Nature

259 nature ideas, each one credited to the book, paper or primary source it comes from. Free to read and swipe on Savvy.

• Forests trade resources through underground fungal networks

  Suzanne Simard's field experiments showed carbon flowing between different tree species through shared mycorrhizal fungi — with older 'hub' trees connected to dozens of others. A f…

  — Suzanne Simard et al., Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field

• Honey found in ancient Egyptian tombs was still edible

  Archaeologists have recovered pots of honey thousands of years old that remain perfectly preserved. Honey's low moisture, high acidity and trace hydrogen peroxide make it nearly im…

  — Natasha Geiling, Smithsonian Magazine, The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life

• Seeing Earth from space rewires astronauts' minds

  Astronauts consistently report a cognitive shift when they see Earth as a single, borderless, fragile sphere — a sudden visceral sense that the divisions we fight over are invisibl…

  — Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution

• One jellyfish species can reverse its own ageing and start life over

  Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish barely 4.5mm across, can respond to injury or starvation by reverting its adult cells back into an earlier polyp stage — biologically restarting it…

  — Stefano Piraino et al., Reversing the Life Cycle: Medusae Transforming into Polyps and Cell Transdifferentiation in Turritopsis nutricula

• A crow bent a piece of wire into a hook to solve a puzzle no one taught her

  In 2002, researchers studying New Caledonian crows watched one named Betty spontaneously bend a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube — a tool she had never seen a…

  — Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell & Alex Kacelnik, Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows

• This wrinkly rodent barely ages and almost never gets cancer

  Naked mole rats live up to 30 years — roughly ten times longer than similarly sized rodents — while showing little decline in health, fertility or metabolism as they age. Their tis…

  — Xiao Tian, Andrei Seluanov & Vera Gorbunova et al., High-molecular-mass Hyaluronan Mediates the Cancer Resistance of the Naked Mole Rat

• Electric eels can leap out of the water to shock a threat directly

  Electric eels don't just shock underwater — when a predator or a person approaches, an eel can rise up and press its chin against the threat, delivering a more concentrated jolt ou…

  — Kenneth Catania, Electric Eels Concentrate Their Electric Field to Enhance the Effectiveness of Shocking Behavior

• Mantis shrimp see the world with 4x more colour receptors than you

  Human eyes have four types of photoreceptor. Mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16, tuned across ultraviolet, visible and polarised light — an eye that looks, on paper, like the bes…

  — Hanne Thoen et al., A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp

• A shrimp's claw snap creates a bubble that briefly flashes with light

  The pistol shrimp's oversized claw snaps shut so fast it fires a jet of water that collapses into a cavitation bubble, loud enough to stun or kill small prey. As the bubble collaps…

  — Michel Versluis, Barbara Schmitz, Detlef Lohse et al., How Snapping Shrimp Snap: Through Cavitating Bubbles

• This shark can live for over 300 years

  Greenland sharks grow so slowly that scientists couldn't age them by normal methods, so a 2016 study radiocarbon-dated proteins locked in the crystalline lens of their eyes instead…

  — Julius Nielsen et al., Eye Lens Radiocarbon Reveals Centuries of Longevity in the Greenland Shark

• A brainless yellow slime mold can solve a maze

  Physarum polycephalum has no brain, no neurons, and is a single sprawling cell — yet when researchers placed food at two exits of a maze, it retracted from every dead end and left …

  — Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ágota Tóth, Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism

• This salamander can regrow an entire limb, jaw, or piece of its own brain

  Axolotls can lose a leg, tail or even sections of heart and brain tissue and simply regrow them — complete with bone, muscle, nerve and skin, and without scarring. Unlike most anim…

  — Susan V. Bryant & David M. Gardiner, Retinoic acid, local cell-cell interactions, and pattern formation in vertebrate limbs

• A beetle mixes two chemicals inside its own body to fire a boiling, corrosive spray

  When threatened, a bombardier beetle combines hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide in an internal reaction chamber, triggering a reaction that heats the mixture near boiling and bla…

  — Thomas Eisner, For Love of Insects

• This fish's blood is colourless because it has no red blood cells at all

  Antarctic icefish are the only known vertebrates that survive without haemoglobin, the protein that makes blood red and carries oxygen in nearly every other animal. In the oxygen-r…

  — Standard ichthyological accounts, Channichthyidae (crocodile icefish)

• A fungus hijacks an ant's brain, marches it to its death, then sprouts from its head

  Spores of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infect carpenter ants, and over about a week the fungus manipulates the ant's behaviour to climb to a specific height and clamp its jaws onto …

  — David P. Hughes et al., Behavioral mechanisms and morphological symptoms of zombie ants dying from fungal infection

• This frog's heart stops every winter, then restarts on its own in spring

  As temperatures drop, wood frogs let ice form in up to two-thirds of their body water while flooding their cells with glucose that works as antifreeze, protecting tissue from damag…

  — Kenneth B. Storey and Janet M. Storey, Biochemical Adaptation for Freezing Tolerance in the Wood Frog, Rana sylvatica

• One root system in Utah grows 47,000 trunks that are all a single organism

  Every trembling trunk across 106 acres of Utah's Fishlake National Forest known as Pando is genetically identical, joined underground by one continuous root system rather than bein…

  — Jennifer DeWoody, Carol A. Rowe, Valerie D. Hipkins and Karen E. Mock, "Pando" Lives: Molecular Genetic Evidence of a Giant Aspen Clone in Central Utah

• A bee tells her whole hive exactly where breakfast is by dancing a figure eight

  Back at the hive, a forager honeybee runs a figure-eight pattern, waggling her abdomen along the straight middle stretch: the angle of that run relative to straight-up encodes the …

  — Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees

• These cicadas count to 13 or 17 years before they ever see daylight

  Magicicada nymphs spend 13 or 17 years underground feeding on root sap before emerging together by the billions in a single synchronized month. Both cycle lengths are prime numbers…

  — Jin Yoshimura, The Evolutionary Origins of Periodical Cicadas During Ice Ages

• The 'Portuguese man o' war' isn't one animal — it's a colony of thousands

  What looks like a single jellyfish-like creature is actually a siphonophore: a colony of specialised, genetically identical zooids, one type forming the gas-filled float, others ha…

  — NOAA Ocean Service, Portuguese Man of War (Physalia physalis)

• Starling flocks turn as one because each bird only tracks its seven nearest neighbours

  Physicists analysing huge starling murmurations found each bird adjusts its flight based on roughly its six or seven closest neighbours, regardless of how densely packed the flock …

  — Andrea Cavagna et al., Scale-Free Correlations in Starling Flocks

• Dung beetles steer by the Milky Way to roll their ball in a straight line

  African dung beetles roll their food ball away from a dung pile in the straightest possible line to escape competitors, and researchers found that on moonless nights they orient us…

  — Marie Dacke et al., Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation

• Sea otters carry a favourite rock around to smash open their food

  Floating on their backs, sea otters balance a rock on their chest as an anvil and hammer shellfish against it until the shell cracks. Some otters keep and reuse the very same rock …

  — Standard marine biology accounts (Riedman & Estes), Tool Use by Sea Otters

• The elephant who recognised herself

  In 2006, an Asian elephant named Happy touched a mark on her own head while looking in a mirror — proof she understood the reflection was herself, not another elephant. It made ele…

  — Joshua M. Plotnik, Frans B. M. de Waal & Diana Reiss, Self-recognition in an Asian elephant

• Monarch butterflies steer by sun and magnetic field

  Monarch butterflies hold their long southward migration on course using a light-dependent magnetic compass housed in their antennae, alongside a separate time-compensated sun compa…

  — Patrick A. Guerra, Robert J. Gegear & Steven M. Reppert, A magnetic compass aids monarch butterfly migration

• The plant that can count to five

  A Venus flytrap needs two touches to its trigger hairs within about 20–30 seconds before it snaps shut — a single touch won't do, saving energy on false alarms. Further touches aft…

  — Rainer Hedrich et al., The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula Counts Prey-Induced Action Potentials to Induce Sodium Uptake

• Birds may be able to see Earth's magnetic field

  European robins lose their magnetic sense under certain wavelengths of light, leading researchers Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko to propose a light-dependent 'compass' built into …

  — Wolfgang Wiltschko & Roswitha Wiltschko, Magnetoreception

• One bird flew 13,560 km without stopping to eat, drink or land

  In October 2022, a young bar-tailed godwit tagged '234684' flew nonstop from Alaska to Tasmania in eleven days — the longest uninterrupted flight ever recorded for any animal. Godw…

  — U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center, Satellite tracking of trans-Pacific bar-tailed godwit migration

• One octopus can impersonate a sea snake, a lionfish and a flatfish — and switch fast

  Discovered in Indonesian waters in 1998, the mimic octopus doesn't just camouflage — it reshapes its body and movement to imitate the exact silhouette and swimming style of dangero…

  — Mark D. Norman and F.G. Hochberg, A New Octopus Species from the Tropical Indo-West Pacific

• This sea slug photosynthesises using chloroplasts stolen from its food

  Elysia chlorotica eats a specific alga and, instead of digesting the chloroplasts inside it, extracts them intact and embeds them in its own gut lining, where they keep converting …

  — Mary E. Rumpho et al., Kleptoplasty in the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica

• The fastest animal on Earth isn't a cheetah — it's a bird in a dive

  A peregrine falcon can't outrun a cheetah in level flight, but in a hunting dive called a stoop, it tucks its wings and free-falls toward prey at over 320 km/h (200 mph) — faster t…

  — Ken Franklin, GPS-tracked stoop velocity of a trained peregrine falcon

• Ants have been farming fungus for 50 million years — we've farmed crops for 12,000

