Animals
- Animals
Fox Selection: Bottleneck survivors show surprising variety
Foxes native to a California island—famous for the least genetic diversity ever reported in a sexually reproducing animal—have some variation after all.
- Animals
Feral breed lacks domestic dogs’ skill
Wild dogs that haven't lived with people for 5,000 years share little of the capacity of their domesticated cousins for interpreting human gestures.
- Animals
Flesh Eaters: Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young
A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects carrion from carcasses has an unexpected taste for live, abandoned wasp young.
- Animals
How blind mole rats find their way home
The blind mole rat is the first animal discovered to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a magnetic compass.
- Animals
Where’d I Put That?
Birds that hide and recover thousands of separate caches of seeds have become a model for investigating how animals' minds work.
- Animals
Fish in the dark still size up mates
Female cave fish still have their ancestral preference for a large male, even though it's too dark to see him.
- Animals
Vanishing Vultures: Bird deaths linked to vet-drug residues
The recent puzzling crash in vulture populations in Pakistan comes not from some new disease but from exposure to veterinary drug residues in livestock carcasses.
- Animals
Cheap Taste? Bowerbirds go for bargain decor
When male spotted bowerbirds collect sticks and other doodads to wow females, they don't search for the rare showpiece but go for the cheap trinket.
- Animals
Whale Haunt: Nursing, feeding spot found off south Chile
A survey along the coast of southern Chile has turned up a previously undocumented blue whale hangout that seems to be a feeding ground.
- Animals
Not-So-Great Hunter: Said the spider to the fly—Eek! I’m outta here
The poisonous brown recluse spider may turn out not to be a fearsome hunter so much as a scavenger.
- Animals
First Impressions: Early view biases spider’s mate choice
In a new wrinkle on how females develop their tastes in males, a test has found that young female wolf spiders that see a male's courtship display grow up with a preference for that look in mates.
- Animals
Your Spiral or Mine? Snail gene reverses coil, makes new species
A snail with a shell spiraling to the right can't mate readily with a lefty, so changes in the single gene that controls shell direction have created new snail species.
