Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Field post archive
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The ground pangolin's tongue does not attach at the throat like most mammals. Instead it runs back to the pelvis, letting the animal unfurl a probe longer than its own body deep into insect nests.
Atlantic mudskippers spend most of their active hours out of water, absorbing oxygen through their skin and mouth lining rather than relying only on gills, a trait called cutaneous respiration.
Before reaching sexual maturity, female fossas grow an enlarged, spine-covered pseudo-penis and rust-orange fur matching adult males, a disguise thought to reduce harassment, then lose both traits within a couple of years.
Their sting is reduced to a useless stub, so defence falls to mandibles, resin and sheer numbers. Some species bite hard enough to draw blood, and a few smear caustic plant secretions into the wound.
Humphead parrotfish bite living coral, grind the skeleton in a throat mill of interlocking teeth, and excrete the rock as fine white sand. Estimates for large individuals run to several tonnes per fish per year.
A curlew probing deep in mud cannot open its whole bill against the sediment. Instead the upper mandible flexes near the tip, a mechanism called rhynchokinesis, so the bird can grip a worm at depth with only the last few millimetres moving.
Crocodylus halli was described from museum specimens and decades-old field notes rather than a new discovery in the field. The animals were well known locally; what changed was the recognition that they were not the same species as their northern neighbours.
The adult is a filtering sac with no backbone and no obvious head. Its larva, by contrast, swims with a tail stiffened by a notochord and a dorsal nerve cord, the defining features of the group that includes vertebrates.
The flat faces of the wedge point east and west, so the broad sides catch weak morning and evening sun while the narrow edge meets the fierce midday sun overhead. The alignment is remarkably consistent across a plain.
Almost all pollination is accidental, a by-product of insects seeking food. The female yucca moth gathers pollen with specialised mouthparts, lays eggs in the flower's ovary, then climbs the style and packs the pollen in deliberately.
Aplysia californica has around twenty thousand central neurons, some nearly a millimetre across and individually identifiable from animal to animal. That combination made it the organism in which the cellular basis of simple learning was first worked out.
Newborns move out of estuaries and into fresh water, where they can spend several years before returning to the sea. That nursery habit put the species deep inland, and it is why dams and water extraction hurt a marine ray.
Toxic saliva from the short-tailed shrew's submandibular gland can immobilise invertebrates and small vertebrates. The shrew stores paralysed but living prey, keeping a fresh larder through periods when hunting is poor.
After hatching, ringed caecilian young feed by peeling and eating the outer layer of their mother's skin, which she grows thickened and nutrient-rich for the purpose. They also take a fluid she secretes from the vent.
The technique of prising open a kerbside wheelie bin lid appeared in a few Sydney suburbs and then spread outward along neighbourhood lines. Mapping where it turned up showed social learning, not independent invention in each place.
Two-toed amphiumas have one of the largest genomes measured in any animal, roughly twenty-five times the size of a human's. The consequence is visible under a microscope: their red blood cells are among the biggest known in vertebrates.
The tiny teeth on a limpet's rasping tongue are reinforced with goethite nanofibres and reach tensile strengths of roughly three to six and a half gigapascals, exceeding spider silk and matching high-performance engineered fibres.
Sponges have no neurons, yet a glass sponge can arrest its feeding current across the whole body within seconds of a disturbance. The signal travels through continuous cytoplasm, because much of the animal is a single fused syncytium.
A fossil insect from the Messel pit in Germany, Eophyllium messelensis, shows the leaf-like body outline and leg lobes of modern Phyllium. It puts the strategy at least 47 million years old and reveals it evolved among quite different plants.
Beneath the long outer skirt sits qiviut, a downy underlayer shed in sheets each spring. Its fibres measure in the low teens of micrometres, finer than most cashmere, and it is one of the warmest natural fibres collected anywhere.
Cormorants stand with wings spread because parts of their plumage soak up water. That looks like a design flaw, but wet outer feathers reduce buoyancy and make diving cheaper, so the drying posture is the price of an efficient hunt.
Cassiopea settles bell-first on the seabed and points its arms upward because those arms are packed with symbiotic algae. The posture is not distress or stranding: it is a sun-facing arrangement that lets photosynthesis supply a large share of the animal's energy.
Most bony fish carry a gas-filled float that holds them at depth without effort. Atlantic mackerel do not have one, so they must swim continuously to avoid sinking, and can change depth quickly without waiting for gas to equilibrate.
When one bird in a flock was shot, the rest circled back to the fallen individual rather than fleeing. Hunters could therefore take an entire flock from a single position, a behaviour repeatedly described in nineteenth-century accounts.
The family is named for a two-spine mechanism in the dorsal fin. The first spine raises and a smaller second spine slots in behind it as a locking pin, wedging the fish inside a hole so it cannot be pulled out.