  Long before leafcutter ants existed, an ancestral group of ants began cultivating fungus gardens inside their nests, feeding them chewed plant matter and defending them with antibi…

  — Ted R. Schultz and Seán G. Brady, Major evolutionary transitions in ant agriculture

• A songbird can copy a chainsaw and a camera shutter closely enough to fool experts

  The Australian superb lyrebird builds its courtship song almost entirely from mimicry, weaving together the calls of a dozen or more other bird species alongside sounds it's simply…

  — Anastasia H. Dalziell, Lyrebird

• Woodpeckers don't have shock-absorbing skulls — scientists assumed they did for decades

  For years the standard explanation for why woodpeckers never get concussions was a built-in shock-absorption system in the skull. A 2022 study using high-speed video and biomechani…

  — Sam Van Wassenbergh et al., Woodpeckers minimize cranial absorption of shocks

• A camel's hump stores fat, not water — the myth mattered enough to actually test

  The common assumption is that a camel's hump is a built-in water tank, but it's actually fatty tissue, up to 36 kilograms of it, metabolised for energy when food is scarce. Physiol…

  — Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, Desert Animals: Physiological Problems of Heat and Water

• Male bowerbirds build and decorate an entire structure just to get a date

  Bowerbirds don't decorate their nests — they build a separate structure purely for courtship, called a bower, then spend weeks arranging twigs, shells, flowers and any bright litte…

  — Standard zoological accounts, Bowerbird

• Female fireflies fake another species' mating flash, then eat the males who fall for it

  Male fireflies flash a species-specific pattern of light to attract mates, and females answer with the matching pattern. Predatory Photuris fireflies mimic the answering flash of o…

  — James E. Lloyd, Aggressive Mimicry in Photuris: Firefly Femmes Fatales

• A platypus hunts with its eyes shut, using an electric sixth sense in its bill

  When a platypus dives, it closes its eyes, ears and nostrils, hunting entirely blind. Its duck-like bill is packed with tens of thousands of electroreceptors that detect the faint …

  — Standard zoological accounts, Platypus

• A vampire bat that fails to feed can ask a roost-mate to regurgitate blood for it

  A vampire bat starves if it goes two nights without a blood meal, but hunting fails often enough that many bats would die without help. Biologist Gerald Wilkinson found that well-f…

  — Gerald S. Wilkinson, Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat

• Komodo dragons kill with venom, not just dirty saliva

  For decades, biologists believed Komodo dragons killed prey through septic bacteria festering in their mouths. A 2009 study using MRI scans found instead that they have genuine ven…

  — Bryan Fry et al., A Central Role for Venom in Predation by Varanus komodoensis

• A hagfish can turn a bucket of water into slime in under a second

  When grabbed by a predator, a hagfish fires mucus and coiled protein threads from glands running the length of its body, which expand up to 10,000-fold in seawater into a suffocati…

  — Douglas S. Fudge, Kelly H. Gardner, Valerie Trystan Forsyth, Christian Riekel & John M. Gosline, The Mechanical Properties of Hydrated Intermediate Filaments: Insights from Hagfish Slime Threads

• A living fossil's blue blood is used to test the safety of every vaccine you've had

  Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper-based hemocyanin instead of iron-based hemoglobin. Its blood cells also clot instantly around bacterial toxins, a…

  — Frederik B. Bang, A Bacterial Disease of Limulus polyphemus

• Lobsters don't slow down, weaken or lose fertility the way most animals do with age

  Unlike humans, lobsters keep growing, keep reproducing and show no measurable decline in strength as they age, a pattern gerontologists call 'negligible senescence,' linked to an e…

  — Wolfram Klapper, Katrin Kühne, Kusum K. Singh, Katja Heidorn, Reza Parwaresch & Gert Krupp, Longevity of Lobsters is Linked to Ubiquitous Telomerase Expression

• Bats 'see' with sound pulses pitched above human hearing

  Bats emit rapid ultrasonic calls and read the returning echoes to build a moving map of insects and obstacles in total darkness, pulsing over 20 times a second as they close in on …

  — Donald R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men

• Killer whales are one of only five species known to go through menopause

  Female orcas stop reproducing around age 40 but can live into their 80s or 90s, spending decades as post-reproductive grandmothers. Long-term study of resident killer whale pods fo…

  — Stuart Nattrass et al., Postreproductive killer whale grandmothers improve the survival of their grandoffspring

• Why no tree on Earth grows taller than about 130 metres

  As a redwood grows taller, gravity and friction make it exponentially harder to pull water up from roots to its topmost leaves, which stay water-stressed even when the ground below…

  — George W. Koch, Stephen C. Sillett, Gregory M. Jennings & Stephen D. Davis, The limits to tree height

• The nest temperature that decides a turtle's sex

  In many reptiles — sea turtles, crocodilians and some lizards — sex isn't fixed by chromosomes but set by the temperature eggs experience during a critical window of incubation. A …

  — Standard biological accounts, Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination

• This reptile is born with a working third eye on top of its head

  Tuatara hatchlings have a parietal eye complete with its own lens and retina, visible as a pale patch of skin on the skull. It can't form images, but its light-sensitive cells appe…

  — Richard M. Eakin, The Third Eye

• The world's only venomous primate mixes its toxin by licking its own arm

  Slow lorises are the only primates known to be venomous. A gland on the inner arm secretes an oily compound that stays harmless until the loris licks it, mixing it with saliva to a…

  — K. Anne-Isola Nekaris, Richard S. Moore, E. Johanna Rode & Bryan G. Fry, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Biochemistry, Ecology and Evolution of Slow Loris Venom

• Fire ants link legs and jaws to build a living raft that floats for weeks

  When floodwater hits a fire ant colony, thousands of worker ants lock legs and jaws together in under two minutes, weaving their bodies into a waterproof raft. The queen and larvae…

  — Nathan J. Mlot, Craig A. Tovey & David L. Hu, Fire Ants Self-Assemble into Waterproof Rafts to Survive Floods

• Cuttlefish talk in a light pattern most predators literally cannot see

  Cuttlefish skin reflects patterns of polarized light invisible to many of their predators, such as seals, whose eyes can't detect it. Researchers found the patterns appear on the a…

  — Nadav Shashar, Phillip S. Rutledge & Thomas W. Cronin, Polarization Vision in Cuttlefish – A Concealed Communication Channel?

• The oldest known individual living thing on Earth is a tree older than the pyramids

  A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, nicknamed "Methuselah," has been growing for roughly 4,850 years, confirmed by counting its growth rings. Its exact …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Great Basin bristlecone pine

• Elephants talk to each other in rumbles too low for humans to hear

  In 1984, bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne noticed a throbbing sensation in the air near elephants at a zoo and suspected it was sound below human hearing. Field recordings confir…

  — Katy Payne, William Langbauer, Elizabeth Thomas, Elephant infrasound communication

• A narwhal's tusk isn't decoration — it's an antenna wired straight to its brain

  The narwhal's long spiral tusk is an overgrown tooth riddled with millions of nerve endings. Research led by dentist-researcher Martin Nweeia found the tusk can sense subtle change…

  — Wikipedia contributors; research by Martin Nweeia, Narwhal

• One bird flies the equivalent of three round trips to the Moon in its lifetime

  The Arctic tern breeds in the Arctic and winters in Antarctica, an annual round trip of roughly 70,900 km, the longest migration of any animal, confirmed by tracking devices in a 2…

  — Carsten Egevang et al., Tracking of Arctic terns Sterna paradisaea reveals longest animal migration

• This mole's nose can identify and eat prey in a fifth of a second

  A star-nosed mole's nose bears 22 fleshy tentacles packed with over 25,000 touch receptors, more sensory input than a human hand. It can touch, identify, and swallow a single prey …

  — Kenneth C. Catania, Fiona E. Remple, Asymptotic prey profitability drives star-nosed moles to the smallest prey in the world

• Tardigrades survived days of direct exposure to the vacuum of space

  In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades flew aboard the European Space Agency's FOTON-M3 mission and were exposed directly to the vacuum, cosmic radiation, and deep cold of low Earth orbit…

  — K. Ingemar Jönsson et al., Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit

• African wild dogs vote on whether to hunt by sneezing

  Before setting off to hunt, a pack of African wild dogs performs a ritual greeting rally, during which individuals sneeze. Researchers found the sneezes function as votes: the more…

  — Reena H. Walker, Andrew J. King, J. Weldon McNutt, Neil R. Jordan, Sneeze to leave: African wild dogs use variable quorum thresholds facilitated by sneezes

• This plant heats itself up to bloom through the snow

  Eastern skunk cabbage can hold its flowering hood 15 to 35 degrees Celsius warmer than the freezing air around it, for up to two weeks straight, letting it bloom before winter snow…

  — Roger M. Knutson, Heat Production and Temperature Regulation in Eastern Skunk Cabbage

• Hummingbirds nearly shut their bodies down every single night

  To survive till dawn without starving, many hummingbird species enter nightly torpor: body temperature can fall from around 40C to as low as 10-20C, metabolic rate drops by 60-95%,…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Torpor

• A fist-sized fish sculpts an underwater crop circle to find a mate

  For over a decade, divers off Japan's Amami Oshima island found mysterious 2-meter geometric circles on the seafloor with no explanation. In 2012, biologists traced them to a singl…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Pufferfish mating ritual

• A tiny reef fish passed the classic mirror self-recognition test

  In 2019, bluestreak cleaner wrasse became the first fish shown to pass the mark test: after time with a mirror, fish marked with a spot only visible in reflection scraped at their …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Bluestreak cleaner wrasse

• Dolphins invent their own names and call out to specific friends

  Within its first few months of life, a bottlenose dolphin invents a unique signature whistle that functions like a personal name. Researchers found dolphins copy a companion's sign…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Signature whistle

