To pollinate the food we eat and the flowers in our gardens, insects like bees and butterflies rely on a keen sense of smell. “Our sense of smell is terrible compared to most other organisms,” says Robbie Girling, an associate professor of agroecology at the University of Reading in the UK. “[Pollinators] really use odors
When it comes to bat species, Nathusias’ pipistrelle may appear to be relatively unassuming. Found across Europe, it’s about as small as a common pipistrelle, measuring under 2 inches long and weighing only 3 to 8 grams. But even with its petite size, the species can deftly migrate more than 600 miles in a season.
The subterranean fungi known as truffles are best known as human delicacy, often sniffed out with the help of trained pigs or dogs. But it turns out these shrooms are popular outside the mammalian world, too: two common birds in Patagonia are truffle hounds in their own right, according to a new study in Current
Having sturdy jaws is essential for the small marine creatures known as bloodworms. The worms, which grow to about 15 inches in length, spend their lives burrowing through the muddy seafloor and hunting small crustaceans, molluscs, and other worms. “They need their jaws to kill the more active prey,” says Herbert Waite, a marine biochemist
In 2013, smugglers in São Paulo were all set to ship a huge cache of fossils out of the Santos Harbor, but before they could, local police swooped in and recovered the contraband. Among the piles of specimens were six large slabs of limestone. Paleontologists finally got their hands on the slabs in 2016, when
As July passes into August, the tips of broadleaf tree branches all around the mid-Atlantic will come alive with the new generation of Brood X cicadas. A single female cicada can lay up to 600 eggs over several different nests—and though not all of them survive, hundreds of millions will hatch into miniscule nymphs, only
This post has been updated. It was originally published on March 26, 2021. If you live east of the American Rockies, you’re probably used to seeing Northern cardinals zooming around in all four seasons. That’s right, baby—this species sticks around for the toughest weather, unlike other songbirds that only show up in spring and summer.
Despite federal and provincial recovery efforts, caribou herds have been declining rapidly across Canada. The country has lost a dozen herds within the last two decades, and many others are at the brink of extirpation. But the Klinse-Za mountain caribou in British Columbia has broken from the trend. A recent study published in the journal
CATERPILLARS ARE masters of deception. Some imitate sticks and leaves to avoid becoming lunch. Others flash bright colors to convey their toxic nature. A few even wave pumped-up limbs to frighten foes. Despite such impressive maneuvers, humans tend to overlook these wee wonders. But they rarely escape the eye of Samuel Jaffe, an entomologist who’s
The story of all land animals begins with a squat-limbed, long-bodied swamp fish. Sometime in the steamy mid-Devonian, a family of those fish followed plants and bugs onto land and became the first tetrapods, or four-legged vertebrates. But the fossil record from 390 million years ago is so sparse that it’s hard to find clues
