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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
The yeti crab's hairy claws are not decoration. The setae carry dense mats of chemosynthetic bacteria, and a related species has been filmed waving its claws over vent fluid in what appears to be deliberate cultivation before the crab eats the crop.
Submersible and diver footage has shown giant oarfish holding a vertical, head-up posture and propelling themselves with an undulating dorsal fin, rather than swimming horizontally like a conventional fish.
River buffalo carry 50 chromosomes and swamp buffalo 48, the result of a fusion in the swamp lineage. They interbreed and produce fertile offspring anyway, which makes the pair a useful counterexample to tidy species definitions.
Unlike a whale shark, which can actively suck water in, the basking shark relies on ram filtration alone. It swims with its mouth open and lets forward motion drive water across bristle-like gill rakers, which is why it must keep moving to eat.
Most big cats suffocate their prey with a throat or muzzle grip. The jaguar frequently does something else: it bites through the temporal bones of the skull, or through the back of the neck, killing by direct damage to the brain or spinal cord.
The two longest lower teeth of the common fangtooth are so large relative to its skull that the fish has a pair of pockets on either side of its brain for them to slide into when the mouth closes.
Pistol shrimp excavate and maintain a burrow; the goby, which cannot dig, lives in it and stands guard. The shrimp keeps an antenna touching the goby's tail, and a flick of the fin sends both underground.
Warthogs sleep in holes they do not dig, usually abandoned aardvark burrows. An adult backs in tail first, leaving its tusks facing the entrance, so anything following it down meets the sharp end.
The Baikal seal is the world's only exclusively freshwater pinniped, landlocked more than 1,500 kilometres from the nearest sea. How its ancestors reached the lake is still argued over, with river routes from the Arctic the leading candidate.
Chelifer cancroides was noticed in old libraries because it hunts the psocids and mites that live in paste, glue and damp paper. It does not eat books; it eats the animals that do, which is how a beneficial predator ended up named after the damage.
Instead of scattering caches, this squirrel piles cones in a single central midden that can accumulate over decades and reach cubic metres of discarded scales. The midden's damp interior keeps cones closed and their seeds edible, and the squirrel defends it year-round.
When seized, the frog contracts a muscle that snaps a small bone in the toe and drives the sharpened tip out through the skin of the foot, producing a claw where a moment before there was none.
In September 1968 the Soviet Zond 5 probe looped around the Moon and returned to Earth carrying two Central Asian tortoises. They came back alive, three months before the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to make the same trip.
It looks like a stocky iguana, but the tuatara belongs to Rhynchocephalia, a lineage that split from the ancestors of lizards and snakes in the Triassic. Its nearest relatives have been extinct for tens of millions of years.
A bonded titi pair sits shoulder to shoulder and wraps their tails around each other, a posture recorded through the night and during rest. Separating a pair produces measurable rises in cortisol, making titis a standard model for attachment.
A hunting emperor dragonfly does not follow its target. It steers to a point where the prey is going to be, holding the victim at a fixed bearing while closing the distance, a strategy that pushes capture success far above what a simple chase could achieve.
The giant African land snail needs calcium to build its very large shell, and it will scrape it from painted walls, plaster and concrete when plants alone cannot supply enough. The damage is a side effect of shell growth, not appetite for buildings.
Litters average fifteen to twenty young, and counts as high as thirty-two have been recorded. The female carries an unusually high number of teats, reported at up to about twenty-nine.
Koalas carry looped and whorled ridge patterns on their fingertips that are difficult to tell from human prints under a microscope. The trait evolved independently, long after the marsupial and primate lineages parted ways.
Holding a deep breath is what a human diver does and exactly what a true seal avoids. A phocid empties much of its lungs, stores oxygen in blood and muscle instead, and lets the remaining airway collapse under pressure to keep nitrogen out of the bloodstream.
A male red-winged blackbird can expose or conceal his scarlet epaulettes at will. On territory he flares them in display; away from it he covers them with black feathers, and experiments blacking out the patch cost males their territories.
Hadogenes troglodytes holds the record for length, driven by a whip-thin tail that in males can exceed the body. That tail is a poor weapon: the species has weak venom, hunts by crushing, and defends itself by wedging immovably into rock.
Corkscrew-shaped wounds on dead seals and porpoises in the North Sea were long blamed on ship propellers or offshore ducted turbines. Video and forensic work eventually identified large male grey seals as the source.
A Brandt's bat banded in Siberia was recaptured at least forty-one years later. For an animal of about seven grams, that is roughly ten times the lifespan body size would predict, and no other mammal exceeds the ratio.