Picture the den in early summer. Some of the adult wolves have left to hunt, which can mean being gone for the better part of a day or longer and covering ground a person would struggle to walk.

The new pups are too small to follow and too helpless to leave truly alone. So they are not left alone. A pack member often stays behind, and that wolf may be an older brother or sister from a previous litter, on babysitting duty.

Wolves are one of a fairly small number of animals where the raising of the young is a group effort rather than a job for two. Biologists call it alloparenting, care given by animals other than the mother and father. In a wolf family it often falls to yearlings and other nonbreeding wolves that have not yet left to start families of their own. The Wolf Conservation Center describes them babysitting the pups, regurgitating food for them and playing with them. 

The most striking part, to me, is the food. A yearling that has fed at a kill will travel back to the den and regurgitate meat for the pups, delivering a meal it carried home inside itself. It is not glamorous. It is also a genuinely generous act by an animal that could simply have eaten and kept walking. The parents do it too, but research on wild wolves found that all adult pack members, including yearlings, regurgitated food, so the pups can be fed from several directions at once.

There is a quiet division of labor worth noticing. In one Idaho study, nonbreeding females attended dens and rendezvous sites about twice as often as nonbreeding males, suggesting that older sisters may take a closer hand in caring for the new pups.

The younger wolves may also be gaining practical experience. By the time a yearling leaves to raise its own litter, it may already have spent a season or two feeding, guarding, and minding pups. It has, in the most practical way, learned the job before it needs it.

All of this can have a hard payoff. Spreading the care across the pack means the pups can be watched, fed, and defended while other wolves hunt, part of what makes a pack so resilient. In a long-term study of reintroduced red wolves, helpers were associated with higher pup mass and survival at low population density, although the survival benefit disappeared at high density. Gray-wolf research likewise shows that the relationship between pack size and surviving pups varies with ecological conditions. Extra hands are not automatically better in every place and every year, but they let a wolf family divide the essential work of guarding and provisioning.

What I like about it is how unfamiliar it makes a familiar animal look. We are used to thinking of wolves through the language of dominance and the lone hunter. The reality on the ground, in early summer, is a young pack member staying home to mind the babies while others hunt, and then bringing dinner back for everyone.

It is closer to the cooperative way humans have raised children across much of our history, with older children and other relatives helping to care for and provision the young.

The pups will grow, and in a year or two some of the babysitters will leave to become parents themselves, carrying the whole routine somewhere new. It is a small, well-run system, repeated from one generation to the next

The post In a wolf pack, older brothers and sisters often help with the babysitting. While some adults are away hunting, wolves from previous litters guard the new pups and carry food back for them — an all-hands approach to raising the young that can improve a pup’s chances of surviving appeared first on Space Daily.

The bird most people would name first if asked to picture something pink is not pink when it hatches. A flamingo chick comes out of the egg in dull grey or white down, and it stays that way for a long time.

The famous rosy colour is not part of the bird when it arrives. It is built, slowly, out of what the bird eats.

The grey beginning

According to most accounts of flamingo development, a young bird needs roughly two to three years of the right diet before it carries the full adult flush.

That grey phase is not a flaw waiting to be corrected. As the British Ornithologists’ Union notes, the melanin behind that early colour strengthens the feathers and provides photoprotection and thermoregulation. The dull plumage is doing a job of its own before the pink ever arrives.

Where the colour comes from

The pink is borrowed. Flamingos, like many other birds, cannot manufacture the pigments that make them rosy, so they have to eat them. Their food, algae and small crustaceans, carries pigments called carotenoids. The bird’s liver metabolises the raw pigment, converts much of the beta-carotene into canthaxanthin, and deposits the result into newly growing feathers, skin, bill and legs.

This is why all six flamingo species end up rosy despite living in very different places. Because carotenoids cannot be synthesised by animals and must come entirely from the diet, the shade on the outside is essentially a record of what went in.

