When Daniella Chusy, currently at Indiana University, U.S., learned that many captive elephants were thought to be overweight and that their low birth rates suggested that they may be facing a fertility crisis, she began ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 27, 2021
0
7
Groping around in your bag for your keys can be a daily ordeal. I'm not going to list the catalogue of junk in my bag, but I can distinguish every article by touch. Our fingertips are exquisitely engineered, deftly detecting ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 4, 2020
0
4
The blue whale might be one of the most enigmatic creatures on the planet, but the true megastars of the diving world are Cuvier's beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris). They are capable of reaching depths of almost 3000 m, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 24, 2020
0
445
Southern elephant seal mothers have only one thing on their mind after weeks marooned on beaches nursing their pups: getting back into the ocean to feast on lantern fish and squid. Yet, no one was sure how the ravenous predators ...
Plants & Animals
May 20, 2020
1
5
Feathers are amazing evolutionary innovations that allowed birds to conquer the sky. A study led by Matthew Towers (University of Sheffield, UK) and Marian Ros (University of Cantabria, Spain) and published in the journal ...
Plants & Animals
May 6, 2020
0
57
Mantis shrimp (Squilla mantis) don't take kindly to captivity. "They have a general baseline of being angry," chuckles Kate Feller, currently at the University of Minnesota, USA, recalling how the contrary stomatopods are ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 25, 2020
0
15
Spread across the globe, from Central and South America to Japan, non-human primates have a toehold that almost spans the tropics, but they never made it to Australia. Christofer Clemente, from the University of the Sunshine ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 17, 2019
0
2
Southeast Asia is a riot of colour and biodiversity. Boasting luxuriant rainforest and thousands of insects and mammals, the region is ripe for a biologist in search of inspiration. But when James Croft, then at Edith Cowan ...
Other
Dec 4, 2019
0
109
According to Noël Coward, mad dogs and Englishmen are the only creatures that go out in the midday sun, but Harald Wolf from the University of Ulm, Germany, would add another animal: Saharan silver ants (Cataglyphis bombycina). ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 16, 2019
3
925
Start thinking about numbers and they can become large very quickly. The diameter of the universe is about 8.8×1023 km and the largest number with a name—googolplex, 1010100—outranks it enormously. Although that colossal ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 10, 2019
4
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