“Crypsis,” as you should all know by now, is just a fancy scientific word for “camouflage.” Often cryptic animals will hide from predators by mimicking their background, but here’s a case in which one part of an animal mimics the other. Have a look first and see if you can figure out what’s going on. […]
No, it’s not a car but a sleek black cat. This video, from NBC News, tells the story of a moggie who found its way home over a distance of eight miles after the family was relocated in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Now I read this kind of story frequently—frequently enough that I think […]
Our reader/photographer in the beautiful wilds of Idaho has been monitoring a nest of bald eagles (two chicks, I believe), and sent these photos of one parent taking wing:
Reader Richard, who lives near Cape Town, South Africa, sent some photos he took of a malachite sunbird, and noted this: A Nectarinia famosa visits our garden each year when these flowers emerge. Sunbirds, including this species, are the Old World equivalent of hummingbirds: an example of convergent evolution. They make their living, like hummingbirds, […]
Clearly, the advantage here is to the stoat. Look how fast that damn thing is! A stoat is another name for the short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea), which, when it turns white in winter, is known as the ermine. This play behavior prepares the young stoat for its life as a vicious predator. To see that […]
Courtesy of alert reader QOS., I learned about an old bit of research from 2005, reported in the Harvard Gazette, purporting to answer the question above—but probably not succeeding. But let’s leave that aside for the nonce and learn a bit about narwhals. For reasons that elude me, they seem to have become the iconic […]
The red panda (Ailurus fulgens, or “shining cat” in Latin) is a denizen of the same bamboo forests of China that harbor the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, meaning “black and white cat-foot”). They also subsist largely on bamboo leaves, though they’re a bit more omnivorous than their larger relative. Although it’s called the “lesser panda”, […]
I love raccoons (Procyon lotor): they’re wily, cute, and fiercely smart. I used to have one who regularly came through the cat door of my old crib and ate the cat food—but not before washing it in the cat’s water bowl. I first realized something was amiss when I kept finding dirt in the water […]
Well, at least some of them. Matthew, our resident author, just called my attention to this video showing a sea anemone swimming to avoid predation. Although sea anemones are in the phylum Cnidaria along with jellyfish and box jellies, I’ve always thought of them as completely sessile. Well, some of them are, but not all. […]
Zefrank 1 has come up with another “true facts” video, this time about the duck. Warning: since it deals largely with sexual organs and coitus in ducks, you might not want to show this to your kids. But it does make some good points about sexually antagonistic selection, and so constitutes a science lesson rather […]