Some species go further and apply colour directly. Greater flamingos studied in Spain were found to spread pigmented secretions from the uropygial gland near the tail onto their neck, breast and back feathers, a cosmetic touch-up before breeding. As reported in Smithsonian, the more often a bird does this the pinker it gets, and the colour fades within days if it stops reapplying.

Colour as a signal worth reading

If the colour comes entirely from food, then the colour says something about the eating. Paul Rose, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Exeter, argues the pink is likely an honest signal rather than mere decoration. Rose told National Geographic, “It’s an honest signal. That pink color tells other birds that it’s healthy and fit.”

The logic is straightforward. A bird that feeds well takes in more carotenoids and shows more colour, so a brighter flush generally points to an efficient feeder. Rose put it plainly: “A healthy flamingo — which is demonstrated by its colorful feathers — is an efficient feeder.” This is a reliable proxy, not an infallible one.

That signal appears to matter in the daily scrum of flamingo life. In an observational study of captive lesser flamingos at WWT Slimbridge, Rose and colleagues scored birds on a colour scale. The brightest birds were more aggressive. The authors are careful to note only correlation, not causation, so the link between hue and behaviour is a pattern worth taking seriously rather than a settled mechanism. On colour’s social role, Rose observed that “Color plays an important role” in their social relationships.

What captivity reveals

The clearest evidence that the colour is diet rather than identity comes from birds that lose access to the right food. In captivity, where the natural carotenoid-rich prey of a salt lake is absent, flamingos fade toward pale pink or white unless their keepers intervene. Zoos now supplement the diet with formulated pellets to maintain the colour, a workaround that only exists because the colour was never built into the bird.

The pink is not a costume the flamingo was born wearing. It is information, laid down feather by feather over years, a running record of how well the bird has fed and where. Look closely at a flamingo’s colour and you are reading its meals.

The post Flamingos are not born pink: chicks hatch a dull grey and only slowly take on their famous colour as they feed on algae and tiny brine shrimp loaded with pigments called carotenoids — which means a flamingo’s brilliant flush is essentially a visible read-out of how well, and how richly, it has been eating appeared first on Space Daily.

The strangest thing about a blue whale’s heart is not its bulk. It is how close that heart comes to stopping. On a deep foraging dive, the largest heart on the planet can slow to as few as two beats a minute, a pace so far below what physiology predicts for an animal that size that it looks, at first, like an error in the data.

It was not an error. In 2019, a team led by Stanford’s Jeremy Goldbogen, with Paul Ponganis of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as senior author, made the first recording of a blue whale’s heart rate in the wild. What they found raised a question the whale’s size alone never could: how does a heart that big run that slow, then race back so fast, dive after dive, without faltering?

How do you record the heartbeat of the largest animal that ever lived?

Carefully, and with a long pole. Working in Monterey Bay, co-author David Cade attached a suction-cup electrocardiogram tag near the left flipper of a male blue whale estimated to be about 15 years old. The tag, roughly the size of a lunchbox, was held by four suction cups, two carrying the electrodes that picked up the electrical signal of the heart.

It stayed on for about 8.5 hours of diving before detaching and floating up to be retrieved. The team almost did not believe what came back. “We had no idea that this would work and we were skeptical even when we saw the initial data,” Goldbogen said. Reading the trace was its own task. “With a very keen eye, Paul Ponganis … found the first heart beats in the data,” he recalled. Goldbogen later told Smithsonian the whole attempt felt unlikely: “I honestly thought it was a long shot because we had to get so many things right.”

The results were published on 25 November 2019 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, under a title that named the puzzle directly: extreme bradycardia and tachycardia in the world’s largest animal. This is a single animal measured once in the field, not a survey of the species, so the pattern is best read as a first window rather than a settled rule.

What did the data actually show?

A heart swinging between two extremes on every dive. During dives that reached as deep as 184 metres and lasted up to 16.5 minutes, the heart rate typically settled to four to eight beats a minute and bottomed out at just two beats per minute. For a body this large, the predicted resting rate is closer to 15 beats per minute, so the diving heart was running far below what its size alone would suggest.