Weka are declining across parts of New Zealand and are protected. They are also capable nest raiders, taking eggs and chicks of seabirds and other natives, which has led conservation managers to remove weka from some islands they were introduced to.
Anemonefish are protandrous hermaphrodites. The largest fish in an anemone is female, the second largest is her mate, and when she dies her partner changes sex to replace her rather than a new female arriving.
Pygmy squid have an adhesive organ on the back of the mantle that produces a two-part glue. They stick to seagrass blades, wait motionless, and release on demand without leaving residue.
Roman tradition credits the sacred geese of the Capitol with raising the alarm during a night attack. The practice is not merely ancient: geese have served as working sentries at military installations and distilleries into the modern era.
Every other bird avoids the polar winter. Emperor penguins walk inland onto sea ice as it forms, and males incubate a single egg on their feet through months of darkness and temperatures far below freezing without eating.
For decades nobody knew where Kemp's ridley nested. An amateur film shot at Rancho Nuevo in 1947, rediscovered years later, showed tens of thousands of females on one Mexican beach in a single day, and set the baseline against which the collapse was measured.
Seasonal flooding across an area larger than England concentrates fish into shrinking pools each dry season, and the yacare caiman exploits it. Population estimates for the Pantanal run into the millions, among the densest crocodilian aggregations anywhere.
An American dog tick finds a host by climbing a grass stem and holding out its front legs, a posture called questing. It waits for something to brush past. It cannot jump, cannot fly, and does not drop out of overhead branches.
The hoatzin digests foliage using bacterial fermentation in a greatly enlarged crop, the only bird known to do so. The chamber is so heavy that the bird's flight muscles are reduced to make room for it.
Only some male Asian elephants grow tusks, and females essentially never do. What female and tuskless male Asian elephants have instead are tushes, short teeth that rarely project beyond the lip.
Across hundreds of kilometres, dozens of coral species release eggs and sperm within the same handful of nights each year, cued by water temperature, the lunar cycle and the time after sunset. The water turns visibly cloudy.
Bogong moths fly up to a thousand kilometres to alpine caves they have never visited. Flight simulator experiments showed they combine a magnetic sense with visual landmarks, and that scrambling either one leaves them unable to hold a course.
Cane toads kill northern quolls that try to eat them. Conservation biologists have used sausages of toad meat laced with a nausea-inducing chemical to teach naive quolls that toads are not food, before releasing them into toad-infested country.
The name colobus comes from a Greek word meaning mutilated. Their hands carry only a small tubercle where a thumb would be, turning the hand into a hook that swings through branches quickly, at the cost of a grip that can pinch.
The red admiral was long treated as an annual immigrant to Britain that could not survive the cold season. Records of adults active in midwinter and of overwintering success have accumulated as winters have warmed, changing how the species is classified.
In the Taï Forest of Côte d'Ivoire, chimpanzees crack armoured nuts with stone and wooden hammers. Infants watch and fumble for years before they succeed, and whole populations living beside the same nuts and the same stones never crack them at all.
Newborn emerald tree boas hatch internally and emerge brick red, orange or yellow. They shift to the adult green over their first year or so, a change that appears to track a move to different heights and light in the forest.
An aye-aye drums a branch with a wire-thin middle finger, several taps per second, while swivelling its ears to read the echoes. Where the sound reveals a cavity, it gnaws through with rodent-like incisors and hooks the larva out with that same slender finger.
A gliding Chrysopelea flattens its ribs into a shallow C-shaped cross-section and continues to undulate throughout the flight. Wind-tunnel and motion-capture work shows the undulation is not leftover slither; a snake that stops moving tumbles.
A honey badger's hide is thick and only weakly attached along much of its body. An animal seized by the back of the neck can rotate inside its own skin far enough to bite whatever is holding it.
The size gap between the sexes is among the largest of any bird, with females roughly twice the mass of males. The two hunt different prey as a result, which is thought to widen the range a pair can exploit while breeding.
Behind the walleye's retina sits a reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum, which bounces light back through the light-sensing cells. It gives the fish its glassy shine and a hunting advantage in low light that its prey does not share.
By clearing depressions in the marsh, alligators create pools that persist after the surrounding wetland dries. Fish, turtles, invertebrates and wading birds concentrate around them, which is why the alligator is treated as an ecosystem engineer rather than merely a large predator.
The male fiddler crab's oversized claw is used for waving and fighting, not eating. If he loses it, the small feeding claw on the other side can enlarge to take over the display role, and the regrown limb comes back small.
Trichoplax has no mouth, gut, nerves, muscles or symmetry. It is a flat sheet of a handful of cell types that crawls over surfaces and digests food by pressing its underside against it.
