Imagine a parrot that cannot fly, spends much of its life walking through forests at night, can live for decades, and attracts mates by producing deep booming calls that travel …
Some sharks kill prey by overpowering it. The cookiecutter shark uses a very different strategy: it takes a piece and leaves the victim alive. A typical cookiecutter shark bite is …
A spider stretched across a dinner plate sounds like something invented for a horror movie, yet one species can genuinely approach that scale. The giant huntsman spider size is extraordinary …
If you looked for a katydid’s ears, its head would be the obvious place to start. You would also be looking in the wrong place. The remarkable katydid ears on …
A pistol shrimp is only a few centimeters long, yet it can produce an underwater sound powerful enough to compete with some of the loudest biological noises in the sea. …
Catching a bee in midair is impressive. Swallowing one without being stung requires another level of specialization. The famous bee-eater sting removal behavior solves that problem through a carefully coordinated …
Cut many animals in half and the result is catastrophic injury. Cut certain planarian flatworms into appropriately sized fragments, however, and something extraordinary can happen: separate pieces can rebuild the …
Few courtship displays are as instantly recognizable as a blue-footed booby lifting one brilliant turquoise foot after another in an exaggerated high-stepping dance. The performance looks comical to human observers, …
A kangaroo rat emerges from its burrow after sunset. The desert surface that was dangerously hot only hours earlier is beginning to cool. The small rodent pauses, listens, and then …
A spotted hyena approaches the remains of an ungulate carcass. Much of the obvious meat may already be gone, but the carcass is far from nutritionally irrelevant. Skin, connective tissue, …