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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
Archival tags show bigeye tuna spending daylight hours several hundred metres down in cold water and rising towards the surface at night, tracking the vertical migration of the prey layer rather than the sun.
Goblin sharks catch prey with the most extreme jaw protrusion of any shark. Rare deep-sea footage shows the whole jaw apparatus slingshot forward almost to the tip of the long snout, reaching nearly a tenth of the body length in under half a second.
A velvet worm ejects adhesive slime from a pair of head papillae, and the nozzles whip from side to side dozens of times a second. The oscillation is passive, driven by the fluid jet rather than by muscle.
A family group of acorn woodpeckers stores acorns in individually drilled holes in one shared trunk. A single well-used granary can hold tens of thousands of acorns, and the group defends and maintains it across generations.
The sail sits diagonally across the float, and populations contain mirror-image individuals angled the opposite way. Each form sails at an angle to the wind in the opposite direction, so a single onshore blow can strand one form while the other stays at sea.
Grinding gritty seagrass wears teeth out fast. Manatee molars migrate forward through the jaw, fall out at the front and are replaced from behind, a marching-teeth arrangement shared with elephants only in outline, not in mechanism.
The dabbling that gave Procyon lotor its species name, the washer, is not cleaning. Water softens the skin of the forepaws and sharpens their touch, so the raccoon is examining an object rather than rinsing it.
Sponges defend themselves with glass spicules and unpleasant chemistry, and most reef animals leave them alone. Hawksbills eat them in quantity, and in some regions sponges make up the majority of the diet by mass.
Breeding great egrets grow lacy back plumes that fetched prices by weight comparable with precious metals around 1900. The slaughter of nesting colonies provoked a public reaction that produced bird protection societies, national laws and the first wardens.
A young Risso's dolphin is uniformly dark grey. Over a lifetime it accumulates pale tooth rakes from other Risso's dolphins and marks from squid, until an old animal can look almost entirely white.
As a big brown bat closes on an insect, its echolocation rate climbs from about ten calls a second to roughly two hundred. The resulting feeding buzz updates the target's position almost continuously in the last fraction of a second.
Nectar in the bertam palm's flower buds ferments in place, reaching about 3.8 per cent alcohol at its strongest, though most buds measure far weaker. Pen-tailed treeshrews drink it night after night, at doses that would intoxicate a person, and show no visible signs of it.
Medicinal leeches are a cleared medical device in modern reconstructive surgery. They are applied to reattached fingers, ears and skin flaps to drain congested blood while small veins regrow, not to remove supposed bad humours.
Its cuttlebone is too small to float the animal comfortably, so Metasepia pfefferi ambulates across the bottom on two arms and two flaps of the mantle, pulsing bright colours as it goes.
Norwegian whalers noticed that these whales arrived off the coast at the same time each year as the seje, the pollock. The whale took its name from the coincidence, and the fish has nothing to do with its diet.
True seals rely on blubber. Fur seals rely on an underfur so dense, in the region of 300,000 hairs per square inch on parts of the body, that it holds a layer of air against the skin and keeps cold water off entirely.
Almost every primate lives on fruit, leaves, seeds or animals. The gelada lives on grass. Blades and rhizomes make up the large majority of its intake, plucked one at a time by a hand built for exactly that job.
In a full gallop a greyhound is airborne during two separate phases of each stride, once with legs gathered and once with legs extended. This double suspension, not raw leg speed, is what places the breed among the fastest land mammals.
Live observations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute showed that the barreleye's tubular eyes are not fixed upward. They pivot forward within a fluid-filled transparent shield that earlier net-caught specimens had always lost.
The titan beetle is the longest-bodied beetle known, and adults arrive at lights in the Guianas most years. Despite that, the larva has never been collected in the wild, so its size and habits remain inference.
A tarsier's eyeball is roughly sixteen millimetres across, about as large as the animal's entire brain and weighing nearly as much. The eyes cannot rotate in their sockets, so the animal turns its head almost halfway round instead.
The male guards the clutch until the embryos move, then swallows them into his vocal sac, where they develop for weeks and are eventually released as fully formed froglets from his mouth.
![Photograph of King Cobra: Photo by Dr. Anand Titus and Geeta N Pereira ([1])](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F4%2F4d%2F12_-_The_Mystical_King_Cobra_and_Coffee_Forests.jpg%3Futm_source%3Den.wikipedia.org%26utm_campaign%3Dimageinfo%26utm_content%3Dthumbnail_unscaled&w=3840&q=75)
Almost no other snake gathers material and constructs anything. The female king cobra scrapes leaf litter into a mound with a loop of her own body, lays inside it, and stays on guard while the decaying leaves warm the clutch.
Genetic sampling across Africa found that animals which all looked like a single dwarf crocodile species were three deeply divergent lineages, separated for millions of years. Two older names, one from 1867 and one from 1919, were lifted out of synonymy to cover them.