Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Permanent editions
Published facts keep their original date, evidence and correction trail. Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
Spray is a last resort with a limited supply. Before using it a striped skunk stamps its front feet, hisses, raises its tail and may charge without discharging, a graded sequence that resolves most encounters without chemistry.
No squirrel flaps. The patagium turns a leap into a controlled descent steered by wrist cartilage and tail. A 2019 finding added a stranger detail: under ultraviolet light, flying squirrel fur fluoresces pink, and nobody yet knows why.
An opossum confronted by a predator can enter an involuntary catatonic state, going limp with the mouth open and releasing a foul green fluid from its anal glands. The animal does not decide to do this and cannot end it on cue.
Instead of straining plankton from open water, the gray whale rolls onto one flank on the seabed, sucks in sediment and filters out the small crustaceans living in it. Most individuals favour the right side, and their baleen wears accordingly.
Camels share with llamas, alpacas and the other camelids a trait no other mammal has: oval red blood cells. The shape lets the cells pass through capillaries when the blood thickens with dehydration, and they can swell to more than double volume on rehydration without bursting.
Selection for breast muscle has made the standard commercial turkey so front-heavy that males cannot physically mount females. Essentially all commercial turkey production now depends on artificial insemination, a fact rarely mentioned on the packaging.
The common snapper's reputation for aggression comes almost entirely from encounters on land. Its lower shell is a narrow cross that leaves the limbs and neck exposed, so it has no way to shut itself in and defends the only way left to it.
A buried softshell can stay under for hours because its lungs are not its only route to oxygen. Thin skin over the leathery shell, and a heavily vascularised throat lining pumped with water, take up dissolved oxygen directly.
The venom that makes this desert scorpion dangerous is a chemical library of small peptides. One of them, chlorotoxin, binds preferentially to certain tumour tissue and has been developed into an experimental imaging agent that makes tumour margins glow during surgery.
At Suaq Balimbing in Aceh, orangutans strip twigs into probes to lever seeds out of a stinging fruit and to fish insects from tree holes. Populations a short distance away, with the same fruit available, largely do not.
Young greater sac-winged bats produce long strings of repeated, rhythmic syllables that carry no message. The sequences resemble human infant babbling closely enough that researchers apply the same eight defining criteria, and they precede adult song.
At speed, this porpoise does not leap. It surfaces so fast that water is forced up into a distinctive fan of spray behind the head, a signature visible from a long way off and unlike anything other porpoises produce.
After a few weeks on thyme the caterpillar drops to the ground, is carried into a red ant nest as though it were a stray grub, and then spends ten months eating the ants' own brood while mimicking their chemistry and sound.
Each dolphin invents a distinctive whistle in its first months and keeps it for life. Others copy that whistle to address the individual, and playback experiments show a dolphin responds when it hears a copy of its own.
Not every insectivorous bat catches things in the air. The greater mouse-eared bat listens for the footsteps of carabid beetles walking on bare soil, drops onto them, and takes prey from the ground rather than from flight.
For a long time they were assumed to be permanently rooted. Submersible video showed animals detaching part of the stalk and dragging themselves across the seabed with their arms, moving slowly but purposefully away from approaching sea urchins.
The right side of a fin whale's lower jaw is white and the left side dark, a lopsided pattern almost unknown among mammals. The asymmetry continues inside the mouth, where the front baleen plates on the right are pale.
Sabella spallanzanii sorts every particle its feeding crown collects. Fine matter goes to the mouth, oversized grains are rejected, and an intermediate grade is stored and cemented with mucus to extend the tube it lives in.
Four sensory clubs hang from the bell, each carrying six eyes, two of them with a lens, cornea and retina like a vertebrate's. There is no central brain to receive the images, only a ring of nerve tissue that steers the animal around obstacles.