• Microscopic animals came back to life after 24,000 years frozen solid

  In 2021, Russian scientists thawed bdelloid rotifers pulled from Siberian permafrost and watched them move, feed, and reproduce asexually. Radiocarbon dating put the sediment at ab…

  — Lyubov Shatilovich et al., A living bdelloid rotifer from 24,000-year-old Arctic permafrost

• A bird that hides up to 98,000 seeds a year and still finds them

  Clark's nutcrackers scatter-hoard pine seeds across dozens of square miles each autumn — one bird was recorded caching up to 98,000 seeds in a single season. Long after snow buries…

  — Stephen B. Vander Wall and Russell P. Balda, Cache recovery and spatial memory in Clark's nutcracker

• Male anglerfish fuse to females and share their blood forever

  In several deep-sea anglerfish species, a tiny male bites onto a female and enzymes fuse their skin and blood vessels into one shared circulatory system. He then loses his eyes, fi…

  — Theodore W. Pietsch, Dimorphism, Parasitism, and Sex Revisited: Modes of Reproduction Among Deep-Sea Ceratioid Anglerfishes

• This desert plant grows only two leaves — for up to 1,500 years

  Welwitschia mirabilis, found only in Namibia's Namib Desert, sprouts exactly two leaves as a seedling and never grows more — they just split and fray with age. Some individuals are…

  — Tao Wan et al., The Welwitschia genome reveals a unique biology underpinning extreme longevity in deserts

• This spider spins the toughest biological material ever measured

  Darwin's bark spider builds orb webs across entire rivers and streams, some spanning more than 25 metres. Its silk is roughly twice as tough as any other spider silk known and outp…

  — Ingi Agnarsson, Matjaž Kuntner, Todd A. Blackledge, Bioprospecting Finds the Toughest Biological Material: Extraordinary Silk from a Giant Riverine Orb Spider

• A deep-sea octopus guarded her eggs for four and a half years without eating

  Marine biologists tracked a Graneledone boreopacifica octopus off California brooding a single clutch of eggs for 53 months, the longest known brooding period of any animal. She ne…

  — Bruce H. Robison, Brad A. Seibel, Jeffrey Drazen, Deep-Sea Octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) Conducts the Longest-Known Egg-Brooding Period of Any Animal

• Some living whales still carry harpoon tips from the 1800s

  Bowhead whales caught by Alaskan hunters have been found with fragments of explosive harpoon heads embedded in their blubber, a design that fell out of use around 1880 - meaning th…

  — Jeffrey C. George, Craig George, et al., Age and Growth Estimates of Bowhead Whales via Aspartic Acid Racemization

• This insect makes its own sunscreen-like pigment using genes stolen from fungi

  Pea aphids are the only animals known to manufacture their own carotenoid pigments, using genes horizontally transferred from fungi millions of years ago rather than getting them f…

  — Nancy A. Moran, Tyler Jarvik, Lateral Transfer of Genes from Fungi Underlies Carotenoid Production in Aphids

• The largest animal ever to exist is alive right now, not extinct

  Blue whales can grow past 29 metres and weigh close to 200 tonnes — bigger than any dinosaur known from the fossil record. Their hearts alone can weigh as much as a small car, and …

  — NOAA Fisheries, Blue whale

• The colossal squid's eyes are the size of dinner plates — biggest in the animal kingdom

  A colossal squid's eyes can reach nearly 27 centimetres across, built to catch the faintest traces of light or bioluminescent flashes in the deep ocean where it hunts. Scientists t…

  — Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Colossal squid

• Thousands of penguins huddle in a slow-moving swirl to survive -50°C winds

  Emperor penguins breed through the Antarctic winter by packing into huddles of thousands, each bird taking turns at the freezing outer edge before shuffling back toward the warmer …

  — British Antarctic Survey, Emperor penguin

• One bird has a wingspan longer than a family car

  The wandering albatross has the largest wingspan of any living bird, reaching up to 3.5 metres tip to tip. That span lets it lock its wings and glide for hours over the Southern Oc…

  — BirdLife International, Snowy albatross

• An entire ecosystem was found living without a single ray of sunlight

  In 1977, scientists diving in the submersible Alvin to the Galapagos Rift found thriving colonies of giant tube worms, clams and crabs clustered around undersea hydrothermal vents,…

  — John Corliss et al., Hydrothermal vents on an active spreading center

• A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem for fifty years

  When a whale carcass sinks to the deep ocean floor, it creates what scientists call a whale fall: a temporary oasis that can support hundreds of species, some found nowhere else on…

  — Craig Smith and Amy Baco, Whale-fall ecosystems: recent insights into ecology, paleoecology, and evolution

• Cut this worm into 279 pieces, and you can get 279 new worms

  Planarian flatworms can regenerate a complete new body, head, brain and all, from a tiny fragment of their original tissue. Biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan documented in 1898 that eve…

  — Thomas Hunt Morgan, Experimental Studies of the Regeneration of Planaria maculata

• Some deep-sea animals grow far bigger than their shallow-water cousins

  Giant squid, giant isopods and colossal squid all belong to groups whose shallow-water relatives stay small, yet in the deep ocean they grow to extraordinary size. Biologists call …

  — Wikipedia, Deep-sea gigantism

• Bumblebees solve a version of the classic 'travelling salesman' problem

  Given several flowers to visit in an unfamiliar patch, bumblebees don't just fly to whichever is nearest next — after a few exploratory trips, they converge on close to the shortes…

  — Mathieu Lihoreau, Lars Chittka & Nigel E. Raine, Travel Optimization by Foraging Bumblebees through Readjustments of Traplines after Discovery of New Feeding Locations

• Dolphins sleep with only half their brain at a time

  Because dolphins are conscious breathers who must surface for air, they can't afford to fully lose consciousness the way land mammals do. Instead, one brain hemisphere sleeps at a …

  — Lev M. Mukhametov, Unihemispheric Slow Wave Sleep in the Bottlenose Dolphin

• A bulbous nose lets this antelope breathe both frozen and dusty air safely

  The saiga antelope's oversized, downward-pointing nose works like built-in climate control: in winter it warms and humidifies frigid air before it reaches the lungs, and in summer,…

  — Standard zoological accounts, Saiga Antelope

• This primate taps on trees with an impossibly thin finger to find grubs hidden inside

  The aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur, has a skeletal middle finger it uses to tap rapidly along branches, listening for the echo change that reveals a hollow tunnel where a grub is hidin…

  — Carl J. Erickson, Percussive Foraging in the Aye-aye, Daubentonia madagascariensis

• A gecko's foot holds itself up with molecular forces, not glue or suction

  Each gecko toe carries hundreds of thousands of hair-like setae, and every seta splits into hundreds of nanoscale spatulae just 200 nanometres wide. Contact that close triggers van…

  — Standard herpetological references; adhesion mechanism established by Kellar Autumn et al., PNAS, 2002, Gecko

• Chameleons change colour by tuning a lattice of nanocrystals in their skin

  Scientists long assumed chameleons shifted colour purely by moving pigment inside cells. A 2015 study found a second skin layer packed with a lattice of guanine nanocrystals; relax…

  — Jeremie Teyssier, Suzanne V. Saenko, Dirk van der Marel, Michel C. Milinkovitch, Photonic crystals cause active colour change in chameleons

• The world's smelliest flower disguises itself as a rotting corpse to get pollinated

  When the titan arum finally blooms after years of growth, its deep maroon inner spathe mimics the look of raw meat while the towering spadix heats up and releases dimethyl disulfid…

  — Standard botanical references, Amorphophallus titanum

• Two-thirds of an octopus's neurons live in its arms, not its brain

  An octopus has roughly 500 million neurons, about as many as a dog, but only 40 to 45 million sit in its central brain. The rest run along nerve cords down each arm, so a severed a…

  — Standard cephalopod-neuroscience references, Octopus

• One jellyfish can reverse its own aging and start life over as a baby again

  When injured, sick, starving or old, Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back into an earlier polyp stage, the biological equivalent of a butterfly turning back into a c…

  — Stefano Piraino, Ferdinando Boero, et al., Reversing the Life Cycle: Medusae Transforming into Polyps and Cell Transdifferentiation in Turritopsis Nutricula

• This rodent lives like a beehive — one queen, and workers that don't reproduce

  Naked mole-rats are one of only two mammal species known to be eusocial: a single breeding queen suppresses reproduction in dozens of other colony members, who instead dig tunnels …

  — Jennifer U. M. Jarvis, Eusociality in a Mammal: Cooperative Breeding in Naked Mole-Rat Colonies

• This crow bends wire into a hook to fish food out of a tube, unprompted

  New Caledonian crows craft hooked tools from twigs in the wild, stripping and shaping them to pull grubs out of tight crevices. In a 2002 lab test, a crow named Betty spontaneously…

  — Alex A. S. Weir, Jackie Chappell, and Alex Kacelnik, Crafting of Hooks in Tool Use by New Caledonian Crows

• Lost army ants once marched in a circle for two days until they died of exhaustion

  In 1921, naturalist William Beebe observed a column of army ants in Guyana that had lost the pheromone trail of the main colony and begun following one another in an unbroken circl…

  — William Beebe, Edge of the Jungle

• One flower disguises itself as a female bee to get pollinated

  The bee orchid's petals mimic the look, texture and scent of a female solitary bee closely enough that male bees try to mate with it. In the attempt, the male picks up a packet of …

  — Standard botanical accounts, Ophrys apifera

• Coral turns ghost-white when it evicts the algae that feed it

  Reef-building coral survives by hosting microscopic algae in its tissue, which photosynthesize and share food with the coral in exchange for shelter — and give coral its colour. Wh…

  — Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Coral Bleaching: Causes and Consequences

• One fish is immune to a sting that kills almost everything else that touches it

  Sea anemones sting and paralyse fish that brush against their tentacles, but clownfish live inside them unharmed, coated in a layer of mucus that stops the anemone's stinging cells…

  — Standard marine biology accounts, Amphiprioninae

• Some plants bribe ants into planting their seeds for them

  Thousands of plant species attach a fatty, nutrient-rich packet called an elaiosome to their seeds, which ants find irresistible. Worker ants carry the whole seed back to the nest,…

  — Andrew J. Lucky, E. S. Dixon & C. R. Wolf, Myrmecochory: An Ecosystem Service

• A cuckoo chick hatches, then evicts its foster siblings from the nest one by one

  Female common cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and leave. Within hours of hatching — still blind and featherless — the cuckoo chick shoulders every other egg and hatchl…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Cuckoo

• Touch this plant's leaves and they fold shut in under a second

  Mimosa pudica, the 'sensitive plant', collapses its leaflets and droops its stem within a second of being touched, using rapid water shifts in specialized cells rather than muscle …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Mimosa pudica

• Some rotting wood glows faintly green in the dark, all on its own

  Certain fungi that decay wood, such as Armillaria and Panellus species, produce a chemical reaction that emits a faint greenish glow known as foxfire. Sailors, soldiers and Aristot…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Foxfire (bioluminescence)

• A sloth's fur is its own tiny ecosystem, complete with a resident species of algae

  Sloths move so slowly that algae grow directly in grooves in their fur, tinting it green and helping camouflage them in the canopy. Moths and beetles that live nowhere else spend t…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Sloth

• This seal can hold its breath for two hours and dive nearly 2km down

  Northern elephant seals spend more than 90% of their lives underwater, diving beyond 1,500 metres and holding their breath for up to two hours at a time — longer than almost any ot…

  — Burney Le Boeuf et al., Diving behavior of northern elephant seals

• Every European eel is born in one patch of ocean no one has watched

  European eels spend most of their lives in rivers and lakes thousands of miles from the sea, then swim all the way to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die. A Danish biologist traced t…

  — Johannes Schmidt, The Freshwater Eels

• This fish spits a jet of water to shoot insects off branches

  Archerfish aim a precise jet of water from their mouths to knock insects into the water from overhanging leaves, correcting for light bending at the water's surface and adjusting t…

  — Stefan Schuster et al., Precision of archerfish targeting

• A hammerhead shark's odd skull gives it near-360-degree vision

  Researchers fitted hammerhead sharks with electrodes and found their widely spaced eyes give them a complete vertical field of view and overlapping binocular vision in most directi…

  — Michelle McComb et al., Eye Position in Hammerhead Sharks

• This spiny mammal lays eggs, has no nipples, and sweats milk through its skin

  Echidnas are one of only two kinds of mammal that lay eggs instead of giving birth — the other being the platypus. A female incubates a single leathery egg in a temporary pouch; th…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Echidna

• The largest living tree on Earth is still adding the volume of a small tree every year

  General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park, has a trunk volume of roughly 1,487 cubic metres — more than any other known living tree, despite not being …

  — Wikipedia contributors, General Sherman Tree

• Some ocean waves glow electric blue when disturbed — that's algae defending itself

  During certain 'red tide' blooms, the ocean fills with dinoflagellates that flash blue-green light the instant a wave, a swimmer or a predator disturbs them. The light isn't decora…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Bioluminescence

• Wild goats scale a near-vertical dam wall just to lick the concrete

  Alpine ibex have been filmed climbing the sheer face of dams in the Italian Alps, using split, rubbery hooves to grip footholds barely wider than a coin. They're not showing off: c…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Alpine ibex

• This freshwater animal shows no sign of ever aging

  For four years, biologist Daniel Martinez tracked hydra individually, watching for the usual signs of aging — and found none: death rates and reproduction stayed flat the entire ti…

  — Daniel E. Martinez, Mortality Patterns Suggest Lack of Senescence in Hydra

• Australia's invading cane toads evolved longer legs in 70 years — for a strange reason

  Since cane toads were introduced to Australia in the 1930s, the leading edge of their spread has sped up roughly fivefold, and researchers found toads at that front have significan…

  — Benjamin L. Phillips, Gregory P. Brown, Jonathan K. Webb, Richard Shine, Invasion and the evolution of speed in toads

• Millions of ant nests along 6,000km of coastline treat each other as one colony

  In their native South America, Argentine ant colonies are small and viciously territorial. But researchers sampling ants across the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of southern Eu…

  — Tatiana Giraud, Jes S. Pedersen, Laurent Keller, Evolution of supercolonies: the Argentine ants of southern Europe

• Crows remembered one 'dangerous' human face for years — and warned their friends

  Researchers at the University of Washington trapped wild crows while wearing a distinctive mask, then walked around campus in that same mask without bothering the birds at all. Cro…

  — John M. Marzluff, Jeff Walls, Heather N. Cornell, John C. Withey, David P. Craig, Lasting Recognition of Threatening People by Wild American Crows

• A wild bird leads humans to beehives, then eats the leftover wax

  In parts of Africa, the greater honeyguide bird calls out to human honey hunters and physically leads them to wild bee nests. The Hadza and Yao peoples in Tanzania and Mozambique r…

  — Claire Spottiswoode et al., Honeyguides respond to a signal of a human-wildlife mutualism

• Spiders can 'fly' using Earth's electric field, not just the wind

  Many spiders travel long distances by releasing silk threads and drifting on air currents, a behavior called ballooning that Charles Darwin observed from the deck of the Beagle. A …

  — Erica Morley and Daniel Robert, Gossamer spiders use electric fields to launch into the air

• This animal always gives birth to identical quadruplets

  Nine-banded armadillos reproduce through a quirk called polyembryony: a single fertilized egg splits into four separate embryos, which develop into four genetically identical sibli…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Nine-banded armadillo

• The female of this octopus can be 40,000 times heavier than the male

  Blanket octopuses show one of the most extreme size differences between sexes of any animal on Earth: females can grow up to two meters long, while males stay smaller than a walnut…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Blanket octopus

• This ant's bite is 2,300 times faster than a blink

  The trap-jaw ant snaps its mandibles shut at up to 145 mph, among the fastest self-powered strikes ever measured in an animal. It works like a crossbow: muscles slowly load elastic…

  — Sheila N. Patek et al., Multifunctionality and mechanical origins: Ballistic jaw propulsion in trap-jaw ants

• A parasite makes rats stop being afraid of cats — on purpose

  Toxoplasma gondii can only complete its life cycle by reproducing inside a cat's gut, so it needs an infected rodent to get eaten. Studies show infected rats and mice lose their in…

  — Wendy M. Ingram et al., Mice Infected with Low-Virulence Strains of Toxoplasma gondii Lose Their Innate Aversion to Cat Urine

• A sea turtle memorizes Earth's magnetic field at the beach it hatched on

  Loggerhead turtles imprint on the unique magnetic signature of their natal beach as hatchlings, then use it as a homing beacon years later. Researchers found nesting density rises …

  — J. Roger Brothers, Kenneth J. Lohmann, Evidence for Geomagnetic Imprinting and Magnetic Navigation in the Natal Homing of Sea Turtles

• This bird spends ten months a year without ever touching down

  Common swifts leave their nests in August and don't land again until the next breeding season, eating, sleeping and even mating entirely on the wing. Tracking devices showed some i…

  — Anders Hedenstrom et al., Annual 10-Month Aerial Life Phase in the Common Swift Apus apus

• Any cheetah can take a skin graft from any other cheetah, no rejection

  Cheetahs alive today are so genetically similar that they're nearly clones of each other — the result of a population bottleneck thousands of years ago that nearly wiped out the sp…

  — Stephen J. O'Brien et al., Genetic basis for species vulnerability in the cheetah

• This fish spends most of its life out of water

  Mudskippers breathe partly through their skin and the lining of their mouth, letting them leave the water and 'walk' across mudflats using their pectoral fins. They can even climb …

  — Standard zoological accounts, Mudskipper

• This deep-sea creature defends itself with glowing mucus, not ink

  The vampire squid — actually neither a vampire nor a true squid — lives in the ocean's oxygen-poor 'midnight zone.' Instead of an ink cloud, it defends itself by ejecting a cloud o…

  — Standard zoological accounts, Vampyroteuthis infernalis

• This is the only mammal covered head to tail in scales

  Pangolins are armored in overlapping scales made of keratin — the same protein as human fingernails and rhino horn — and when threatened, they roll into a tight ball that even lion…

  — Standard zoological accounts, Pangolin

• Cut off a starfish's arm, and in some species that arm can grow a whole new starfish

  Most starfish can regrow a lost arm as long as their central disc survives. But in a few tropical species, a single severed arm — if it still carries a fragment of the central disc…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Starfish regeneration

• The panda's 'thumb' isn't a finger at all

  Giant pandas grip bamboo using a sixth digit that looks and works like a thumb — but it's actually an enlarged wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, not a true finger. Stephen Jay Gould…

  — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb

• Threatened, this animal shoots its own guts out through its rear end

  Some sea cucumbers defend themselves by violently expelling sticky internal threads called Cuvierian tubules through their anus, sometimes along with parts of their own digestive t…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Cuvierian tubules

• Male birds-of-paradise contort into shapes that barely look like birds

  Across New Guinea's forests, male birds-of-paradise have evolved some of the most extravagant courtship displays in nature — flattening feathers into perfect ovals, flipping upside…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Bird-of-paradise

• A single touch on its leg can turn a lone desert locust into a swarming monster

  Desert locusts exist in two dramatically different forms - shy solitary insects and gregarious swarming ones - controlled by the same genome. Touching, seeing, or smelling other lo…

  — Michael L. Anstey, Stephen M. Rogers, Swidbert R. Ott, Malcolm Burrows, Stephen J. Simpson, Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization Underlying Swarm Formation in Desert Locusts

• The world's deadliest frog is harmless if you feed it the wrong bugs

  A wild golden poison frog carries enough batrachotoxin to kill about ten adult humans, yet it makes none of that poison itself. It sequesters the toxins from specific ants, mites a…

  — John W. Daly, H. Martin Garraffo, Thomas F. Spande, Consuelo Jaramillo, A. Stanley Rand, Dietary source for skin alkaloids of poison frogs (Dendrobatidae)?

