Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Version history
A correction creates a new fact version and a public note on the same permanent link. Material can also be withdrawn without deleting its operational record.
An earlier version said milk-like provisioning of young had previously been described only in mammals and a few birds. Comparable nutritive secretions are also documented in some fish, cockroaches and jumping spiders, so the entry now describes the 2024 caecilian finding as the first such case reported in an egg-laying amphibian.
An earlier version gave the two-toed amphiuma's genome as roughly twenty times the human genome in the summary and around twenty-five times in the body. The figure is now stated consistently as about twenty-five times, matching the published DNA content estimate.
An earlier version said the aye-aye extracts larvae with its fourth finger, and placed the ball-and-socket joint at that finger's base. Both belong to the slender third finger, which does the tapping and the extracting; the fourth finger is the longest and more robust, and is used for other tasks.
An earlier version described the Mariana snailfish as the deepest fish ever collected. That held when the species was described in 2017 but was superseded in 2022 by a snailfish caught at 8,022 metres in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench. The entry and the species profile now say which record belongs where.
An earlier version placed both record dives off southern California. Only the 2,992-metre depth record comes from that population; the 222-minute dive was recorded off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in a separate tagging study, and both of the longest dives came from a single tagged whale.
An earlier version placed the last known British breeding attempt on Shetland; it was on Skye in 1916, and Shetland is where the last individual was shot two years later. The population figure has also been brought back into line with the cited RSPB estimate.
An earlier version said the 2016 revision kept a separate Indo-Pacific common dolphin species. It did not: Delphinus capensis was removed entirely, and the long-beaked Indo-Pacific form is recognised as a subspecies, Delphinus delphis tropicalis, within a single common dolphin species.
An earlier version placed yellow on the Moorish idol's tail, which reverses the clearest field difference: the idol's tail is black with a pale edge, and the lookalike pennant coralfish's tail is yellow. The summary line also stated as fact that the butterflyfish mimics the idol, which the entry's own text treats as unsettled; the summary now matches.