Then came the reversal. The moment the whale returned to the surface to breathe and re-oxygenate, the heart climbed to its highest recorded rate of 30 to 37 beats per minute. There was one wrinkle even at depth. During a lunge to feed, the rate briefly jumped to about 2.5 times the dive minimum, before sinking again.

Why would a heart run itself so close to stopping?

The slow pace is oxygen management. Holding a single breath through a long dive, the whale conserves its limited oxygen by dropping its heart rate and routing blood to the organs that need it most, the same dive response seen across diving mammals, scaled up to the largest body on Earth. The surface surge is the repayment, the heart racing to reload oxygen before the next plunge.

What struck the team was how little headroom remained. The surface rate sat near the whale’s estimated physiological maximum, which led them to suspect the heart may already be working at its functional ceiling. That ceiling, set by body size and the demands of lunge feeding, “can help us understand biological limits to size,” Goldbogen said. The idea that a maxed-out heart is one reason blue whales never grew larger is the team’s hypothesis, not a proven fact, and they have been clear that much more work is needed to test it.

So is the heart really the size of a small car?

Probably not. The comparison is repeated everywhere, but it does not survive a close look at an actual specimen. A preserved blue whale heart weighed roughly 400 pounds, while National Geographic noted that a Volkswagen Beetle weighs around 3,000 pounds, which makes the car framing closer to legend than measurement. A researcher’s suggestion of a small golf cart is nearer the mark, though even that overshoots, since golf carts run heavier than the heart itself. The simpler version holds: it is the largest heart of any animal, and its size is not the most interesting thing about it.

What makes the 2019 recording matter is the method as much as the numbers. One tag, one whale, 8.5 hours. The questions the data invites next are the ones that take a fleet of recordings to answer: whether the same cardiac swing holds across larger and smaller individuals, whether it shifts with feeding, depth, or age, and how close other giants of the ocean run to their own limits. The first beat was the hard part. What it measures next is still open.

The post A blue whale has the largest heart of any animal, but the first recording ever made of one beating revealed something stranger than its size: on a deep foraging dive the heart can slow to as few as 2 beats a minute, then race back toward 37 the instant the whale surfaces to breathe appeared first on Space Daily.

A multi-year biodiversity survey of limestone caves in western Cambodia has documented at least 11 species apparently new to science, among them a pit viper, several geckos, micro-snails and millipedes.

The work was led by the conservation charity Fauna & Flora with Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment. The published report compiles field surveys of four taxonomic groups plus a camera-trapping programme across the karst hills of Battambang province (the wider study also reached Stung Treng), with the cave bat survey alone covering 64 caves across 10 hills. The fieldwork ran from November 2023 to July 2025, and the report was released in March 2026.

Among the new species, the report lists three geckos already formally described — Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, Hemiphyllodactylus khpoh and Dixonius noctivagus — alongside two micro-snails (Clostophis udayaditinus and Chamalycaeus aduncus) and two millipedes (Orthomorpha efefai and Orthomorpha battambangiensis). A further three geckos and one new pit viper of the genus Trimeresurus are still being formally described.

In all, seven have been described and published, with four more in progress.

Why one stretch of rock keeps producing new species

The reason such caves yield so many unfamiliar animals has less to do with luck than with geography. Cambodia’s karst — the eroded limestone formations that hold the caves — forms isolated hills, each cut off from its neighbours. A population that settles on one hill can evolve in confinement, separated from the same species only a few kilometres away.

The report frames these limestone landscapes as having high conservation value precisely because they harbour such localised, range-restricted animals. Researchers on the survey have likened the hills to a repeated natural experiment, with related lineages evolving independently on separate outcrops. That confinement is also what makes the species fragile: a gecko or millipede found on a single hill, and nowhere else, may have nowhere to go if that hill changes.

