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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
A sea bass of a size that fits a dinner plate is often several years old, and females may not spawn until five to eight years. That late maturity is why wild stocks respond slowly to fishing pressure and quickly to minimum-size rules.
Pederson's cleaner shrimp does not wait passively for customers. It whips its long white antennae and sways at the edge of its anemone, and fish that see the display are more likely to stop, hold still and open their gill covers to be cleaned.
The black caiman belongs to the alligator family rather than to the crocodiles, yet it grows larger than the American alligator and outweighs every other predator in the Amazon basin, jaguar and green anaconda included.
Rain is almost absent in the Namib dunes, but fog arrives from the Atlantic on many nights. Onymacris unguicularis climbs a dune crest, tilts head-down into the wind, and lets condensed water run to its mouth.
Radiocarbon dating of deep Hawaiian black coral has returned ages of over four thousand years for individual colonies, placing them among the oldest known living animals. The skeleton grows in fine layers, so it records the water it grew in.
Cuvier's dwarf caiman rarely exceeds 1.6 metres, yet it carries bony plates embedded in the skin of both back and belly, and even inside its eyelids. The armour is heavy enough to have made its hide commercially useless.
Satellite-tagged bar-tailed godwits have flown from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping, covering distances above eleven thousand kilometres over eight to eleven days. There is no land or food on the route, so the birds neither eat nor drink for the entire flight.
Ferrets are susceptible to human influenza viruses, develop comparable symptoms and transmit the virus by air to other ferrets. That combination makes them the standard animal model for assessing whether a new flu strain could spread between people.
Io moth caterpillars are covered in branched green spines that break on contact and deliver venom into the skin. The result is immediate burning pain and welts, one of the few genuinely stinging caterpillars in North America.
A sea spider's trunk is too narrow to hold its organs, so the digestive tract branches into every leg and, in most species, the gonads do too. Some sea spiders release eggs through pores on the legs rather than from the body.
By day it sits balled up on a sponge or coral. After dark, in a current, it opens its repeatedly branched arms into a broad mesh and catches drifting plankton on hooked spines along the tendrils.
Its round face, forward-set eyes and grasping tail have led observers to take the cuscus for a small primate. It is a marsupial, and New Guinea and Australia have no native monkeys at all.
A stoat in white winter coat retains one black marking, the tip of its tail. Experiments with models suggest the spot draws a raptor's strike away from the body, acting as a decoy rather than an oversight.
Camelids make antibodies with no light chains at all. The single binding domain from those antibodies can be produced alone, is unusually small and stable, and has become the basis of a licensed medicine and a large research toolkit.
A rabbit produces two kinds of dropping. The hard pellets are waste; the soft, clustered caecotrophs are taken directly from the anus and swallowed whole, delivering microbial protein and B vitamins that the first pass could not extract.
Amphipods from the floor of the Mariana Trench carry enzymes that break down cellulose. In a habitat with almost no food, they appear to exploit driftwood and plant debris that sinks eleven kilometres from the surface.
The matamata does not chase or bite. It opens a wide mouth and drops the floor of its throat in a fraction of a second, creating a pressure drop that pulls a volume of water, and the fish in it, straight in.
A pileated woodpecker digs long rectangular cavities into dead trunks to reach carpenter ant galleries. The shape is diagnostic: no other North American woodpecker leaves excavations of that size and geometry, and the holes outlive the bird that made them.
The neat horizontal rows of holes a sapsucker drills keep sap flowing for weeks, and the birds tend them like a crop. Hummingbirds, warblers, squirrels, bats and insects all feed at the wells they maintain.
Painted ladies move between tropical Africa and northern Europe in a multi-generation loop covering thousands of kilometres. The northward leg was obvious for centuries; the return flight was only confirmed once radar and isotope work caught butterflies flying south at altitude.
Female belted kingfishers carry a rufous band across the belly and flanks that males lack, making them the more colourful sex. Reversed plumage difference of this kind is rare among North American birds and its function is not settled.
A single common tern is no threat to a fox or a gull. A colony is different: dozens of birds rise together, dive at the intruder's head, and strike hard enough to draw blood, which is why nesting islands are marked off during the breeding season.
Under ultraviolet illumination, springhare fur fluoresces in patchy pinks and oranges. Springhares are the first thoroughly documented case of biofluorescence in an Old World placental mammal.
Sloane's viperfish has fangs so long that the front teeth of the lower jaw project outside the head when the mouth shuts, curving back past the eyes rather than folding into any socket.