It's Alive
- Life
These snails give live birth, and it’s the babies that may do the labor
Protecting eggs in mom’s body may have given rough periwinkle snails an advantage over egg-laying cousins, letting them spread to far more coastline.
- Life
‘Polyester bees’ brew beer-scented baby food in plastic cribs
Ptiloglossa bees’ baby food gets its boozy fragrance from fermentation by mysteriously selected microbes.
- Animals
After eons of isolation, these desert fish flub social cues
Pahrump poolfish flunked a fear test, but maybe they’re scared of other things.
- Plants
These flowers lure pollinators to their deaths. There’s a new twist on how
Some jack-in-the-pulpit plants may use sex to lure pollinators. That's confusing for male fungus gnats — and deadly.
- Animals
Invasive jorō spiders get huge and flashy — if they’re female
Taking the pulse (literally) of female jorō spiders hints that the arachnid might push farther north than a relative that has stayed put in the South.
- Plants
Rats with poisonous hairdos live surprisingly sociable private lives
Deadly, swaggering rodents purr and snuggle when they’re with mates and young.
- Animals
A face mask may turn up a male wrinkle-faced bat’s sex appeal
The first-ever scientific observations of a wrinkle-faced bat’s courtship shows that, when flirting, the males raise their white furry face coverings.
- Plants
This parasitic plant consists of just flashy flowers and creepy suckers
With only four known species, Langsdorffia are thieves stripped down to their essentials.
- Life
Algae use flagella to trot, gallop and move with gaits all their own
Single-celled microalgae, with no brains, can coordinate their “limbs” into a trot or fancier gait.
- Animals
Texas has its own rodeo ant queens
New species of rodeo ants, riding on the backs of bigger ants, turned up in Austin, Texas.
- Life
Saharan silver ants are the world’s fastest despite relatively short legs
Saharan silver ants can hit speeds of 108 times their body length per second.
- Plants
Why tumbleweeds may be more science fiction than Old West
A tumbleweed is just a maternal plant corpse giving her living seeds a chance at a good life somewhere new.