Discovery and destruction running in parallel

The caves are largely unprotected. The same limestone that makes the hills biologically distinctive also makes them commercially valuable, and the report documents extensive stone quarrying on some hills — at Phnom Takriem, for instance, roughly a fifth of the hill area has been given over to quarries. Across the world, only about 1% of karst ecosystems sit under any kind of protection. 

Pablo Sinovas of Fauna & Flora ties the geography directly to the risk: destroy the only place a species lives, and you risk wiping it out altogether. Sothearen Thi, the survey’s karst biodiversity coordinator, has made a related point — that biologically significant species could disappear before science has ever recorded them.

What the report changes, and what it doesn’t

The survey did not cover everything. The team did not enter the interiors of several caves holding very large bat colonies — some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and more than a million in the biggest roosts. In at least one major colony cave, the ammonia inside was simply too concentrated to go in; other caves went unsurveyed because of unsafe vertical entrances, time constraints or a lack of climbing equipment. More exploration remains to be done.

What the report does is move these species from undocumented to documented — the precondition for any argument about protecting them. Whether that shifts the calculus for the hills themselves remains open. Fauna & Flora says it is working with the Cambodian government and local partners to strengthen protection of the landscapes. 

Source: Fauna & Flora (2026). Karst Biodiversity Report: Battambang and Stung Treng Provinces, Cambodia — November 2023–July 2025.

The post A survey of 64 limestone caves in Cambodia, reported in March 2026, turned up around 11 species new to science, among them a turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, geckos, micro-snails and millipedes appeared first on Space Daily.

A peregrine falcon in a hunting dive reaches a terminal velocity of about 320 km/h (200 mph), which makes it the fastest animal alive.

That figure is not a guess from a single enthusiast with a stopwatch. A peer-reviewed aerodynamics study notes that peregrines exceed 320 km/h in a full stoop, though its own filmed dives took place past a 60 m dam — short enough that the falcons never reached terminal velocity, but long enough to capture the changing wing shape on high-speed cameras. The record claim sits higher still: a captive falcon named Frightful was reportedly clocked at 389 km/h (242 mph) in 1999 after release from a light aircraft.

For comparison, the Guinness World for the fastest speed in an Formula 1 car is 372.56 km/h (231.51mph). These cars need a long straight and lots of horsepower. The falcon gets there with body mass, gravity, and a folded silhouette, then has to land a precise strike at the end of it. The car only has to keep going straight.

The dive has a name: the stoop. The record speed belongs only to the dive, and the dive depends on shape. Robin Mills, a biologist who has modelled the manoeuvre, describes it this way: “Within the blink of an eye, it dives down – first flapping forcefully and then folding its wings to decrease drag. It basically appears to drop out of the sky.” All of this is in service of the strike at the bottom — the stoop is how the falcon turns altitude into a killing blow.

The peregrine delivers the blow with its feet, used as a blunt weapon rather than as the gripping talons most people picture. The popular image of a clenched fist is roughly right but not exact. The Birds of Stanford essays note that “High-speed cinematographic studies, however, have shown that they strike their prey from above with all four toes fully extended.” The foot may be open at the instant of contact, not closed, though the strike itself remains a percussive hit rather than a grab.

The impact does much of the killing. Peregrines and their close relatives carry only modest talons, so they cannot rely on the crushing grip that some larger raptors use. Instead, as Fowler and colleagues describe in their study of raptor anatomy, “For immobilisation, Falconini rely more strongly on strike impact and breaking the necks of their prey, having evolved a ‘tooth’ on the beak to aid in doing so.” The dive does the work, and the notched beak finishes what the blow starts.

The speed record hides something. A car at 320 km/h is being asked to follow a known line on a known surface. The falcon is being asked to intercept a small, frightened, swerving target in open air, and to do it while its own anatomy works against it. The peregrine’s sharpest vision sits off to the side of its eye, not straight ahead. Tucker and colleagues put the problem plainly: “When diving at prey straight ahead from great distances at high speeds, a peregrine has a conflict between vision and aerodynamics.”

