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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
Elysia chlorotica pierces algal cells, keeps their chloroplasts alive inside its own gut lining, and can then survive for months on photosynthesis. It is an animal that has taken up part of a plant's machinery without becoming a plant.
Sterile larvae of Lucilia sericata are used to clean chronic wounds, eating dead tissue while leaving living tissue intact. In 2004 the United States Food and Drug Administration cleared medical maggots for marketing as a prescription medical device.
Living in cold water at 3,800 metres, this frog barely uses its small lungs. The baggy folds hanging from its body enlarge the skin surface for taking oxygen directly from the lake.
Cranes are ground birds, but the two crowned crane species retain a long hind toe that lets them grip a branch. They perch and roost in trees, a trait they share with no other living crane.
The fastest-growing reef coral in the Caribbean reproduces most often without sex at all. Storm-snapped branches roll into the sediment, reattach, and grow into colonies genetically identical to the parent, which is also why whole thickets can share one immune weakness.
GPS-collar work on wild cheetahs found that most successful hunts were run well below the animal's maximum speed. What separated a catch from a miss was extreme deceleration and tight, high-grip turns in the last seconds.
An antlion larva may spend two years hunting and never defecate. Its midgut is closed off at the rear, waste accumulates internally through the whole larval life, and it is voided only once, when the adult emerges from the pupal cocoon.
Before spraying, a spotted skunk lifts its hindquarters into the air and balances on its front paws, tail spread. The display makes a small animal look larger and points the glands directly at whatever is approaching.
For most of a century, jackals in Africa and Eurasia were treated as one species. Genetic work published in the 2010s showed the African animals are a distinct lineage closer to grey wolves, and they were reclassified as the African wolf.
Blackpoll warblers leave northeastern North America in autumn and fly out over the Atlantic, tracking to the Caribbean and South America. Miniature geolocators carried by individual birds confirmed a nonstop overwater leg lasting two to three days.
Once below the surface, the sandfish stops using its limbs entirely. X-ray filming shows it tucks its legs against the body and propels itself by a travelling wave down the trunk and tail, moving through dry sand at speeds around ten centimetres a second.
A leopard will drag carcasses heavier than itself up into the canopy and wedge them in a fork. The behaviour is not display but theft prevention, and it is most pronounced where lions and spotted hyenas are common.
Experiments published in 2020 showed that Deinopis reacts to low-frequency airborne sound picked up by receptors on its legs, striking backwards at flying insects it never sees, in addition to netting walkers on the ground.
Few reef animals will attack the venomous, spine-covered crown-of-thorns starfish. The humphead wrasse is among the handful that do, alongside the giant triton snail, which links its decline to coral loss.
Legless does not mean snake. The eastern glass lizard blinks, has ear openings behind the eye, and cannot unhinge its jaws to swallow large prey, all traits snakes lack or reverse. Limblessness has evolved repeatedly among lizards.
Euprymna scolopes houses luminous Vibrio fischeri in a dedicated light organ and shines the light downward, matching the moonlight filtering from the surface above and cancelling the silhouette a predator swimming below would otherwise be able to see.
Spring peepers weigh a few grams, yet a full chorus is audible far across a landscape. The volume comes from an inflatable throat sac that works as a resonator, driven by some of the fastest muscles in vertebrates.
Few predators will take a striped skunk, but great horned owls do so routinely. Birds have a poorly developed sense of smell, so the spray that deters mammalian predators costs the owl little, and captured owls often reek of it.
An ocean quahog collected off Iceland in 2006 was aged at 507 years by counting annual shell increments, making it the oldest individual non-colonial animal ever documented. It was named Ming, for the dynasty ruling when it settled.
Polistes dominula foundresses carry variable black markings on the face and clypeus. Experiments in which the patterns were painted over changed how rivals treated them, indicating the marks carry social information rather than being decoration.
The name comes from a single early eighteenth-century engraving of a tarantula feeding on a hummingbird. The spider's recorded diet is dominated by insects, earthworms and amphibians, with vertebrates taken opportunistically rather than as a staple.
The black-browed albatross was once assessed as Endangered, largely because longline and trawl fisheries were killing adults. Simple gear changes, including bird-scaring streamer lines and night setting, contributed to its reassessment down to Least Concern.
Rufous hummingbirds travel north up the Pacific coast in spring and return south through the mountains in late summer, following the sequence of flowering. The one-way journey between Alaska and Mexico runs to about 6,000 kilometres in a bird weighing roughly three grams.
The muskellunge's reputation as the fish of ten thousand casts reflects real ecology rather than caution. As a large solitary top predator it occurs at low natural densities, often well under one adult per hectare in waters that support it.