• A whole population of whales swapped their song for a stranger's tune in two years

  Humpback whales off eastern Australia abandoned their traditional song and adopted, almost note for note, a completely different song sung by whales from the Indian Ocean populatio…

  — Michael J. Noad, Douglas H. Cato, M. M. Bryden, Micheline N. Jenner, Kylie C. S. Jenner, Cultural revolution in whale songs

• This bacterium is too small to see, yet it makes 1 in 5 breaths of oxygen

  Prochlorococcus is barely half a micron across, smaller than most bacteria, yet it's the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet. Trillions of these cells drift through…

  — Sallie W. Chisholm, Robert J. Olson, Erik R. Zettler, Ralf Goericke, John B. Waterbury, Nicholas A. Welschmeyer, A novel free-living prochlorophyte abundant in the oceanic euphotic zone

• This lizard runs across the surface of water to escape predators

  The basilisk lizard slaps its splayed hind feet against the water fast enough to trap a pocket of air beneath each foot, generating enough force to support its weight before the fo…

  — John W. Glasheen and Thomas A. McMahon, A Hydrodynamic Model of Locomotion in the Basilisk Lizard

• Honey badgers survive snake venom that kills almost everything else

  Honey badgers routinely eat venomous snakes and take bites that would kill most mammals many times over. Their nicotinic acetylcholine receptors carry the same defensive mutation f…

  — Danielle H. Drabeck, Antony M. Dean, and Sharon A. Jansa, Why the Honey Badger Don't Care: Convergent Evolution of Venom-Targeted Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors in Mammals That Survive Snakebite

• This spider fishes for moths using a scent it fakes, not a web

  A bolas spider spins no web to catch prey. Instead she manufactures a chemical copy of a female moth's mating pheromone, releases it into the night air, and waits for lovestruck ma…

  — William G. Eberhard, Aggressive Chemical Mimicry by a Bolas Spider

• Weaver ants glue leaves together using their own larvae as glue guns

  To build a nest, weaver ants pull leaf edges together with their bodies, then carry their own silk-spinning larvae back and forth along the seam like living glue guns. The larvae s…

  — Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, Weaver Ants: Social Establishment and Maintenance of Territory

• A fish thought extinct for 65 million years turned up in a fisherman's net in 1938

  Coelacanths were known only from fossils and presumed to have died out alongside the dinosaurs, until museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted one among a trawler's catch …

  — Samantha Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

• An entire species survives nowhere on Earth except one narrow desert pool

  The Devils Hole pupfish lives only in a single water-filled cavern opening in the Nevada desert, a rock shelf just a few metres wide where the whole wild population, sometimes fewe…

  — Joseph H. Wales, Biometrical studies of some races of cyprinodont fishes from the Death Valley region, with description of Cyprinodon diabolis, n. sp.

• This fish's eyes are split in two so it can watch above and below the waterline at once

  Anableps, the "four-eyed fish" of Central and South American rivers, swims with its eyes half-submerged, each one divided by a band of tissue into two separate pupils: one focused …

  — Joseph S. Nelson, Terry C. Grande, and Mark V. H. Wilson, Fishes of the World

• The last of his kind lived for decades as the world's most famous bachelor

  Discovered in 1971, Lonesome George was the sole known survivor of the Pinta Island giant tortoise subspecies. Conservationists spent over 40 years trying to breed him with related…

  — Henry Nicholls, Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon

• This fish lays more eggs in one go than any other vertebrate on Earth

  A single female ocean sunfish, Mola mola, can release an estimated 300 million eggs in one spawning, the highest fecundity known in any vertebrate. Almost none survive to adulthood…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Ocean sunfish

• To survive the night, some hummingbirds shut their bodies down almost entirely

  A hummingbird's heart can beat over 1,200 times a minute in flight, a metabolism so fast it would starve overnight without help. Many species enter torpor after dark, dropping body…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Torpor

• One shrimp-like species may outweigh humanity's entire biomass

  Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, swarm in numbers so vast that scientists estimate their total biomass at up to 500 million tonnes, among the largest of any wild animal species …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Antarctic krill

• An octopus small enough to sit in your palm carries no antidote to its own bite

  The blue-ringed octopus, barely the size of a golf ball, carries tetrodotoxin, the same nerve poison found in pufferfish, potent enough to kill an adult human within minutes throug…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Blue-ringed octopus

• Push a sponge through a sieve, cell by cell, and it can rebuild itself

  In 1907, biologist H.V. Wilson separated a living sponge into individual cells by squeezing it through fine silk mesh. Left in seawater, the scattered cells crawled back together a…

  — Henry Van Peters Wilson, On Some Phenomena of Coalescence and Regeneration in Sponges

• This lizard flies without wings, using its own ribs as a parachute

  Southeast Asia's Draco lizards have elongated ribs connected by skin that fold flat against the body but fan out into wing-like membranes, letting them glide over 60 metres between…

  — Jimmy A. McGuire and Robert Dudley, The Biology of Gliding in Flying Lizards (Genus Draco) and Their Fossil and Extant Analogs

• The only primate that's 100% carnivorous has eyes bigger than its brain

  Tarsiers, tiny nocturnal primates native to Southeast Asian islands, eat nothing but live prey, insects, lizards, even small birds, making them the only primates that are entirely …

  — Genus first described by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Tarsier

• The biggest fish in the ocean survives on some of the smallest food in it

  Whale sharks can grow over 12 metres long, making them the largest fish species alive, yet they feed almost entirely on plankton and small fish, filtering huge volumes of water thr…

  — First described by Andrew Smith, Whale shark

• Utility companies use turkey vultures to sniff out gas pipeline leaks

  Natural gas is odourless, so pipelines are laced with ethyl mercaptan, the same compound that gives rotting meat its smell. Turkey vultures can detect that odour from the air at ju…

  — Kenneth E. Stager, The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura)

• This salamander embryo hosts living algae inside its own cells

  Spotted salamander eggs carry a green alga, Oophila amblystomatis, that doesn't just surround the embryo — it invades the embryo's own tissues and individual cells, trading oxygen …

  — Ryan Kerney et al., Intracellular Invasion of Green Algae in a Salamander Host

• A wasp stings a cockroach's brain, then walks it to its own grave

  The emerald cockroach wasp delivers a first sting to paralyse its victim's front legs, then a second directly into the brain that suppresses the escape reflex without knocking it o…

  — Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal, Wasp Voodoo Rituals, Venom-Cocktails, and the Zombification of Cockroach Hosts

• Honeybees can rank zero as a number, not just recognise 'nothing'

  Trained to always pick the image with fewer dots, honeybees offered a real choice against a blank card chose the blank — placing zero below one on a number line, something previous…

  — Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree and Adrian G. Dyer, Numerical Ordering of Zero in Honey Bees

• This microscopic animal hasn't had males or sex in tens of millions of years

  Bdelloid rotifers are a whole class of freshwater microorganisms with no known males, reproducing by cloning themselves for an estimated 35 million years or more — a timespan most …

  — Class described across decades of evolutionary biology research, Bdelloidea

• One spider spends its entire life underwater, breathing from a bubble it wove itself

  The diving bell spider builds a dome-shaped web between underwater plants and fills it with air carried down from the surface on its hairy abdomen, creating a silk 'diving bell' it…

  — Described in Journal of Experimental Biology research, Diving bell spider (Argyroneta aquatica)

• This caterpillar freezes solid every winter for seven years before becoming a moth

  The Arctic woolly bear caterpillar lives so far north that its brief summers only give it enough time to feed, not to complete its life cycle. Each winter it produces its own antif…

  — Described in Arctic entomology research, Arctic woolly bear moth (Gynaephora groenlandica)

• A spider with a brain the size of a poppy seed plans detours to ambush its prey

  Portia jumping spiders hunt other spiders, and researchers found they'll pause to scan a scene, then set off on winding routes that take them out of sight of their prey entirely, s…

  — Robert R. Jackson and Fiona R. Cross, Route selection by a jumping spider (Portia labiata) during the locomotory phase of a detour

• A giraffe's neck has exactly as many bones as yours does

  Despite being over a metre and a half long, a giraffe's neck contains just seven cervical vertebrae, the same number found in humans, mice, and nearly every other mammal. Each vert…

  — Anne Innis Dagg and J. Bristol Foster, Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation

• The oldest known individual animal was a clam that lived over 500 years

  An ocean quahog dredged off Iceland in 2006 turned out to be about 507 years old when scientists counted growth rings in its shell, the oldest known non-colonial animal ever record…

  — Paul Butler and colleagues, Bangor University, Ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) longevity study

• This lizard shrinks its own skeleton to survive famine, then regrows it

  Galapagos marine iguanas can reabsorb bone material and shrink up to 20% of their body length during El Nino years when their algae food vanishes, then regrow to full size once fee…

  — Martin Wikelski, Corinna Thom, Marine iguanas shrink to survive El Nino

• Owls can turn their heads 270 degrees without cutting off blood to the brain

  Owls can't move their eyes in their sockets, so they compensate with necks that rotate roughly three-quarters of a full circle. Imaging studies found owls have extra blood reservoi…