To see the prey clearly, the bird “must turn its head approximately 40 ° to one side” to fix the target on the most acute part of its eye, but a turned head adds drag and slows the dive. Wild peregrines solve this not by turning the head but by curving the whole approach. Tucker’s team observed birds tracking distant prey along a curved path resembling a logarithmic spiral, which keeps the target pinned on that sideways high-acuity vision while the head stays streamlined. It is the aerial equivalent of taking the racing line rather than the shortest one.

The precision goes deeper than the path. A 2018 simulation by Mills and colleagues at Groningen and Oxford modelled the attack and found the diving falcon steers using the same proportional-navigation logic that guides missiles. The same work is careful about what high speed actually buys. The simulations suggest that when prey moves erratically, high-altitude stoops raise catch success compared with low-altitude attacks, but only if the falcon’s guidance law is finely tuned and its vision and control are precise. Speed without that control is just a fast miss. This is a modelling result rather than a field measurement, so it is best read as a clue to how the real birds manage it, not the last word.

The body comes equipped for the rest. Bony tubercles inside the nostrils are thought to limit the air rushing in at speed, and a translucent third eyelid sweeps across the eye to protect it while still letting the falcon see, a built-in visor for a pilot who cannot afford to blink at the wrong moment.

The post In a hunting dive, the peregrine falcon becomes the fastest animal alive, plunging at speeds of more than 320 km/h — before striking its prey in mid-air, a blow that can kill on impact appeared first on Space Daily.

It might sound strange but a swarm of bees deciding where to live is perhaps one of the cleanest examples of a crowd making a good choice without anyone in charge.

There is no leader, no vote-counter, no bee that surveys the options and issues a verdict. The queen, despite the title, has no say in it. And yet a few hundred bees, working only with their own senses and a dance, settle on a new home that is more often than not the best one available.

A note before going further: we are writers reading the work of biologists, not animal-behaviour researchers ourselves. The findings here come from a small number of careful field experiments, and the temptation to read bee democracy as a lesson for human democracy is one to hold lightly. This is reflection on what the research describes, not a claim that crowds of people work the same way.

The swarm that shouldn’t work

The setup looks like a recipe for chaos. When a hive becomes overcrowded in early summer, two-thirds of the worker bees leave with the old queen and cluster on a nearby branch, a temporary camp with no roof and no plan. From there, several hundred scout bees, often the oldest in the colony, fly off to find somewhere permanent. They might inspect 10 to 20 candidate cavities scattered across the surrounding countryside.

No single scout visits every option. No scout can compare all the sites and pick a winner. By any obvious logic, a group of individuals each holding a fragment of the picture should struggle to agree on anything, let alone the right thing. What’s striking isn’t that bees manage to choose at all — it’s that they keep choosing the best of the available options, through a mechanism stranger and simpler than a committee.

What scouts actually do

A scout that likes a cavity comes back and dances. The waggle dance encodes direction and distance, and crucially, it encodes enthusiasm. Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley puts the mechanism plainly: “A scout adjusts how long she dances according to the goodness of the site.” 

This is the part that looks like campaigning. A bee returning from a good site lobbies harder, and her advertising recruits more visitors, who in turn come back and dance for the same place. What keeps the system from being hijacked by an over-eager scout is that the bees appear to grade honestly.

The quorum, not the consensus

The popular picture of bee democracy gets one thing slightly wrong. The swarm does not wait for agreement. It waits for a threshold.

As scouts visit and re-advertise the leading candidate, their numbers at that cavity build. Once roughly 15 scouts are present at one site at the same time, that site has effectively won. The bees are not polling the whole crowd for a majority. They are sensing local density, the moment when enough of them are gathered in one place.