King crabs belong to the hermit crab lineage, not to the true crabs. The evidence is in the count: a king crab walks on three visible pairs of legs, because the fourth pair is reduced and tucked inside the gill chamber.
The famous cackle is not amusement but a group territorial signal, usually given at dawn and dusk by a family party in chorus. Neighbouring groups answer, and the exchange marks boundaries without the birds having to meet.
The Central African slender-snouted crocodile was separated from its West African relative in 2018, using skull measurements from historical museum specimens alongside modern genetics. A name proposed in the nineteenth century was resurrected for it.
Snailfishes have been collected from about 8,000 metres in the Mariana Trench, and since 2022 both filmed and caught deeper still off Japan. Those depths sit close to the point at which fish physiology is predicted to fail.
A woodlouse in a dry garden shed is a marine animal's descendant carrying its ocean anatomy on land. It breathes through gill-like structures on its underside, which is why it dies quickly in dry air and hides under damp wood by day.
Its body is olive, grey or gunmetal brown. The name comes from the inside of the mouth, which the snake gapes open in threat to show a lining so dark it reads as black against the pale gums of other species.
No individual green darner completes the annual round trip. Isotope work on museum and field specimens showed a migratory generation flying north, its offspring flying south, and a third, non-migratory generation overwintering in the south before the cycle restarts.
European sailors called this flightless North Atlantic bird the penguin long before anyone reached Antarctica. When explorers met similar black-and-white divers in the southern ocean they reused the name, even though the two groups are not closely related.
A squirrel monkey's brain is roughly one-fortieth of its body mass, a higher proportion than in humans, whose ratio is nearer one in fifty. The comparison is real but misleading, because small animals routinely carry proportionally larger brains.
A patch of specialised quills on the streaked tenrec's back can be vibrated against one another to produce a high-pitched signal. Stridulation is common in insects; among mammals, this is the only case known.
Analysis of hundreds of indri songs found intervals clustering at ratios of one to one and one to two, the same categorical rhythms that underlie human music. It was the first such pattern reported in a non-human mammal.
Devil facial tumour disease is not caused by a virus. The cancer cells themselves pass from animal to animal through biting, making it one of only a handful of transmissible cancers known in nature.
A female water opossum dives with young aboard. A ring of muscle draws her rear-opening pouch closed and a greasy secretion seals it, keeping the young dry through dives that last well under a minute.
Along the Mediterranean coast, workers taken from Portugal and from Italy do not fight when introduced to each other. Genetic and behavioural work indicates a single cooperative network running roughly 6,000 kilometres.
Europe's best-known giant skate was described in 1758 and fished to near extinction under a single name. In 2010 it was shown to be two distinct species that had been lumped together, so the animal on the red list had never been assessed properly.
This long-necked antelope of the dry Horn of Africa appears to meet its water needs entirely from the leaves it browses. Observers report no confirmed drinking even where water is available nearby.
The shoulder hump that identifies a grizzly is not fat or bone but a mass of muscle anchoring the forelimbs. It powers the digging that supplies much of the bear's food, and it distinguishes grizzlies from black bears at a glance.
Its range map is not a band along the coast but a handful of separated patches, from the English Channel to Morocco and the western Mediterranean. Local abundance can be high inside a pocket while the gaps between them stay empty.
In deep hibernation a groundhog's core temperature falls to within a few degrees of its burrow, its heartbeat drops from roughly a hundred beats a minute to a handful, and it breathes only a few times a minute. It is not sleeping; it is running a different metabolism.
Satellite tags on Cuvier's beaked whales have logged a dive of 3 hours and 42 minutes off North Carolina, and a separate record depth of 2,992 metres off southern California. Both are the deepest and longest dives recorded for any mammal.
The last widely accepted records of the ivory-billed woodpecker date from the 1940s in Louisiana and the 1980s in Cuba. Later claimed rediscoveries produced no image that convinced the field, and the species' formal status remains contested.
Giant tortoises once lived across the islands of the western Indian Ocean. Sailors ate almost all of them. The survivors are concentrated on a single remote raised coral atoll, where the wild population runs to roughly one hundred thousand animals.
Known from carcasses since the nineteenth century, Architeuthis was never seen alive in its habitat until a Japanese team hooked one on a baited line at about 900 metres and photographed the encounter.
Platydemus manokwari tracks land snails by following their mucus trails, then feeds by everting its pharynx into the shell. It was deliberately introduced to several Pacific islands and has since been implicated in snail extinctions.
Northern Europe is too cool for reptile eggs to develop in bare soil. Grass snakes solve the problem by laying in rotting vegetation, where microbial decay supplies steady warmth, and garden compost heaps are now among their most reliable nest sites.
Botos are born grey and many adults turn pink, but the colour is not evenly distributed. Males are pinker than females, and the pinkest males are those carrying the most bite marks from fights with other males.