  — Fabian de Kok-Mercado, Michael Habib, Philippe Gailloud, Blood supply to the brain and eyes in the rotated head position of owls

• Fifty million crabs march to the sea on Christmas Island every year

  Each October or November, monsoon rains trigger roughly 50 million red crabs to leave the rainforest and walk to the ocean in a single wave. Males dig burrows and mate first, then …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Christmas Island red crab

• A cave insect fishes for prey with glowing silk fishing lines

  Arachnocampa luminosa, the New Zealand glowworm, is a fungus gnat larva that lights its rear end blue-green to lure flying insects toward the cave ceiling. It then dangles up to 70…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Arachnocampa luminosa

• Some bacteria grow their own internal compass needles

  Magnetotactic bacteria build chains of magnetite or iron-sulfide crystals called magnetosomes inside their own cells, wrapped in membrane like a string of beads. The chain acts as …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Magnetotactic bacteria

• This worm survives the steepest temperature gradient known to animal life

  The Pompeii worm lives in tubes on hydrothermal vent chimneys, with its head in relatively mild seawater while its tail presses against vent walls that can hit around 80°C. A fleec…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Alvinella pompejana

• One patch of sky in Venezuela lights up with lightning almost every night

  Where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo, thunderstorms fire lightning on most nights of the year, sometimes flashing dozens of times a minute for hours without a break.…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Catatumbo Lightning

• The smell after rain has a name, and it comes from bacteria in the soil

  That distinctive scent after a dry spell ends is called petrichor, and it comes largely from geosmin, a compound made by soil-dwelling Streptomyces bacteria. Raindrops hitting dry …

  — Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas, Petrichor

• Yellowstone's biggest hot spring is rainbow-coloured because of heat-loving microbes

  Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring in the United States, gets its rings of orange, yellow and green from mats of thermophilic bacteria and archaea living at different t…

  — U.S. National Park Service, Grand Prismatic Spring

• Some bamboo waits over a century to flower, then blooms everywhere at once

  Certain bamboo species flower only once every 60 to 130 years, and when the moment finally comes, every plant of that species blooms in the same year worldwide, regardless of clima…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Flowering of bamboo

• Cut a fifth of this fish's heart away, and it grows back completely in two months

  Damage a zebrafish's heart and, instead of scarring like a human heart would, its remaining muscle cells start dividing again, rebuilding the lost tissue almost seamlessly within a…

  — Kenneth Poss et al., Heart regeneration in zebrafish

• The loudest sound any animal makes isn't a roar — it's a click in total darkness

  Sperm whales hunt in the lightless deep ocean using clicks produced by the largest sound-generating organ of any animal, a nasal complex that can weigh several tonnes. Measured at …

  — William A. Watkins & William E. Schevill (foundational research), Click Sounds

• Sailors swore giant 'rogue waves' were real for centuries — then one got measured

  For generations, scientists treated mariners' tales of sudden monster waves as exaggeration, since standard ocean models said waves that size were statistically almost impossible. …

  — Statoil (Draupner platform monitoring), Draupner wave

• Wild monkeys have their own 3,000-year-old Stone Age, dug up by archaeologists

  Bearded capuchins in Brazil's Serra da Capivara National Park still crack cashew nuts by pounding them with stone hammers on stone anvils. Excavating beneath their cracking sites, …

  — Tiago Falótico, Michael Haslam et al., Wild monkeys flake stone tools

• A harmless species can borrow another's warning colors and steal its protection

  Naturalist Henry Walter Bates spent 11 years in the Amazon and noticed that palatable butterfly species had evolved to look almost identical to foul-tasting, toxic ones that predat…

  — Henry Walter Bates, Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley

• A spider smaller than a grain of rice dances in color to avoid being eaten by his date

  Male peacock spiders raise a flap of iridescent, rainbow-colored abdomen and wave modified legs in a precise rhythmic display to court females — who are large enough to kill and ea…

  — Jürgen Otto, David Hill, Maratus (peacock spiders)

• This desert rodent can live its entire life without ever taking a drink

  Kangaroo rats survive in North American deserts on the water contained in dry seeds alone, produced internally when their bodies metabolize food. Kidneys far more efficient than a …

  — Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, Desert Animals: Physiological Problems of Heat and Water

• These orcas beach themselves on purpose, then wriggle back to open water

  At Punta Norte, Argentina, killer whales deliberately strand themselves on the shore to snatch sea lion pups from the beach, then use the next wave to wriggle back into the sea — a…

  — Peninsula Valdés long-term research programme, Intentional stranding behaviour in killer whales

• Male seahorses are the ones who get pregnant and give birth

  Female seahorses deposit their eggs into a pouch on the male's body, and from there he takes over — fertilizing, aerating and nourishing the embryos through a placenta-like tissue …

  — Kai N. Stölting and Anthony B. Wilson, Male pregnancy in seahorses and pipefish: beyond the mammalian model

• A male praying mantis can keep mating even after losing his head

  When a female praying mantis bites off her mate's head mid-sex, his body doesn't stop — it keeps making copulatory movements, sometimes more vigorously than before. The nerve cente…

  — Kenneth D. Roeder, An Experimental Analysis of the Sexual Behavior of the Praying Mantis (Mantis religiosa L.)

• This squirrel's body temperature drops below freezing without turning to ice

  Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels let their core body temperature fall as low as -2.9°C, the coldest ever recorded in a mammal, while their blood and tissues stay perfectly liqui…

  — Brian M. Barnes, Freeze Avoidance in a Mammal: Body Temperatures Below 0°C in an Arctic Hibernator

• Death Valley's 'sailing stones' move themselves across a dry lakebed

  For decades no one ever saw the rocks of Racetrack Playa move, yet trails hundreds of metres long snaked behind them across the cracked mud. In 2014, researchers fitted stones with…

  — Richard D. Norris, James M. Norris, Ralph D. Lorenz, Jib Ray and Brian Jackson, Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion

• Elephants return to touch the bones of their dead, sometimes years later

  Elephants that come across a dead herd member, or even just its bones, often stop to investigate — touching and lifting the remains with their trunks, standing around the body for …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Elephant Cognition

• Bringing back one predator reshaped an entire national park's rivers

  Wolves were hunted out of Yellowstone by 1926; without them, elk grazed river-bank willows and aspens unchecked for decades. When 31 wolves were reintroduced in 1995–96, elk began …

  — Wikipedia contributors, History of Wolves in Yellowstone

• Some moths jam bat sonar the same way militaries jam radar

  As bats evolved echolocation to hunt in the dark, moths evolved countermeasures: many species have ears tuned to detect a bat's ultrasonic calls and trigger sudden evasive loops or…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Evolutionary Arms Race

• Entire reefs release their eggs on the same night, timed by the moon

  Once a year, many coral species on a reef spawn simultaneously, releasing clouds of eggs and sperm into the water within the same narrow window — often just a few nights after a fu…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Coral

• A desert ant counts its own steps to find its way home across a featureless desert

  Saharan desert ants forage for hundreds of metres over sand with no landmarks, then walk straight back to a nest hole the width of a pencil. Researchers fitted ants with stilts or …

  — Matthias Wittlinger, Rüdiger Wehner, Harald Wolf, The Ant Odometer: Stepping on Stilts and Stumps

• Vervet monkeys have a different alarm call for eagles, leopards and snakes

  Vervet monkeys give acoustically distinct alarm calls for each major predator, and the calls alone trigger the correct escape response even when researchers play them back with no …

  — Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, Peter Marler, Monkey Responses to Three Different Alarm Calls: Evidence of Predator Classification and Semantic Communication

• A termite mound breathes like a lung to keep its colony at a constant temperature

  Fungus-farming termites build towering mounds riddled with internal chimneys and channels that use wind and daily temperature swings to drive a slow, constant exchange of air. The …

  — J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures

• Almost every fig species has exactly one wasp species that alone can pollinate it

  Fig trees and fig wasps have co-evolved in pairs for tens of millions of years: a female wasp squeezes into a fig so tight she often loses her wings and antennae getting in, pollin…

  — James M. Cook, Jean-Yves Rasplus, Mutualists with Attitude: Coevolving Fig Wasps and Figs

• A caged bird's escape attempts pointed straight at the North Star

  In the 1960s, Stephen Emlen raised indigo buntings in a planetarium and placed them in ink-blotting funnels that recorded which direction they hopped toward as migration season app…

  — Stephen Emlen, Celestial rotation: Its importance in the development of migratory orientation

• A prairie dog's alarm call can describe a predator's size, shape and colour

  Biologist Con Slobodchikoff spent decades recording and analyzing prairie dog alarm calls and found they aren't just generic 'danger' signals. The calls encode specific details abo…

  — Con Slobodchikoff, Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals

• Bacteria vote on when to act using a chemical language, then commit all at once

  Individual bacteria release small signalling molecules and can sense their own concentration in the surrounding fluid, effectively counting how many neighbours are nearby. Once tha…

  — Bonnie Bassler, Quorum Sensing in Bacteria

• Sick chimpanzees seek out one bitter plant they normally never touch

  Primatologist Michael Huffman documented chimpanzees with parasite infections seeking out and chewing the pith of a bitter plant, Vernonia amygdalina, that they normally avoid eati…

  — Michael Huffman, Animal self-medication and ethno-medicine

• A shrimp's punch is so fast it boils the water and flashes with light

  The peacock mantis shrimp swings its club-like forelimb with the acceleration of a fired bullet, reaching speeds over 20 metres per second in under a tenth of a millisecond. The st…