Seeley and P. Kirk Visscher tested this directly by scattering scouts among identical boxes instead of letting them concentrate; spreading the bees out delayed the signal to leave, which is what you would expect if the trigger is a quorum at a single spot rather than a tally across all sites.

Once the quorum is reached, the scouts switch from advertising to mobilising. They produce piping signals that prime the rest of the swarm to warm their flight muscles to around 35°C, the temperature a bee needs to fly. Then a buzz-run signal tears through the cluster, and the whole swarm lifts off at once and heads for the chosen home. The decision and the departure are two separate acts, and the second only happens when the first is sealed.

Why the crowd gets it right

The honest test of any decision rule is whether it lands on the best option, not just a tolerable one. Seeley and Susannah Buhrman ran that test on Appledore Island, off the coast of Maine. They offered swarms one excellent nest box among four mediocre ones, and in each trial, one or more of the poor sites happened to be discovered hours before the good one. Even with that head start working against the right answer, the swarms picked the excellent site in four of the five trials.

What makes the rule work is that quality and persistence are coupled. A better site draws longer dances, longer dances draw more scouts, more scouts reach quorum faster. The early lead a mediocre site might enjoy gets overtaken because its dancers give up sooner. No individual bee weighs the options; the weighing emerges from the population, in the bookkeeping of who keeps dancing and who stops.

Perhaps what the swarm reveals most clearly is that good collective choices carry a cost, and the cost is time. The whole process, from clustering on the branch to lifting off toward a new home, can stretch across two or three days, spent hanging exposed with little shelter and finite reserves. The colony could probably decide faster by lowering the quorum or trusting the first site found, but it doesn’t. Those hours and that energy seem to be the price of getting the answer right. 

The post When a honeybee colony outgrows its hive it makes a genuinely democratic decision: scout bees fly out, inspect possible new homes, and ‘campaign’ for their favourite with waggle dances, lobbying harder for better sites — and only once enough scouts have converged on the same spot does the whole swarm lift off together, almost always choosing well appeared first on Space Daily.

Picture a single society running from the Italian Riviera to the Atlantic edge of Spain, its members numbering in the billions, none of them ever raising a weapon against another. That is not a thought experiment about humans; it is a population of ants.

In 2002, three researchers at the University of Lausanne reported that a single network of Argentine ant nests stretched at least 6,000 kilometres along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of southern Europe. Tatiana Giraud, Jes S. Pedersen and Laurent Keller documented a main supercolony of millions of nests and billions of workers — a cooperative unit they described as astonishing in scale.

What makes the European supercolony so strange is not just its size — it is the peace. In their native South America, Argentine ants behave like most ants: neighbouring colonies fight, and a colony stays small, on the order of a few metres to a few kilometres across.

These ones do something different. Workers pulled from nests hundreds of kilometres apart, with no shared recent ancestry to speak of, meet and groom and pass food rather than tear each other apart.

The Lausanne team put numbers to it by collecting ants from sites along the coast and staging encounters between them. Workers from the same supercolony showed no aggression toward one another, even when separated by huge distances and genetic differentiation between sampling sites. Mix workers from two different supercolonies, though, and the result is lethal. The truce holds inside the network and stops hard at its edge.

The European finding raises a question that sounds philosophical but turns out to be biological: at what point does a sprawling web of cooperating individuals stop being a population and become a single society? Biologist Mark Moffett took it up. His answer turns on growth. Moffett wrote that “this capacity for unrestricted growth is the defining characteristic of supercolonies.” A normal ant colony has a ceiling; a supercolony does not.

That capacity for essentially unlimited scale shows up in only a handful of ant species and in one other animal: us. The comparison is what gives the European supercolony its claim to be the second-largest cooperative society on the planet. The Lausanne team had already reached for similar language, describing the network as one that “effectively forms the largest cooperative unit ever recorded.”

And it grew larger still. A later study traced the connections beyond Europe. Behavioural tests and chemical analyses showed that the biggest European, Californian and Japanese supercolonies recognise one another as nestmates, linking them into one intercontinental society. Ellen Van Wilgenburg, Candice Torres and Neil Tsutsui concluded that the intercontinental network is the “most populous known animal society.”

