Moss Has a Fungal Partner
Mosses were supposed to be the only land plants without fungal partners. Scientists just found fungi living inside their tissue.
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.
Single-Celled Cannibal Eats Its Own Clones
One microbe. One cell. Same DNA as every relative it's about to eat.
Deep Sea Whale Necropolis Is Five Million Years Old
Nearly 500 whale fossils, a new species named after the trench, and bone-eating worms thriving 7 kilometers down. What else has been accumulating in the dark?
Zombie Squirrel of the Pleistocene Feasted on Mammoth Meat
Permafrost-preserved squirrel feces just rewrote what we thought we knew about Ice Age ecosystems. What else hides in those frozen burrows?
Bees Have a Water Escape Plan. Pesticides Dampen Their Swimming Skills.
Bees use visual contrast to swim toward shore. So what happens when a common pesticide erases that ability entirely?
A Katydid's Disguise Is Also Its Pickup Line
Survival and sex appeal are supposed to be a tradeoff. One katydid species apparently didn't get that memo. What happens when your disguise is also your best pickup line?
Meet Balrog The Deep Cave Cricket
No natural caves. A 82 foot deep man-made tunnel. Thirty-seven insects clinging to the walls, named to honor Tolkien.
Bomb Fish
Flatfish pulled from the North Sea are turning up with cancer in their tissue. The cause isn't a mystery. It's TNT. And the casings holding it in are still corroding.
Tiny Wrens Turn Giant on Scottish Isles
Four isolated island populations of wrens evolved independently. Same winds, same weather, so why are some wrens ending up twice the size of their mainland relatives?
A New Snake Species Was Named "Unbelievable." The Taxonomists Were Not Wrong.
A newly described snake in China has a tail that looks exactly like its own head. That's not even the most surprising thing about how scientists found it.
Belugas Pass the Mirror Test. The Mirror Test Has a Problem.
Two belugas. One mirror. Twenty-five years of unanalyzed footage. And now a debate about whether the test itself knows what it's testing.
A Tadpole Tail Turns Orange When a Dragonfly Shows Up
The tadpole, like Pooh, is of very little brain. So how does it know exactly which predator is watching and which body part to sacrifice?
The Wolves of Chernobyl Are Evolving Resistance to Cancer
Wolves in a radioactive no-man's land are thriving at seven times normal density. Their genomes show cancer-resistance adaptations no lab has ever produced.
When the World Was on Fire, Some Plants Decided to Work the Night Shift
They had no bark, no flowers, no seeds. But 252 million years ago, these ancient plants rewired their photosynthesis and inherited a scorched Earth. How did they know?
Rice Death Trap Spikes Pests
Rice plants have been luring caterpillars to their death. Once again, nature is schooling us on how to handle pests.
Sulfur Mollies Battle as One Body. Birds Calculate New Angles of Attack.
No individual fish makes the decision to dart; the entire shoal does. Birds hunting them developed work arounds. What does collective intelligence look like with no central brain?
Bird Retinas Contain No Blood Vessels. They Run on Sugar Instead.
The pecten oculi, a comb-like structure in bird eyes studied since the 1600s, is inspiring new research that could help stroke recovery.
This Bug Has a Passenger. The Passenger Is Flying the Bug.
A parasite spends its larval life hidden inside a stink bug. When it's time to leave, the host opens a door it has never opened before.