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Picture this: You’re hiking through a redwood forest in Northern California, and you stumble upon a towering trunk with tens of thousands of acorns drilled into it. You might think it’s some Satanic ritual, but in reality, it’s the handiwork of an 8-inch-long woodpecker and its kin. In fact, it’s what acorn woodpeckers are best

When you leave a zoo, you physically carry traces of the animals home with you. A pair of new studies, published together in the journal Current Biology, found that by simply filtering air around zoos, researchers could recover genetic material from surrounding animals. They didn’t just detect the captive animals, though—the teams captured environmental DNA‚

AMBER IS a portal to the past. The pieces often capture insects and other tiny organisms in stained-glass mausoleums, providing vivid glimpses of flora and fauna that lived more than 100 million years ago. Each reveals subtle clues about how life on Earth evolved—and where it might be headed. “Because it preserves with such intricacy

What can we learn from a zebrafish’s regenerating tail? Or a termite army’s march into uncharted terrain? Welcome to the fields of ecology and evolution, where researchers observe the natural world to better understand how species are shaped by each other and their environments.  In practice, it takes years of notetaking and analysis to break

For most ant species, being born as a worker ant means you’ll spend your whole life on the clock. But for Harpegnathos saltator (also known as Jerdon’s jumping ants or Indian jumping ants), there’s always hope of ascension. If the colony’s queen dies, workers face their peers in a showdown for a shot at the

On the hunt in swamps, river mouths, and brackish coastal water, archerfish pick off insects with pinpoint precision. They don’t need arrows—instead, they shoot jets of water over a meter at their prey. The streams of water knock bugs out of the sky and are incredibly accurate. Despite their popularity—the fish are common in zoos

The Greater Sac-winged bat, known for clinging to the sides of buildings and feasting on insects, couldn’t seem more different from a human. However, it turns out we have more in common with these three-inch-long flying mammals than meets the eye.  According to a study published today in Science, Greater Sac-winged pups babble just like human

Bats are masters at detecting sound—and a lot of it has to do with the mechanics and structure of those adorably large ears. A set of unique inner ear features may explain how one group of bats evolved the sophisticated echolocation strategies that have allowed them to thrive on every continent except Antarctica, scientists report