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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
Queen Alexandra's birdwing is confined to a small area of rainforest in Papua New Guinea, and a 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington destroyed a large part of it in a single event. Oil palm has since taken more.
Ornamental koi are often described as an ancient Japanese tradition. The coloured varieties actually arose in the Niigata region in the early nineteenth century, when rice farmers noticed colour mutations among the food carp kept in their paddy ponds.
A roosting potoo relies on stillness and bark-like plumage, but it does not go blind while frozen. Slits in the upper eyelids let the bird monitor an approaching threat with its eyes apparently shut, keeping the disguise intact.
A king penguin chick is fed heavily through summer, then almost abandoned through winter as its parents forage far away. It can lose much of its mass over those months, which stretches the breeding cycle past a year and forces parents onto an awkward schedule.
Rough-skinned newts carry tetrodotoxin, the same toxin found in pufferfish. Common garter snakes in the same forests have evolved resistance, and where resistant snakes are most common, the newts are most toxic.
The light on a deep-sea anglerfish's fishing rod is not made by the fish. It is made by luminous bacteria housed in a bulb at the tip, an arrangement the fish must acquire rather than inherit.
Its several pairs of leg-like appendages are enlarged tube feet, extended and retracted by pumping seawater rather than by muscle contraction alone. The whole animal is powered by a hydraulic system with no bones and no blood.
Woodpeckers and treecreepers work upward, braced on a stiff tail. Nuthatches descend headfirst, hanging from one backward-set foot without any tail prop, which lets them find food in bark crevices that upward-climbing birds have already passed.
The perentie reaches about two and a half metres, making it the biggest lizard on the continent, yet it is among the least often encountered. It lives in remote rocky desert, keeps deep burrows, and flees at long distance.
A silk moth larva spins its cocoon from one continuous filament, commonly cited at 900 metres or more. Reeling it intact requires killing the pupa before it emerges, because an emerging moth dissolves its way out and severs the thread.
The smallest penguin lands in groups once the light has gone, crossing open beach in a rush. The pattern is usually explained as predator avoidance, and the timing tracks sunset closely enough that artificial lighting can shift it.
A frogfish expands its mouth to about twelve times its resting volume and engulfs prey in roughly six milliseconds, faster than any potential victim can respond. The lure that brings prey in mimics a worm.
The upcurved casque of a rhinoceros hornbill is a thin keratin shell over a mostly empty space crossed by fine bony struts. Only one hornbill in the family has a genuinely solid casque, and that species has been hunted for it.
No living rodent outweighs the capybara, but it is a modest survivor of a much heavier lineage. Extinct South American relatives ran to several hundred kilograms, and the capybara holds its title only because those giants are gone.
No blue pigment exists in a common kingfisher's feathers. The colour comes from microscopic structures in the barbs that scatter short wavelengths, which is why the same bird looks cyan, turquoise or dull brown depending on the angle of light.
Decades of field study in South Australia have shown that shingleback pairs re-form each spring with the same partner, some for more than twenty consecutive seasons. Males follow their partner closely for weeks before mating, a monogamy almost unknown among lizards.
Instead of laying eggs, a female tsetse retains one larva at a time in her uterus and feeds it on a milky secretion. She deposits it fully grown, and it burrows into soil and pupates within about an hour of birth.
Removing this one predator from experimental patches of Washington shoreline caused the community to collapse from roughly fifteen species to a near-monoculture of mussels. The result introduced the term keystone species in 1969.
A bonxie will grab a gannet by the wingtip or tail in flight and hold on until the larger bird gives up its catch. The skua is smaller than its victim, and the tactic works through persistence and grip rather than through size.
Unlike the peregrine, a gyrfalcon usually attacks in fast level flight close to the ground, running down ptarmigan over open tundra. Its heavier build and broader wings suit sustained horizontal pursuit rather than a vertical stoop.
A count of the long-finned pilot whale neocortex found roughly 37 billion neurons, about twice the number in a human neocortex. The finding says something about scale and structure, and much less about intelligence than headlines suggested.
Honey bees pack pollen into baskets on the hind legs. Megachile bees carry it dry on a brush of hairs under the abdomen, which is why a foraging leafcutter looks dusted gold underneath.
Generations of textbooks used the viceroy as the standard example of a palatable butterfly bluffing its way to safety by resembling the monarch. Feeding trials with birds found the viceroy is unpalatable in its own right.
Genetic work at Bimini traced adult female lemon sharks back to the mangrove lagoon where they themselves were born. They return to that same nursery to pup roughly fifteen years later, a homing behaviour better known from salmon and sea turtles.