  — Sheila Patek et al., Deadly Strike Mechanism of a Mantis Shrimp

• Some dolphins wear a sea sponge on their nose like a glove to go hunting

  In Shark Bay, Australia, certain bottlenose dolphins tear a cone-shaped marine sponge off the seabed and wear it over their beak while foraging, using it to cushion their snout as …

  — Michael Krützen et al., Cultural Transmission of Tool Use in Bottlenose Dolphins

• An octopus can taste something the instant it touches it, before it's near its mouth

  Every one of an octopus's hundreds of suckers is packed with chemotactile receptors, a sense found nowhere else in the animal kingdom that lets the arm 'taste' a surface by touchin…

  — Lena van Giesen, Corey Allard, Nicholas Bellono et al., Molecular Basis of Chemotactile Sensation in Octopus

• A parasite eats a fish's tongue, then attaches itself and becomes the tongue

  Cymothoa exigua, a parasitic isopod, enters through a fish's gills and clamps onto the base of its tongue, cutting off the blood supply until the tongue withers away entirely. The …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Cymothoa exigua

• This goose crosses the Himalayas in a single overnight climb

  Bar-headed geese migrate between Tibetan breeding lakes and Indian wintering grounds by flying straight through Himalayan passes, reaching tracked altitudes above 7,000 metres. Den…

  — Charles M. Bishop, Lucy A. Hawkes et al., The paradox of extreme high-altitude migration in bar-headed geese

• This marsupial mates itself to death every single breeding season

  Male antechinus mate for up to 14 hours at a stretch during a frantic few weeks, flooding their bodies with stress hormones to power through it. Their immune systems then collapse …

  — Diana O. Fisher, Christopher R. Dickman, Menna E. Jones and Skye F. Cameron, Sperm competition drives the evolution of suicidal reproduction in mammals

• A flightless parrot digs its own amphitheatre and booms for a mate all night

  Male kakapo carve shallow bowl-shaped pits against rock faces that work like natural amplifiers, then inflate their chests and boom into them for hours — one bird was recorded maki…

  — New Zealand Department of Conservation; standard ornithological accounts, Kākāpō

• This bone regrows a metre of itself from scratch every single year

  Deer antlers are true bone, yet they can lengthen by up to 2.5cm a day — over 300 times faster than a human growth plate — before being shed and regrown from nothing the following …

  — Standard biological accounts; Guinness World Records (fastest-growing mammalian tissue), Antler

• An octopus can sense light through its skin, without using its eyes

  Cut a small patch of skin from an octopus or squid and shine light on it in a dish, and the pigment cells will still respond — because their skin is packed with the same light-sens…

  — M. Desmond Ramirez & Todd H. Oakley, Octopus

• Sponges have no nerves or muscles, yet they can still "sneeze"

  A sponge is one of the simplest animals alive, with no neurons, brain, or muscle tissue — yet time-lapse footage shows sponges slowly contracting their entire bodies over minutes t…

  — Danielle Ludeman et al., Sponge

• Honeybees can learn to recognize individual human faces

  Despite having a brain the size of a grass seed, honeybees trained with a sugar reward can pick out one specific human face from a lineup of photos, and even generalize the skill t…

  — Adrian G. Dyer, Christa Neumeyer & Lars Chittka, Honey bee

• Elephants can tell which human ethnic group is talking, just from the voice

  Kenyan elephants that have faced spearings from Maasai herders react with fear to recordings of Maasai men's voices but stay calm hearing the same words spoken by Kamba men, a grou…

  — Karen McComb, Graeme Shannon, Katito N. Sayialel & Cynthia Moss, Elephant cognition

• This nocturnal bird echolocates like a bat to fly through pitch-black caves

  The oilbird is one of the only birds known to echolocate, firing rapid clicks — up to 250 a second — to navigate its breeding caves in total darkness. Unlike bat calls, its clicks …

  — Wikipedia, Oilbird

• This squid farms glowing bacteria in its body to erase its own shadow

  The Hawaiian bobtail squid hatches with no bacteria at all, then within hours recruits a specific microbe, Vibrio fischeri, into a light organ on its underside. The bacteria glow t…

  — Wikipedia, Hawaiian Bobtail Squid

• This barnacle castrates a crab, then turns it into a babysitter for its eggs

  Sacculina larvae inject themselves into a crab and grow into a root-like network through its entire body. The parasite sterilizes its host, and if the crab is male, reshapes its ab…

  — Wikipedia, Sacculina

• A reef fish was filmed smashing clams against a rock like a hammer

  An orange-dotted tuskfish was filmed digging a clam from the seabed, carrying it across the reef, and repeatedly flinging it against a chosen rock until the shell cracked open. It'…

  — University of California, Santa Cruz, Video shows tool use by a fish

• Zebra stripes evolved to confuse biting flies, not predators

  For over a century scientists assumed zebra stripes were camouflage against lions. Field experiments instead show striped hides are far less attractive to blood-sucking horseflies …

  — Tim Caro et al., The function of zebra stripes

• Lichens aren't two organisms living together -- they're three

  Textbooks describe lichen as a simple partnership between a fungus and an alga or cyanobacterium. In 2016 researchers found a second, previously overlooked fungal partner -- a yeas…

  — Toby Spribille et al., Basidiomycete yeasts in the cortex of ascomycete macrolichens

• A bat sleeps inside a carnivorous plant and pays rent in droppings

  Borneo's Nepenthes hemsleyana pitcher plant has largely given up digesting insects. Instead, Hardwicke's woolly bats roost inside its pitchers by day, and the plant draws up to a t…

  — T.U. Grafe et al., A novel resource-service mutualism between bats and pitcher plants

• This vulture's diet is up to 90% bone, and it dyes its own feathers red

  The bearded vulture's diet is up to 90% bone and bone marrow, the highest reliance on bone of any vertebrate, digested by stomach acid roughly as strong as battery acid. Bones too …

  — Antoni Margalida et al., Bearded vulture bone-eating ecology and cosmetic plumage colouration

• An invisible line through Indonesia splits Asian and Australian animals

  While mapping species across the Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace noticed that islands only tens of kilometers apart had starkly different wildlife -- tigers and monkeys to…

  — Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago

• Darwin predicted a moth with a foot-long tongue decades before anyone found one

  In 1862, Darwin examined a Madagascar orchid with a nectar spur nearly 30 centimeters deep and predicted a moth must exist with a proboscis long enough to reach it, though no such …

  — Charles Darwin, On the various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects

• A bird once numbering in the billions was gone within a few decades

  Passenger pigeons were likely the most numerous bird in North America, with single flocks reported to darken the sky for hours and estimated in the billions. Commercial hunting and…

  — Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Passenger Pigeon

• One hormone system explains why some voles mate for life and others don't

  Prairie voles form lasting pair bonds and share parenting duties, while their close relatives, meadow voles, mate promiscuously and never bond. Researchers traced much of the diffe…

  — Thomas Insel and C. Sue Carter, Prairie vole pair-bonding research

• This fish hitchhikes across the ocean using a suction disc on its head

  A remora's first dorsal fin has evolved into a flat, ridged sucker that clamps onto sharks, whales, turtles and even boats, letting the fish travel for free and snack on the host's…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Remora

• The 'world's ugliest animal' only looks that way once it's out of the water

  Blobfish live 600 to 1,200 metres down, where pressure is up to 120 times greater than at the surface. Their flesh is a gelatinous mass slightly less dense than water, letting them…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Psychrolutes marcidus

• This insect doesn't hide near flowers — it disguises itself as an entire flower

  The orchid mantis has petal-shaped leg lobes and pink-and-white coloring that let it pass as a blossom, swaying gently as if moved by the breeze. Unlike most camouflage, which just…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Hymenopus coronatus

• This frog hides its own blood to turn invisible while it sleeps

  Glass frogs have translucent skin on their undersides, revealing their hearts, livers and coiled intestines beneath. While resting during the day, they pack roughly 89% of their re…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Centrolenidae

• Two unrelated poisonous species evolve to look identical, purely for mutual benefit

  Unlike a harmless species copying a dangerous one, Müllerian mimicry is when two genuinely toxic species converge on the same warning pattern, so predators only need to learn one l…

  — Fritz Müller, Ueber die Vortheile der Mimicry bei Schmetterlingen

• Beavers reshape entire landscapes so thoroughly they change the local climate

  A beaver dam turns a flowing stream into a pond, drowning some trees while creating wetland habitat that supports far more species than the stream alone ever did. The ponds trap se…

  — Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

• A gecko can drop its own tail in an instant, and the tail keeps moving after

  Grabbed by a predator, many geckos snap off their own tail at a pre-set fracture point in the vertebrae, sacrificing it to escape. The severed tail keeps twitching and flipping for…

  — Standard zoological accounts, Autotomy

• An ant colony builds bridges out of its own living bodies, then dismantles them

  Army ants crossing a gap in the forest floor will link their own bodies, leg to leg, into a bridge for the rest of the colony to walk across. Researchers found the ants constantly …

  — Matthew Lutz, Chris Reid, et al., Army Ants Dynamically Adjust Living Bridges in Response to a Cost-Benefit Trade-Off

• The fastest animal on Earth isn't the cheetah, it's a bird folding its wings and falling

  A peregrine falcon hunts by climbing high above its prey, then tucking its wings into a steep dive called a stoop, reaching speeds recorded over 200 mph, faster than a Formula 1 ca…

  — Vance A. Tucker, Gliding Flight: Speed and Acceleration of Ideal Falcons during Diving and Pull Out

• A single-celled organism with no brain redesigned Tokyo's rail network from scratch

  Researchers placed a yellow slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, onto a map of Tokyo with oat flakes marking the positions of major stations, and watched it grow a network connecting…

  — Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, and colleagues, Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design

• An octopus was filmed carrying coconut shells across the seafloor to use as portable armor

