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Welcome to the world, little whale!
A remarkable discovery has been made in East Africa’s Lake Malawi, one of the deepest bodies of water on the African continent.
Africa’s impressive lakes have long remained a focus of speculation for naturalists, involving folklore about strange creatures—including supposed holdovers from prehistoric times—alleged to inhabit some of their waters.
However, a much smaller discovery made by a team of researchers with the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) at Vancouver, Canada, is nonetheless challenging our past thinking on what kinds of life forms can be found lurking in the depths of some of Africa’s storied lakes.
In a remarkable discovery, a variety of lake fly larvae have been found descending into the very oxygen-deprived depths of Lake Malawi, where they hide more than 650 feet below the surface to avoid predators.
After spending their days in this deep-water “dead zone,” the larvae reemerge at night and feed—or at least some of them do, if they are lucky enough to escape the fish searching for a dinner of their own, while these tiny insects are commuting back to the surface.
To chart the unusual daily cycle of these larvae, UBC researchers Dr. Philip Matthews and Dr. Evan McKenzie used sonar technologies, which were positioned deep within the lake.
While this provided an idea about where these tiny insects were going, it was dissecting the larvae that revealed how these remarkable little creatures have somehow evolved a respiratory system that contains two pairs of small air sacs, which function like ballast tanks, allowing the larvae to control their buoyancy.
Within these sacs, they discovered the presence of resilin, a material that can either expand or contract in proportion to changes in the pH of the sac’s walls. As a result, the larvae can change the volume of these unique air sacs, thereby controlling their buoyancy.
It is an unusual capability these creatures display, to say the least. Curious about how deep they might be able to go, the researchers placed several of the larvae within small pressure chambers to simulate the depths they might travel to before the sacs imploded.
Much to the team’s surprise, these natural buoyancy systems held out under conditions that would match depths of 400 meters (1,312 feet), which is much deeper than what the sonar data reveals about the larvae’s daily descents into Lake Malawi.
While it has long been assumed that insects, which often thrive in freshwater environments, do not live in open oceans due to such pressures associated with the depths of the world’s largest bodies of water, these African insect larvae reveal that such creatures can survive under such conditions.
Based on their findings, the UBC researchers hope to work on finding ways of simulating such capabilities, perhaps by creating pH-powered resilin smart materials, or even artificial systems that emulate the way muscles operate.
The team’s findings appeared in the new study, “Crush-resistant air sacs allow insect larvae to exploit aquatic habitats at extreme depth,” published in the journal Science.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Paternal care is uncommon among several wild animal species, even among arthropods—the invertebrates that include insects, arachnids, and crustaceans.
Now, in a recent study in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, harvestmen—also known as daddy longlegs—account for more than half of all independently evolved cases of paternal care currently documented among arthropods.
The news insights were made possible by a recent citizen science effort that significantly increased the available data about these paternal behaviors in arthropods, all within days.
Harvestmen are one of the most diverse arachnid groups, with more than 6,900 described species. Despite making up just 0.6% of arthropod diversity, they show more independent origins of paternal care or egg guarding than any other arthropod lineage. This concentration of paternal care makes harvestmen a key group for studying the evolution of this behavior.
Led by Glauco Machado at the University of São Paulo, the research team combined almost thirty years of fieldwork with a review of iNaturalist, a public website for sharing nature sightings. From 1936 to 2025, published studies had found parental guarding in only 80 harvestman species. However, the iNaturalist search added 85 new records: 78 showing parental care and seven showing no care, more than doubling the number of harvestman species with available behavioral data.
Machado was surprised by how quickly the platform produced results. “It’s a tremendous source of information that can improve the velocity with which we accumulate biological information,” he said. “I would never be able to do this by visiting museums around the world. It would be very expensive, very time-consuming, but here we conducted the search in only one week.”
