.
A Healing Touch Revives Coral
The same rescue that saves one bleached coral turns hostile the moment the donor is a genetic stranger. And the fastest part of the recovery went unexplained.
Bacteria Crossed Continents With Us. Industrialization Derailed the Journey.
Some gut bacteria may have ridden along on humanity's longest walk. Why are so many of them missing from the people reading this?
Jonathan Is 194. His Cellular Power Switches Look Barely Used.
Age scrambles the controls that keep cells powered. In one very old reptile, they stayed neat, and nobody can say how he managed it.
Golden Trees Grow From a Carpet of Living Stars
The coral's own DNA could not agree on who its relatives are. The answer that finally won points to a family it barely resembles.
The Mantis Grip Evolved at Least Seven Times. It Kept Coming Out Different.
Same job, same hinge, same snap. So why did six insect lineages that invented this hunting trick each build it to their own measurements?
Bent Trees With No Sense of Up Straightened Themselves
Take away gravity and the direction of light, and a bent tree still has one sense left. For weeks, that was all these trees had to go on.
Beak Length Changed Faster Than Natural Selection Allows
Beaks on one campus swung up and back at a pace near the top of 2,400 documented cases, yet no population crash was reported. What moved them?
One Gentoo Penguin Walked Into a Genome Sequencer. Four Came Out.
No new penguin species had been named in more than 100 years. Then biologists read the DNA of a bird everyone thought they already knew.
Cannibal Chicks: The Hoopoe Hatches a Spare
Researchers slipped one extra late-hatching egg into hoopoe nests. That chick never fledged, and the nest raised nearly two more birds anyway.
This Frog Outsourced Its Defense Against a Species-Killing Fungus
One frog survives a fungus that has wiped out whole species. Another, tested the same way, doesn't. The difference is living on their skin.
A Labrador-Sized Scorpion Once Roamed Britain
The fossils sat in London for 155 years, classified as the wrong animal entirely. What they actually were is considerably more alarming.
Demon Fish Overlooked for 40 Years
Scientists had been crawling through this Alabama cave monthly since the 1990s. Whatever lived in the deeper pools apparently knew the schedule.
A Living Circuit Board Just Ran Calculations Inside a Petri Dish
Five bacterial strains. Two transistor types. One living circuit board doing arithmetic in a petri dish. What gets built when biology becomes the hardware?
Rock-Eating Organisms Thrive Beneath the Great Lakes
689 fungal species have been quietly eating rock 1,000 feet underground for 11,000 years. What else is down there that we haven't thought to look for?