Animals
- Animals
Better Than Real: Males prefer flower’s scent to female wasp’s
In an extreme case of sex fakery, an orchid produces oddball chemicals to mimic a female wasp's allure so well that males prefer the flower scent to the real thing.
- Animals
One-Two Poison: Scorpion starts with a cheap shot
A South African scorpion economizes as it stings, injecting a simple mix first, followed by a venom that's more complicated to produce.
- Animals
Retaking Flight: Some insects that didn’t use it didn’t lose it
Stick insects may have done what biologists once thought was impossible: lose something as complicated as a wing in the course of evolution but recover it millions of years later.
- Animals
Stalking Larvae: How an ancient sea creature grows up
Scientists have finally observed living larvae of a sea lily, an ancient marine invertebrate related to starfish.
- Animals
Camelid Comeback
The future of vicuñas in South America and wild camels in Asia hinges on decisions being made now about their management.
- Animals
Homing Lobsters: Fancy navigation, for an invertebrate
Spiny lobsters are the first animals without backbones to pass tests for the orienteering power called true navigation.
- Animals
Ant Traffic Flow: Raiding swarms with few rules avoid gridlock
The 200,000 virtually blind army ants using a single trail to swarm out to a raid and return home with the booty naturally develop three traffic lanes, and a study now shows that simple individual behavior makes the pattern.
- Animals
Ant Traffic Flow: Raiding swarms with few rules avoid gridlock
The 200,000 virtually blind army ants using a single trail to swarm out to a raid and return home with the booty naturally develop three traffic lanes, and a study now shows that simple individual behavior makes the pattern.
- Animals
Frogs Play Tree: Male tunes his call to specific tree hole
Borneo's tree-hole frog may come as close to playing a musical instrument as any wild animal does. [With audio file.]
- Animals
Hawkmoths can still see colors at night
For the first time, scientists have found detailed evidence than an animal—a hawkmoth—can see color by starlight.
- Animals
Mad Deer Disease?
Chronic wasting disease, once just an obscure brain ailment of deer and elk in a small patch of the West, is turning up in new places and raising troubling questions about risks.
- Animals
Ear for Killers: Seals discern foes’ from neighbor-whales’ calls
Harbor seals eavesdrop on killer whales and can tell the harmless neighborhood fish eaters from roving gangs with a taste for fresh seal.
