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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
Taste buds in a channel catfish are not confined to the mouth. They cover the barbels, head, flanks and tail, with estimates running into the hundreds of thousands per fish, so the animal detects food by touching it with any part of its body.
Griffon vultures eat carcasses laden with bacteria that would sicken most animals. Extremely acidic stomachs destroy the majority of ingested microbes, while the gut still hosts clostridia and fusobacteria that most vertebrates could not tolerate.
For decades the varroa mite was described as feeding on haemolymph, the bee equivalent of blood. Work published in 2019 showed it primarily consumes the fat body, an organ that handles immunity, detoxification and overwintering reserves.
The leathery pouches beachcombers call mermaid's purses come from skates, catsharks and their relatives. Most British finds are small-spotted catshark cases; among the skates, the thornback's is the one recorded most often. Each has four horns, a felted surface, and once held a single embryo.
A returning forager runs a straight line on the vertical comb while vibrating her body. The angle of that run away from straight up matches the angle of the food source away from the sun, translating a horizontal bearing into a gravitational one.
Java is one of the most densely populated islands on Earth. Its tiger disappeared not chiefly through trophy hunting but because the lowland forest was converted to rice, teak and plantations, leaving no space large enough to hold a breeding population.
The Colorado potato beetle has evolved resistance to compounds across more than fifty active ingredients and every major insecticide class used against it, including the arsenical Paris green that first controlled it in the 1860s.
DNA places Haast's eagle among the little eagles of the genus Hieraaetus, whose living members weigh about a kilogram. The lineage gained roughly ten to fifteen times that mass in under two million years, one of the fastest size increases documented in vertebrates.
This crocodile digs its nests into river sandbars exposed at the height of the dry season, timing incubation so that hatching coincides with rising water. When rains arrive early, whole clutches drown before they hatch.
Under severe stress the animal ruptures its body wall and expels part of its gut and associated tissue. It survives the loss and regrows the missing organs over a period of weeks, a defence known as evisceration.
A kangaroo rat can live its whole life on dry seeds. It manufactures water by burning carbohydrate, then defends that water with kidneys that produce some of the most concentrated urine known in mammals and with nasal passages that recapture moisture from every breath.
Because chaetognath species tolerate narrow ranges of temperature and salinity and drift with the water they occupy, oceanographers use their presence in plankton samples as a marker of where a body of water came from.
Northern bottlenose whales approach stationary vessels and linger beside them, and they return to injured companions rather than fleeing. Nineteenth-century whalers exploited both habits, taking whole groups from a single boat.
All six quoll species carry white spots on the body, but the spotted-tailed quoll alone continues the pattern along its tail. That single detail separates it from every other quoll in the field.
Sanderlings chase each wave back down the beach and retreat ahead of the next. The timing is not play: the few seconds after water drains is when buried prey is closest to the surface and the sand is soft enough to probe quickly.
Buried up to twenty centimetres deep in oxygen-poor sand, this urchin maintains a mucus-lined vertical funnel to the seabed surface using extremely long specialised tube feet, drawing clean water down to itself.
The coffee was originally collected from droppings of wild civets that chose the ripest cherries themselves. Demand turned it into caged production, where confined animals are force-fed cherries and the original selection effect disappears.
The European eel's breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea were inferred from larval sizes a century ago, but not until 2022 did satellite tags follow adult eels the whole way there.
Mainland woolly mammoths disappeared roughly ten thousand years ago, but a relict population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until about four thousand years ago, overlapping with Egypt's Old Kingdom and the building of the Giza pyramids.
All the males in a breeding population sing broadly the same song, and that song is periodically replaced wholesale by a new one imported from the west. The replacement has been tracked moving from Australia across the South Pacific over several years.
It locates rodents moving beneath snow by sound alone, then plunges through the crust to seize them. Successful captures have been recorded through snow deep enough to hide the owl completely, sometimes tens of centimetres thick.
Up to about two-thirds of its body water turns to ice. The heart stops, breathing stops, and brain activity ceases for weeks, yet the frog thaws in spring and resumes normal life.
The common pheasant looks like a settled part of the British countryside. In fact tens of millions of hand-reared birds are released for shooting each year, briefly making them a large share of the country's total wild-bird biomass before autumn.
The dozens of tiny blue eyes along a scallop's mantle form images by reflecting light from a concave crystal mirror at the back of the eye, the same principle as a reflecting telescope, rather than by focusing it through a lens.