Animals

Even bees need dance lessons! Bees use their “waggle dance” to point each other toward food, and they need lessons to perform it properly.

Rainfall in Africa drives the growth of plants that allow painted lady butterflies to make their flight to Europe and back each year.

Research has revealed distinct sleeping pattern in octopuses, providing new evolutionary insights into speciation.

Hannah Smith is a Biology PhD student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Hannah is interested in the biological pathways that regulate aging, and whether we can target these pathways to make people healthier in old age (but she’s currently…

Early-life hunger makes animals more likely to take risks in the future.

Land animals are often smarter than aquatic animals but it is still unclear exactly how their cognition developed. In @NatureComms, @malcommaciver and #UgurcanMugan found that complex landscapes and the ability of land animals to see more in air compared…

by Lorena Lyon figures by Lorena Lyon If you’ve ever backed down from an argument with a popular kid, you might relate to a male spotted hyena. Spotted hyenas are highly social animals, forming large groups called clans, which range from 6 to over 100…

Archaeologists learn about ancient humans by excavating and analyzing historical artifacts. While the use of tools was once thought to be a uniquely human trait, this is far from the case; many terrestrial animals, including chimpanzees, macaque monkeys,…

by Katherine J. Wu The pets in our households are all descendants of wild animals, many of which still run free today. But dogs, cats, and rodents are all domesticated to varying degrees, with a wide range of consequences for their behavior and…

by Tauana Junqueira Cunha If we could travel back in time 540 million years, what would the first animals look like? This is one of the longstanding questions scientists aim to answer in the study of how animals evolved and became distinct from their…