The supercolony was not engineered. It is a by-product of human shipping, which carried a South American ant around the world and, on the working hypothesis, narrowed its recognition system down to a single shared signal somewhere along the way.

In its home range the same species stays small and quarrelsome. Dropped into Europe with its old border disputes erased, it kept doing the one thing ants do well, cooperating, and simply never ran out of relatives to cooperate with.

Why the peace holds so widely is not fully understood. The same team that mapped the intercontinental network was candid about the gap, noting that the global supercolony’s persistence looked like apparent evolutionary stasis — surprising because introduced populations often evolve rapidly. 

The post A single ‘supercolony’ of Argentine ants is thought to stretch some 6,000 km along the coasts of southern Europe, from Italy to Spain — billions of workers across millions of nests that treat one another as kin and refuse to fight, making it one of the largest cooperative societies on Earth, second only to our own appeared first on Space Daily.

The number that anchors everything is about 600 volts. That is the peak discharge an electric eel can deliver, several times the roughly 120 volts of a North American wall socket. The figure is stranger than it looks: no single part of the eel produces anything close to that. The voltage is assembled, cell by cell, out of thousands of much smaller contributions.

Despite its name, the electric eel is a type of  knifefish, and as much as four-fifths of its roughly two-metre body is given over to one job: making electricity. 

Each of the specialised cells, called electrocytes, produces only a tiny voltage on its own. A single electrocyte fires at around 150 millivolts, about a seventh of a volt. Stack thousands of them in series and fire them at once, and the small jolts sum the way cells in a battery do. The cells are linked in series to build voltage and in parallel to build current, channelling the combined output toward a target.

The comparison to a battery is more than loose metaphor. The arrangement has long been likened to Alessandro Volta’s voltaic pile of 1799, the first synthetic battery, which stacked metal discs to do what the eel does with living tissue.

Researchers have since built the principle back the other way. A team at the University of Fribourg, working with stacked ion-selective hydrogels to mimic the eel’s total of up to 600 volts, assembled an artificial version that generated 110 volts when thousands of its cells were triggered together.

For most of the time we have known about the eel, the assumption was that it shocked prey underwater and left it at that. Then Kenneth Catania filmed something different.

The Vanderbilt biologist documented and filmed eels rising out of the water to press their chin against a partially submerged threat. The contact point matters: the current exits through the chin into the target and returns to the eel’s tail, completing the circuit through the animal it is attacking rather than dissipating into the surrounding water.

The measurements showed both voltage and current to the target rising the higher the eel climbed. Catania read the behaviour as a defensive move, a way to drive a shock home with maximum effect. This, he wrote, lets the eels deliver shocks “with a maximum amount of power to partially submerged land animals that invade their territory”. He also proposed that the manoeuvre could have arisen in steps, with “each stage” providing “a successive advantage, suggesting how it may have evolved.”

The discovery did more than describe new behaviour — it rehabilitated an old story. 

In 1800, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt described eels in a South American pool attacking horses, with two horses stunned and drowned in the first five minutes of the skirmish. For roughly two centuries afterward, no scientific reports of any such leaping attack appeared, and the tale was treated with skepticism. Catania felt the same pull of disbelief. “The first time I read von Humboldt’s tale, I thought it was completely bizarre,” he said. “Why would the eels attack the horses instead of swimming away?”

The filmed leaps offered an answer. Catania argued that the behaviour, most likely a dry-season defence when crowded eels are cornered in shrinking pools, fit Humboldt’s description closely enough that “it seems reasonable to suggest” the naturalist had watched a similar eel behaviour on 19 March 1800. The hedge is his own, and it stays a careful inference rather than proof. Other researchers found the work persuasive all the same. In the view of James Albert, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette biologist who studies how electric fish evolved their use of electricity, the results “are literally rewriting the book on what we know about electric behaviors of the electric eel.”

