On a hot day in a remote area of southern Arizona last month, firefighters donned protective helmets and suits, sealed the openings around their wrists and ankles with duct tape, and cautiously approached a man lying face down on the ground. A layer of stinging bees blanketed his body. Spent stingers riddled the few patches…
The great bowerbirds of northern Australia are well-known for their elaborate tunnels, known as bowers. Pieced together for months by the males, these bowers act as decadent thrones for females to sit in while they watch the males’ dramatic mating display of shakes, swerves and delicate offerings. Male great bowerbirds spend most of the year…
In the balmy cloud forests of Central and South America, nightfall is marked by operatic calls of Alston’s singing mouse, a small, short-tailed rodent famous for its courteous communication. These minuscule mice, each of which weighs less than a lightbulb, sing unique, chirp-filled songs to one another that can last as long as 16 seconds….
By watching their peers, dolphins learn to capture fish in empty conch shells, then ferry the shells up to the water’s surface in order to eat. Octopuses can master experimental tasks by watching their tankmates in the laboratory. Crows follow the cues of others in their flock to attack specific humans who have harassed fellow…
A very large sea lion is drawing onlookers to a pier popular among both other sea lions and tourists in San Francisco, wowing visitors and catapulting him to online fame. “POV: You pull up to the gym and see that one guy who’s just built different,” reads the caption on one video of the sea…
In the turquoise waters off La Ventana, a sleepy coastal town on Mexico’s Baja peninsula, Claudio Rios, 41, monitored the radio of a fishing boat. It was late March. His eyes scanned the horizon, one hand loose on the wheel as the Sea of Cortez swayed beneath him. “It smells like orcas,” he said: pungent…
Desmond Morris, an English zoologist who used observation, logic and insight to contend in his immensely popular 1967 book, “The Naked Ape,” that humanity, stripped of civilized veneer, is just another species of ape, died on Sunday near Dublin. He was 98. His death, at a hospital in the town of Naas, was confirmed by…
In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust. The new research, published in Current Biology, is an important addition to…
In 2022, Jack Brand, an environmental toxicologist, loaded a bunch of Swedish fish with cocaine. He wasn’t trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life; he wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal drug. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of waterways…
