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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.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 hummingbird hawkmoth hovers at flowers, hums audibly and darts between blooms, and is routinely reported as a hummingbird. No hummingbird lives anywhere in Europe today, and none has for tens of millions of years. The resemblance is convergence on the same physical problem.
Asia's water buffalo has been a working animal for thousands of years. Its African counterpart, despite similar size and diet, has resisted every attempt, and the two are not closely related enough for the comparison to hold.
Long-term monitoring of marked Blanding's turtles has followed females well beyond seventy years of age still nesting, with no clear drop in clutch size or hatching success. The species shows little sign of the reproductive decline expected with age.
The world's rarest ape survives as a few dozen animals in one Chinese reserve. The population is small enough that surveyors track named groups and individual births, a precision no other primate census can match.
The shoulder hump of a zebu is a mass of muscle with fatty tissue, not a water store. Its real heat advantage lies elsewhere: a large skin surface, dense sweat glands and a short glossy coat that reflects sunlight.
Alpacas were long assumed to be small llamas, and llamas descend from guanacos. Genetic work in 2001 traced the alpaca instead to the vicuna, the smallest and finest-fleeced wild camelid, and its scientific name was changed to match.
The electric organ of a torpedo ray is the richest known source of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. The receptor was first pulled from electric eel tissue in 1970, but Torpedo membranes carried the work that followed: purification at scale, subunit sequencing and structure.
Since long-term recordings began accumulating in the 1960s, the tonal calls of blue whales have drifted downward in frequency in every ocean where they have been measured. The shift is small, steady and worldwide, and no explanation has yet been settled on.
Rather than bolting from an ambush hunter that is still at a distance, a golden-rumped sengi slaps the leaf litter loudly. The signal tells the predator it has lost surprise, which for an ambush hunter usually ends the attempt.
Shad detect sound far above the range of most fish, into frequencies used by echolocating dolphins. The ability appears to be an early-warning system, and shad respond to ultrasonic pulses by turning and accelerating away.
Cornered on the ground, a southern tamandua rears back, braces on its hind feet and the bare underside of its tail, and holds its clawed forelimbs out. The tail is a grip organ in the canopy and a stabiliser in a fight.
Tracking devices fitted to Arctic terns revealed round trips far longer than the straight-line distance suggests, because the birds loop and detour with the winds. Annual totals above seventy thousand kilometres have been recorded, and some individual routes exceed ninety thousand.
American eels do not hatch male or female. Sex is determined during the freshwater growth phase, and density is the strongest known influence: crowded, downstream habitats tend to produce males, while sparse upstream ones tend to produce females.
Rather than pushing backwards against sand that gives way, it lifts sections of body clear and sets them down at an angle, leaving a trail of separate J-shaped marks rather than a continuous furrow.
Glaciation wiped earthworms from much of northern North America. The large worms now turning garden soil there arrived with European settlement, and in northern hardwood forests they strip the leaf-litter layer that native plants depend on.
A tardigrade is not indestructible. Its extraordinary tolerance belongs to the tun, a desiccated barrel-shaped state in which metabolism becomes undetectable. An active, hydrated tardigrade is a fairly ordinary animal that dies from fairly ordinary things.
Venomous mammals are rare, and the solenodon is among the few. Saliva from a submandibular gland runs along a groove in the second lower incisor and into the wound, a delivery system closer to a snake's than to anything else with fur.
Old World fruit bats lack the laryngeal sonar of other bats. Rousettus reinvented the trick using sharp clicks made with the tongue, a cruder system that is nonetheless enough to fly through a pitch-dark cave.
Despite a formidable skull, tooth wear and stable isotope chemistry indicate the cave bear ate largely plants. Its broad flat molars are built for grinding vegetation rather than shearing flesh, and that dietary narrowness may have contributed to its extinction.
War-zone photographs made this desert arachnid famous for speeds of 40 kilometres per hour, half-metre bodies and flesh-dissolving venom. Measured reality: no venom glands, a top speed of roughly 16 kilometres per hour, and a body usually under seven centimetres.
Matching the brown of a fallen leaf is only the beginning. The dead leaf mantis reproduces leaf veins, irregular edges that read as insect damage, and blotches resembling fungal spotting, and it sways as though moved by air.
Like nearly all scorpions, the Arizona bark scorpion fluoresces a striking cyan under a black light, because compounds in the cuticle absorb ultraviolet and re-emit it as visible light. Field workers use ultraviolet torches to census a desert that otherwise appears empty.
Juveniles are flat five-armed sea stars of ordinary appearance. As the animal grows, the disc inflates and the arms are absorbed into the outline until the adult is a rounded pentagonal cushion with no arms visible.
Mosquitoes collected in the tunnels of the London Underground during the Second World War belong to a form of Culex pipiens that breeds without a blood meal, does not hibernate, mates in confined spaces and bites mammals. Whether the tube created it is another matter.