The post The electric eel can generate a jolt of around 600 volts — several times the shock from a household socket — by stacking thousands of specialised cells together like tiny batteries, and rather than only zapping prey underwater, it has been filmed rearing up out of the water to press its chin directly against a larger attacker appeared first on Space Daily.

When researchers at the Australian National University played recordings of superb lyrebird mimicry to grey shrike-thrushes, the shrike-thrushes responded to the fakes much as they would to one of their own. As lead author Anastasia Dalziell put it, “Surprisingly, strike-thrushes approached the speaker broadcasting mimicked songs as well as the shrike-thrushes’ own song.”

The superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is a large ground-dwelling songbird of the forests of south-eastern Australia, and most of what it sings is borrowed. The bulk of a male’s song is imitation, drawn overwhelmingly from other forest birds. During the breeding season a male will mimic roughly 20 to 25 species.

Dalziell and Robert Magrath measured how close the copies actually were in a study titled “Fooling the Experts.” The acoustic match for grey shrike-thrush song was tight enough that the model species could not reliably tell the imitation from the real thing. “Grey shrike-thrushes sing a complex and beautiful song, but lyrebirds can accurately mimic them all the same,” Dalziell said.

Two cautions belong here. This was a playback experiment measuring acoustic similarity for one model species, not a blanket finding that every lyrebird copy is indistinguishable. The shrike-thrushes also did better at discriminating when given other contextual cues, so “fooled” sits closer to “often fooled” than to “always fooled.”

The chainsaws and car alarms that made the bird globally famous come with their own footnote. The celebrated imitations of saws and drills trace largely to captive birds, including a male named Chook at Adelaide Zoo who died in 2011. Wild lyrebirds overwhelmingly mimic natural forest sounds. 

Look closely and it get’s more interesting. A male does not simply replay everything he knows at maximum length. In the “Fooling the Experts” analysis, the lyrebirds abridged the songs they copied, trimming repeated notes, which is consistent with a trade-off between showing off accuracy and packing in variety.

Dalziell described it this way: “This mimicry is the accomplishment of years of practice and is probably used to show female lyrebirds the quality of the singer.” Note the “probably.” It is offered as a hypothesis, not a verdict.

A 2021 study added a stranger wrinkle. Dalziell and colleagues found that males create an acoustic illusion of a whole mixed-species mobbing flock at very particular moments. As Dalziell put it, “The male lyrebird recreates that sound when a potential mate tries to leave a displaying male without copulating, or during copulation itself.” The illusion may work as a sensory trap rather than a simple display of extravagance, though the Cornell write-up is careful that it is not clear exactly how males benefit.

The tidy phrase “all in service of winning over a mate” runs into a basic problem: females mimic too. The first systematic study of female superb lyrebird song found they are skilled mimics in their own right, copying at least 19 species. Co-author Justin Welbergen noted that “The females imitated fewer bird calls than males but performed more imitations of hawks.” A trait that existed only to attract a mate would have no obvious reason to appear, in a different form, in the sex that does not display.

The function is plainly more than one thing. Courtship is the best-documented driver, and mimicry does peak in the breeding season. But the same skill turns up in what looks like deception during copulation, and in displays whose structure shifts depending on the moment. Each of these is a working hypothesis backed by an observational or playback study, not a closed case.

What the lyrebird exposes is perhaps a habit of ours, not of the bird’s. The temptation is to attach one clean purpose to a behaviour because one purpose is easy to tell as a story. The animal keeps refusing to cooperate. The most interesting thing about a bird that can imitate almost anything is that we still cannot say, with confidence, exactly why it bothers.

The post The Australian superb lyrebird can imitate almost any sound it has ever heard — chainsaws, camera shutters, car alarms, the calls of more than 20 other species — with enough accuracy that the birds being imitated often can’t tell the difference appeared first on Space Daily.