With the expanded dataset, the researchers were able to map parental behaviors onto a newly constructed evolutionary tree encompassing 165 species across nine families. This represented the first reconstruction of how both maternal and paternal care evolved within the superfamily Gonyleptoidea. The findings challenge the assumption that caregiving behaviors follow a single evolutionary pathway.
The analysis found that maternal care evolved only from ancestors that did not provide care, a pattern also seen in insects. Paternal care, however, appeared in two ways: once from ancestors with no care, and once from species where females already guarded eggs. This difference suggests that separate evolutionary pressures shaped the development of parental care in harvestmen.
Machado suggests that sexual selection may have driven the evolution of paternal care from maternal care. In this scenario, which the researchers describe as enhanced fecundity, females favor males that are already tending eggs.
“It’s very rare in nature, paternal care, and this behavior evolved many times independently,” Machado said. “In many species where males care for the offspring alone, the caring activity is a sexually selected behavior, which means that females prefer males that are caring for the eggs.”
The evolutionary tree also showed that parental care does not always persist across lineages. Several groups appear to have lost caregiving behavior over evolutionary time. Some harvestmen now use easier methods, like hiding their eggs or burying them under debris, to protect them without having to stay and guard them.
Machado emphasizes that experts remain essential to this process. It takes specialized knowledge to correctly identify species, tell the sex of the guarding animal, and tell real parental care apart from similar behaviors such as mate-guarding. “I think taxonomists’ role in modern science is more important than ever,” he said. “We cannot preserve a species that doesn’t have a name. And names are provided by taxonomists.”
Additionally, animals that are actively guarding eggs are more likely to be photographed than those not showing any behavior, which could make active parental care seem more common than it really is.
Machado views this approach as a model for future research. More than half of the new records came from individuals without formal training in arachnology, and he anticipates similar results as researchers apply iNaturalist to other animal groups for which parental care remains poorly documented.
“I think it’s a very broad contribution for people that are working with insects, frogs, and all kinds of groups, animal groups, in which we have both maternal care and paternal care,” he said. The next mystery solved through citizen science may not involve arachnids at all.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new biosignature detection method for distinguishing between abiotic and biotic apatite mineral samples on Mars using instruments already aboard the Perseverance Rover, rather than returning samples to Earth.
The team said their mineral-based biosignature detection approach was successful in identifying samples with nearly 98% accuracy and allows for “deeper time” searches for signs of life, given the longer-lasting nature of minerals compared to biological materials. They also suggest their approach could broaden the capabilities of upcoming rover and life-hunting missions without adding new tools or sensors.
In a study detailing the team’s technique, Robert M. Hazen from the Carnegie Institution for Science and colleagues explained that searching for life and biosignatures beyond Earth “is a central objective of astrobiology.” They also note that this research is complemented by studies exploring the origin and early evolution of terrestrial life. Still, they add, although identifying biosignatures remains a key challenge, “robust mineral biosignatures remain limited.”
For example, most proposed biosignature missions focus on organic molecules or searching for fossils preserved in sedimentary environments or aquatic environments, including the subsurface oceans of some of the solar system’s moons. However, there are few, if any, proposed missions searching for signs of life preserved in mineral records, which the team notes “can retain records of biological activity over much longer geological timescales”
On Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has meticulously collected soil and rock samples deemed most likely to contain biosignatures. However, efforts to send a future sample-return mission to the red planet to retrieve samples are currently stalled and may never be completed.
According to the study authors, there are flight-ready instruments “already deployed on the “Perseverance” rover and planned for deployment on the “Rosalind Franklin” rover capable of searching for signs of life in place rather than returning the samples to labs on Earth. However, they add, “to fully exploit these mission-limited yet information-rich tools, it is essential to efficiently extract as much diagnostic value as possible from the data they generate.”
To search for mineral-based biosignatures, the team focused its research on Raman spectroscopy.
“Raman spectroscopy is particularly attractive because it provides bond-specific information on crystal structure and chemical substitution in a nondestructive manner,” they explain.