  Marine biologists filmed veined octopuses off Indonesia collecting halved coconut shells, stacking them together, and awkwardly carrying them across open sand while walking on two …

  — Julian K. Finn, Tom Tregenza, and Mark D. Norman, Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut-Carrying Octopus

• A chimp stripping leaves off a twig overturned science's definition of what makes us human

  In 1960 at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, Jane Goodall watched a chimpanzee strip the leaves from a twig, then poke it into a termite mound and withdraw it covered in insects to eat. It…

  — Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man

• The world's largest known organism is a single fungus spanning 3.7 square miles

  In Oregon's Malheur National Forest, one genetic individual of the fungus Armillaria ostoyae has spread underground for an estimated 2,000-8,000 years, now covering roughly 2,385 a…

  — Bonnie A. Ferguson et al., Coarse-scale population structure of pathogenic Armillaria species in a mixed-conifer forest in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon

• A box jellyfish's sting can stop a human heart within minutes

  Chironex fleckeri's venom is potent enough to cause fatal cardiovascular collapse within two to five minutes of a sting, among the fastest-acting venoms of any animal. Its tentacle…

  — James Tibballs, Australian venomous jellyfish, envenomation syndromes, toxins and therapy

• A salmon can smell its way back to the exact stream where it hatched

  In 1951, Arthur Hasler and Warren Wisby showed that young salmon imprint on the unique chemical scent of their home stream before heading out to sea. Years later, returning adults …

  — Arthur D. Hasler and Warren J. Wisby, Discrimination of stream odors by fishes and its relation to parent stream behavior

• One rainforest tree's seeds can only spread with help from a giant flightless bird

  The southern cassowary swallows rainforest fruit whole, including seeds up to 6cm across that almost no other animal in the forest can process. For some tree species, passing throu…

  — M. G. Bradford and D. A. Westcott, Consequences of southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius, L.) gut passage and deposition pattern on the germination of rainforest seeds

• Earth's biggest migration happens every night, mostly out of sight

  Every evening, an estimated 10 billion tons of ocean animals — mostly zooplankton, small fish and squid — rise hundreds of metres toward the surface to feed under cover of darkness…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Diel vertical migration

• A baobab tree can store more water in its trunk than a swimming pool

  Baobab trunks are spongy and fibrous rather than solid wood, built specifically to swell and hold water gathered in the rainy season. A large baobab can store up to 120,000 litres …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Adansonia digitata

• Giant kelp can grow half a metre in a single day

  Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp, is the fastest-growing marine plant known, adding up to 60cm of new frond in a single day under good light and nutrients. A single plant can climb…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Macrocystis pyrifera

• This plant can dry to a crisp for years, then unfurl green again in hours

  Selaginella lepidophylla, the resurrection plant of Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert, survives losing nearly all its water by curling into a tight brown ball and shutting its metabolism …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Selaginella lepidophylla

• A strangler fig starts life as a houseguest, then becomes its host's coffin

  A strangler fig's seed usually germinates high in a tree fork after a bird drops it there. Its roots grow down around the host's trunk, fusing into a woody lattice, while its crown…

  — Francis E. Putz and N. Michele Holbrook, Strangler Fig Rooting Habits and Nutrient Relations in the Llanos of Venezuela

• An insect larva builds a sand pit engineered so nothing can climb out

  Antlion larvae dig steep conical pits in loose sand, spiraling backward while flinging grains with their heads until the walls sit right at the angle where sand barely holds togeth…

  — Jeffrey R. Lucas, The Biophysics of Pit Construction by Antlion Larvae

• One vulture holds the altitude record for any bird — set by hitting a jet engine

  In 1973, a Ruppell's vulture collided with a commercial aircraft over Ivory Coast at 11,300 metres (37,000 feet), knocking out one engine before the plane landed safely. Feather re…

  — Roxie C. Laybourne, Collision Between a Vulture and an Aircraft at an Altitude of 37,000 Feet

• This turtle survives months underwater without a single breath of oxygen

  Trapped under ice all winter with no access to air, painted turtles switch almost entirely to anaerobic metabolism, a process that would poison most animals with lactic acid within…

  — Donald C. Jackson, Hibernating without Oxygen: Physiological Adaptations of the Painted Turtle

• This plant has no chlorophyll, it feeds through stolen fungal threads

  Ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) contains no chlorophyll and makes no food of its own. Instead it taps into mycorrhizal fungi in the genera Russula and Lactarius, siphoning off the …

  — Wikipedia contributors, Monotropa uniflora

• This bacterium shrugs off radiation doses that would kill a person 3,000 times over

  Deinococcus radiodurans can survive ionizing radiation doses roughly 3,000 times the amount that would kill a human, its DNA shattering into hundreds of pieces in the process. It c…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Deinococcus radiodurans

• A waterfall in Antarctica runs blood-red from microbes trapped a million years ago

  Blood Falls seeps from beneath Taylor Glacier in Antarctica, stained deep red by iron-rich brine that oxidizes on contact with air. The water comes from a pocket of ancient seawate…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Blood Falls

• Scientists found animals that live their entire lives without oxygen

  Three species of Loricifera, tiny animals smaller than a millimetre, were discovered living in oxygen-free mud at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike tardigrades, which mer…

  — Wikipedia contributors, Loricifera

• This fish 'sees' in pitch-black water using its own electric field

  The African elephantnose fish generates a weak electric field around its body and reads distortions in that field through skin receptors, letting it detect the size, shape and even…

  — Gerhard von der Emde, Active Electrolocation and its Practical Applications

• A chameleon's tongue can out-accelerate a fighter jet

  A chameleon's tongue launches from its mouth in as little as 20 milliseconds, reaching peak accelerations of over 260 times the force of gravity — far beyond what a human body coul…

  — Christopher V. Anderson, Power Amplification Increases with Contact Time in Chameleon Tongue Projection

• This ancient sea creature sees the world through an eye with no lens at all

  The chambered nautilus, a relative of squid and octopuses that has barely changed in 500 million years, has eyes that work like a pinhole camera: light enters through a small open …

  — Peter D. Ward, Nautilus: The Biology of the Living Fossil

• Some mountain snow turns pink from algae that thrive in the cold

  In summer, patches of alpine and polar snow can turn a deep watermelon-pink, colored by blooms of the cold-loving algae Chlamydomonas nivalis. The algae produce a red carotenoid pi…

  — Ronald W. Hoham, Snow Algae: Snow Albedo Changes, Growth, and Ecological Functions

• The opah is the only fish known to be fully warm-blooded

  Most fish run cold, matching the ocean around them. In 2015, NOAA biologist Nicholas Wegner found the opah constantly flaps its pectoral fins to generate heat, then uses a speciali…

  — Nicholas C. Wegner et al., Whole-Body Endothermy in a Mesopelagic Fish, the Opah, Lampris guttatus

• Cornered by a coyote, this lizard shoots blood out of its own eyes

  When a canid predator clamps down on a horned lizard, it can restrict blood flow leaving its head until vessels near the eyelids rupture, firing a jet of blood up to 1.5 metres. He…

  — Wade C. Sherbrooke, Blood-Squirting Variability in Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma)

• This snake flattens itself into a wing and glides between trees

  Southeast Asia's Chrysopelea snakes launch from branches, flatten their ribs to double their body width, and undulate side to side as they fall, gliding up to 100 metres. Biologist…

  — Jake Socha, Aerodynamics research on gliding flight in Chrysopelea

• Bonobos settle fights with sex, not violence, and females run the group

  Unlike chimpanzees, bonobos rarely fight to the death. Primatologist Frans de Waal documented how bonobo groups defuse tension over food, status or strangers through casual sexual …

  — Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates

• The Portuguese man o' war isn't one animal — it's a colony of thousands as one

  Despite looking and acting like a jellyfish, the Portuguese man o' war is a siphonophore: a colonial organism made of specialized, genetically identical individuals called zooids, …

  — Species account, Portuguese man o' war

• No single monarch butterfly finishes its migration — it takes four generations

  Monarch butterflies in eastern North America fly up to 4,800 km to overwinter in a specific patch of Mexican forest their great-great-grandparents left the previous spring. Three o…

  — Species account, Monarch butterfly migration

• Cuttlefish can't see color, yet they camouflage to match their surroundings' colors

  Cuttlefish have only a single type of photoreceptor, which should make true color vision impossible, yet they produce some of the most precise color-matching camouflage in nature u…

  — Roger Hanlon and colleagues (research literature), Cuttlefish camouflage and vision

• This Amazonian bird digests leaves like a cow, and hatches with claws on its wings

  The hoatzin is the only bird known to rely on foregut fermentation, using bacteria in an enlarged crop to break down leaves, the same strategy cows use, which gives the bird a stro…

  — Species account, Hoatzin

• Some pine cones are sealed shut and only open when a wildfire burns past

  Lodgepole and jack pine produce cones coated in a tough resin that stays sealed for years, waiting for the heat of a forest fire to melt it open and release the seeds. This trait, …

  — Botanical species account, Serotiny

• A giant clam's dazzling colors come from algae living inside its own flesh

  Giant clams host millions of photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae directly in their mantle tissue, the same partnership corals rely on, and the algae's pigments produce the cl…

  — Species account, Giant clam

• This ancient worm hunts by firing sticky slime jets from its head like a cannon

  Velvet worms, a lineage largely unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, catch prey by shooting two jets of sticky slime up to 30 body-lengths from glands near their mouth, ent…

  — Species account, Onychophora

• The venom of the world's deadliest snail became a non-addictive painkiller

  Cone snails harpoon prey with a venom-loaded, disposable tooth, and one species' venom is potent enough to kill a human. Scientists isolated a single component of that venom and tu…

  — Species account, Cone snail

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