animal behavior

This story originally appeared in High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail camera’s frame. In…

Digital listening is becoming the most powerful new scientific tool for observing and preserving our natural environment. From the Arctic to the Amazon, scientists are covering the globe…

For something so routine, walking is shockingly complicated. Biomechanists break a single step into several phases: First there’s touchdown, when your heel strikes the floor. Next comes the…

If you think your dog loves you, you’re a fool. If you feel a kinship with a tree, you’re a hippie. And if you over-empathize with a wild animal, you must be wearing cheetah prints and a…

Native to East Asia, Jorōs are one of many so-called golden orb weavers, named after the shiny silk they use to spin webs (which can be a whopping 10 feet wide, by the way). The spider was …

For the current study, Tombak, then a PhD candidate at Princeton, and her team wanted to test stripe width to see if narrower ones might be even more repulsive to flies—a potential…

A similar scenario played out in the 1990s, when a Tennessee naturalist named Lynn Faust read the confident published assertion of a scientist named Jon Copeland that there were no…

Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often…

So neuroscientists use an approach called “dimensionality reduction” to make such visualization possible—they take data from thousands of neurons and, by applying clever techniques from…

Set in a far future, robot-filled take on Kowloon Walled City, Stray presents a world that’s tried to move on without human rule—but one that can’t escape the long shadow of our influence.…