The team also notes that the Raman spectra acquired by the rover’s instruments “are highly comparable to those obtained under laboratory conditions,” increasing the robustness of any possible life signal.
“This consistency enables direct translation of laboratory reference datasets to planetary environments,” they write.
However, they add, Raman spectra from natural geological samples are often complex, including “overlapping vibrational modes, heterogeneous backgrounds, and chemistry-dependent band shifts.” Until now, this complexity has made interpreting samples based on individual spectral peaks or qualitative inspection inherently challenging.
“Identifying reliable biosignatures that can be detected by flight-ready instruments, such as Raman spectroscopy, remains a central challenge in astrobiology,” the researchers explain. “Developing robust mineralogical indicators of life therefore represents a critical and complementary approach for planetary exploration.”
To test their approach, the team focused on the mineral apatite. A ubiquitous phosphate, the team notes that apatite can be found “in terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments.” Although apatite is a major component of biological formations such as teeth and bones, it also forms naturally, providing an opportunity to search for biosignatures over much longer timescales if scientists can differentiate the two.
“Here, we integrate Raman spectroscopy with interpretable machine learning to distinguish biotic from abiotic apatite, a ubiquitous phosphate mineral in terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments,” the researchers write.
First, Hazen and colleagues compiled 331 Raman spectra samples. Critically, they included only specimens with known origin attributes: biogenic, abiogenic, or synthetic.
Next, they used this data to extract 21 “band-resolved features.” This was accomplished by training a random forest classifier to identify the “most diagnostic” features of each sample.
“Determining the origin of a sample involves assessing multiple independently varying features of a Raman spectrum, including band positions, widths, and relative intensities, the type of multivariate analysis well suited to machine learning,” the study authors explain.
After some comparative analysis, the team ultimately determined that a sample’s carbonate band and the width of the dominant phosphate band, “reflecting chemical composition and crystal structure, respectively,” were the strongest indicators of biological, natural, or synthetic origin.
After using their method to check the 311 samples, the team said the model successfully distinguished biotic from abiotic apatite “with classification accuracy exceeding 96%.” In fact, the team reported that their mineral-based biosignature detection method misidentified only one biotic apatite sample as abiotic and one abiotic sample as biological.
“Here, we show that biologically formed apatite can be distinguished from abiotic counterparts using interpretable machine learning applied to Raman spectra,” the study authors write.
When discussing the potential implications of their new mineral-based biosignature detection approach, the team noted that their findings establish a “broadly applicable and mission-relevant strategy for deep-time archives and future planetary missions.” More broadly, the researchers note that their findings highlight the “growing importance of combining flight-ready analytical instruments with AI” to fully leverage datasets already captured by Mars rovers and other “in situ” planetary missions.
“As planetary exploration increasingly shifts toward autonomous decision-making and target selection, the integration of interpretable AI with mineralogical biosignatures offers a powerful and extensible framework,” they write.
Beyond mineral-based biosignature detection strategies, the research team notes that future life hunting missions will “increasingly rely on the joint interpretation of mineralogical and organic spectroscopic signatures.” These include on-board py-GC-MS measurements, infrared spectroscopy, luminescence, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence, and “other analytic methods.”
Future approaches will increasingly rely on AI to analyze these disparate datasets, which the authors note will allow for biologically mediated patterns to be distinguished from natural or synthetic backgrounds “in a physically and chemically consistent manner.”
“In this context, such an integrative and interpretable framework provides a pathway toward autonomous, mechanism-informed life detection across diverse planetary environments, advancing the broader goals of planetary science in understanding habitability, biosignature preservation, and the coevolution of geology and biology,” the authors conclude.
The study “Mineral biosignature identification from Raman spectroscopy using machine learning” was published in PNAS Nexus.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
The monkey does not look particularly thrilled to have been found.
This rewrites the history of plant evolution.
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