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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
In the cold months, when leaves and fruit are gone from Chinese mountain forest, golden snub-nosed monkeys switch to lichens growing on tree bark. Lichen can dominate the winter diet, and it is available in snow when almost nothing else is.
In April 2018 police in Toliara, Madagascar, opened a private house and found roughly ten thousand radiated tortoises held inside, one of the largest single seizures of a protected reptile ever recorded, and a measure of the scale of the trade.
Emperor tamarins routinely form stable mixed troops with saddleback tamarins, travelling, foraging and responding to alarms together for months at a time. The two species feed at different heights, which reduces competition while doubling the number of eyes watching for predators.
Macrotus californicus has unusually large eyes for a leaf-nosed bat and can locate prey in dim light with its sonar effectively switched off. In experiments it caught insects using vision alone, which few echolocating bats manage.
At around 20 grams the giant hummingbird is roughly ten times the mass of the smallest hummingbird, and its wingbeat is slow enough to count, near 10 to 15 beats per second rather than the family's usual blur.
For decades, crews in the Southern Ocean recorded a repetitive quacking pulse train they nicknamed the bio-duck, with no idea what made it. In 2014, acoustic tags attached to Antarctic minke whales matched the sound to the animal.
Male Atlantic blue marlin rarely exceed about 160 kilograms, while females can pass 500. Every marlin of trophy size is female, a fact with direct consequences for how the species is fished.
A cowbird is raised by warblers or vireos and never sees a parent of its own kind, yet as an adult it recognises and joins cowbirds. Experiments point to a password call that switches on attention to its own species.
An anemonefish is not born immune to its host. It acclimates over hours or days, contacting the tentacles in short bouts, and ends up wearing a mucus coat the anemone's stinging cells no longer read as prey.
The eastern monarch migration spans thousands of kilometres, but no individual butterfly makes the full circuit. The insects that fly south to Mexico are the great-grandchildren of those that left it, navigating to forests they have never seen.
The cream patch on a giant otter's throat differs from animal to animal in shape and extent. Researchers photograph these patches to identify individuals across years without capturing or tagging anything.
A whirligig lives exactly at the waterline, where air and water demand different optics. Each compound eye is divided into an upper half looking into the air and a lower half looking down into the water.
Before 1955 a coastal taipan bite was effectively a death sentence in Australia. The venom that made an antivenom possible was obtained by a young amateur collector, Kevin Budden, who was bitten securing the snake and died the next day.
The elongated, mobile nose of a dik-dik is a heat-exchange organ. Moisture evaporating from the nasal lining cools blood passing through it, and that cooled blood chills the arteries feeding the brain. It still costs water, but far less than cooling the whole body would.
In the 1980s, tuberculosis from a rubbish tip killed the most aggressive males of a Kenyan olive baboon troop. The troop that remained was markedly less aggressive, and stayed that way for years after every original survivor had gone.
Goliath beetles are routinely called the heaviest insects, and by larval mass that holds. The grubs can outweigh the adults they become, because pupation sheds water and tissue rather than adding it.
Spreading four fully webbed feet and flaring skin flaps along its limbs, the frog turns a fall into a controlled descent of fifteen metres or more, steering as it goes, but it generates no thrust.
The fuzzy branching growth on a kelp blade and the millimetre-wide swimming medusa in the plankton are the same species in different phases. Neither looks like the other, and the colony's sole route to sexual reproduction runs through the swimmer.
A specimen recorded in Massachusetts Bay in 1870 is cited with a bell about 2.3 metres wide and tentacles reported near 37 metres. The length record rests on trailing threads that stretch, not on a rigid body that could be measured like a whale.
Crassostrea virginica typically matures first as a male and later switches to female, and some individuals switch back. Sex is not fixed at settlement; it responds to size, age and conditions such as food supply.
The body louse lives in clothing, not on skin, so it could not exist before clothing did. Dating the genetic split between head and body lice gives an upper bound on when humans began wearing clothes, independent of any surviving garment.
After brown anoles invaded Florida islands, resident green anoles shifted to higher perches within months. Over about fifteen years, roughly twenty generations, their toe pads grew larger and gained more adhesive lamellae, a measurable evolutionary response to competition.
Boas are overwhelmingly a tropical American group, and only two lineages reach the United States: the rosy boas of the southwestern deserts and the rubber boas, which range north to British Columbia. How many species each lineage contains is still argued over.
Force-plate measurements on a trained secretarybird recorded kicks of roughly 195 newtons, about five times the bird's own weight, delivered in contacts lasting around fifteen milliseconds. The strike is faster than the bird could correct with vision alone.