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 Drafts and withdrawn editions are never mixed into this index.
A leaf diet is too poor to yield its nutrients in a single pass. Ringtails produce soft caecal pellets during the day and eat them directly, running the material through the gut a second time to recover microbial protein and vitamins.
![Photograph of Leatherback Sea Turtle: Scientific name: Dermochelys coriacea Common name Spanish: Tinglar Photo by Claudia Lombard, USFWS Location, Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, US Virgin Islands More information: [1]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Ff%2Ffc%2FLeatherback_sea_turtle_Tinglar%252C_USVI_%25285839996547%2529.jpg%3Futm_source%3Den.wikipedia.org%26utm_campaign%3Dimageinfo%26utm_content%3Dthumbnail_unscaled&w=3840&q=75)
Every other living turtle carries a rigid box of fused bone. The leatherback instead carries a flexible mosaic of small osteoderms set in oily, ridged skin, a shell rebuilt for pressure, for depth, and for a diet of jellyfish.
Great crested newts carry a chromosome arrangement in which every individual is heterozygous for a lethal condition. Roughly half of all fertilised eggs consequently fail early in development, and no amount of good habitat changes that fraction.
The name suggests silence, but mute swans hiss, snort and grunt, and their wings produce a loud rhythmic throb in flight that carries far across open water. They are simply quieter than the trumpeting and whooping swans they were named against.
A single grazer cannot feed inside a territorial damselfish's algal farm. Convict surgeonfish solve it by arriving in schools of hundreds, swamping the defender, which cannot chase everything at once.
Maternal care is uncommon in non-social insects, but a female earwig overwinters with her clutch in a soil chamber, turns and licks the eggs to remove fungal spores, and continues to guard and feed the nymphs after they hatch.
In one region of the ocean, large yellowfin tuna consistently travel below herds of spotted and spinner dolphins. Fishers exploited the association by setting nets on the visible dolphins, which killed millions of them before the practice was regulated.
Rather than dropping waste from the canopy, a three-toed sloth makes a slow descent to the ground about once every eight days, scrapes a hollow at the base of a tree, and covers what it leaves. Why it bothers is still argued over.
Millepora builds a hard limestone structure and lives on reefs, but it is a hydrozoan, closer to Portuguese man o' war and hydra than to the stony corals it grows over. Its stinging polyps sit in pores too small to see.
A ringed seal mother excavates a chamber in a snowdrift over her breathing hole and gives birth inside it. The lair hides the pup from polar bears and Arctic foxes and keeps it far warmer than the open ice, provided the snow lasts.
Africa's smallest crocodile spends its nights walking the rainforest floor away from water, taking crabs, frogs and insects. By day it retreats into burrows dug into stream banks, sometimes with no open water at the entrance.
Tiger moths hear an approaching bat and reply with trains of ultrasonic clicks from a pair of ribbed thoracic plates. Experiments show the clicks work chiefly as an honest warning that the moth tastes bad, and in some species as sonar jamming.
The leaf fragments are substrate. Ants chew them into a pulp and use it to grow a fungus in underground gardens, and it is the fungus, in specialised swollen tips, that feeds the colony.
A roseate spoonbill sweeps its open bill side to side through murky water while walking forward. Sensitive nerve endings inside the spatula detect contact and trigger the bill to snap shut, so the bird can feed in water it cannot see into.
Reindeer detect light down to about 320 nanometres, well below the human limit. In snow, which reflects ultraviolet strongly, this turns lichen, urine and wolf fur into dark shapes against a bright field.
Green and black from above, the fire-bellied toad becomes a signal only when threatened, arching the spine and lifting its limbs to expose the orange underside in a posture called the unken reflex.
Measured close to the whale, a sperm whale's echolocation click can exceed 230 decibels relative to one micropascal at one metre. The sound is produced not in the throat but by an air-driven clapper at the front of the enormous nose.
Tridacna gigas gets most of its energy not from filtering plankton but from symbiotic algae cultivated in its exposed mantle tissue. The colourful flesh is a solar array, which is why the animal must live in shallow, sunlit water.
Antlers are shed and horns are kept, in almost every hoofed mammal. The pronghorn does neither cleanly: it keeps a bony core for life but sloughs the forked keratin sheath over it every autumn and grows a new one.
The species grows precisely where waves break hardest, and its flattened branches face into the surf. Reef crests built of elkhorn dissipate a large share of incoming wave energy, which is why its loss changes what reaches the beach behind it.
Its diet is overwhelmingly Antarctic krill, sieved through cheek teeth so intricately lobed that they mesh into a strainer. The English name is a mistranslation-flavoured relic that has outlived every attempt to correct it.
A leaping spinner dolphin can complete as many as seven full turns about its long axis before hitting the water. The spin starts underwater, and the animal's tail continues to drive the rotation until the moment it leaves the surface.
Most whales and dolphins have a rigid neck, with several cervical vertebrae fused into a single block. The beluga's seven stay separate, so it can nod and swivel its head, a trait it shares with a few river dolphins but with almost no other cetacean.
The giraffe has the same number of neck bones as a human, a mouse and almost every other mammal. The length comes from each vertebra being enormously elongated, with one of them reaching roughly a quarter of a metre.