The arapaima shares its water with piranhas and wears armour to match. Its scales are layered composites with a hard mineralised outer surface over tough, twisted collagen, and mechanical tests show piranha teeth fracture before the scale does.
The white-tailed eagle was shot out of Britain by the early twentieth century: the last known breeding was on Skye in 1916, and the last bird was killed on Shetland in 1918. Norwegian birds released on Rum from 1975 rebuilt the population.
Silver-haired bats do not use caves. They wedge themselves into the gap between loose bark and the trunk of a standing dead tree, a roost that lasts a season or two, which means the species depends on forests that are allowed to keep their snags.
In the 1990s the common dolphin was divided into short-beaked and long-beaked species on the strength of body shape. Later genetic work showed that long-beaked forms had arisen independently in several regions, and in 2016 they were folded back into one species.
Two rays of the pelvic fins and one of the tail are elongated and stiffened into struts. The fish rests on them above the sediment, facing into the current, and holds its long pectoral fins forward like antennae.
Ancient DNA published in 2021 showed the dire wolf diverged from the lineage leading to grey wolves, coyotes and dogs several million years ago, with no sign of interbreeding. Its resemblance to a grey wolf is convergence, and it has been moved to its own genus.
Its electric organs are stacks of modified muscle cells wired in series, and the discharge is powerful enough to knock down an adult. The weapon and the naval torpedo share a name, and the ray had it first.
After rats wiped out the Lord Howe Island stick insect early in the twentieth century, the species was written off. In 2001 a surviving population of a few dozen individuals was confirmed on Ball's Pyramid, clustered around a single melaleuca shrub.
Canada closed the northern cod fishery in 1992 expecting a two-year pause. More than three decades later the stock remains far below its historical size, and the ecosystem around it reorganised in ways that appear to hold cod down.
The slug's defensive slime contains compounds that produce a numbing sensation on contact with a mouth, and it is so viscous and adhesive that it is difficult to remove. Both properties discourage animals from finishing the meal.
Zanclus cornutus is the sole living member of the family Zanclidae. Its nearest relatives are the surgeonfish, and a distant butterflyfish, the pennant coralfish, carries such a similar banded outline that the two are constantly mistaken for each other.
A hunting shoebill can stand still for many minutes, then throws its whole body forward in a lunge that ornithologists call a collapse, scooping bill, water and vegetation together before spitting out everything that is not food.
A rock-wallaby's hind feet are short and broad with thick, roughened pads and reduced claws. Traction comes from friction against rock rather than from hooking into it, which is what lets them cross near-vertical faces at speed.
Anoplophora glabripennis larvae tunnel deep in living hardwood, out of reach of surface treatment. The only reliable response found so far is to cut and chip every infested tree, along with apparently healthy hosts nearby.
Its patagium runs from the shoulder blades to the fore paws, from the fingertips to the toes, and from the hind legs to the tip of the tail, including the webbing between digits. Glides of about seventy metres are routine.
Common whelks lay eggs in a spongy aggregate of hundreds of capsules, which washes ashore as a pale lump. Sailors used the dried masses to wash with, giving them the name sea wash balls, and only a fraction of the eggs inside ever hatch.
Northern white-cheeked gibbons once sang in the forests of southern Yunnan. Repeated surveys since the late 2000s have failed to find any, and the species is now generally considered extinct in China, surviving only in Laos and Viet Nam.
Plains and mountain zebras live in stable family groups led by a stallion. Grevy's zebra does not. Males defend large territories around water and grazing, and females associate loosely, joining and leaving without lasting bonds.
Round stingrays sting only when trodden on, and their spine drives upward into a foot placed on top of them. Sliding the feet along the sand instead of stepping gives a buried ray warning and room to swim away.
Ptarmigan are the only grouse whose toes are feathered right to the claws, and the rock ptarmigan is one of them. In winter the foot feathering thickens, spreading the bird's weight across soft snow and insulating the foot in temperatures well below freezing.
Oilbirds leave their caves after dark to pluck oil-rich palm and laurel fruit while hovering, then return before dawn. No other bird combines nocturnal habits with a diet of fruit, and they echolocate to move inside their pitch-dark roosts.
Grooves between the thorny devil's scales form a network of narrow channels. Water touching any part of the body, including sand pressed against the belly and feet, is drawn along these channels to the mouth by capillary action, then swallowed by jaw movements.
A coot looks like a small black duck but is a rail. Its toes are not joined by webbing; each carries a row of stiff flaps that spread on the backstroke and fold on the recovery, and that also work well for walking on soft ground.
Nearly all cephalopods have a single visual pigment. Watasenia scintillans has three, an anatomy that would allow it to distinguish wavelengths in the deep water where bioluminescence and residual daylight differ in colour.