UK gardens took a battering this summer as a heat dome settled over western Europe, and much of the green and pleasant land turned a dusty beige.

Allowing females to mate with multiple males, rather than just one, could help make species more resistant to extinction, University of East Anglia research shows. A new study reveals that when females have multiple males to mate with, their offspring inherit significantly fewer harmful genetic mutations. This, in turn, makes the entire population healthier and less likely to die out.

Allowing females to mate with multiple males, rather than just one, could help make species more resistant to extinction, University of East Anglia research shows. A new study reveals that when females have multiple males to mate with, their offspring inherit significantly fewer harmful genetic mutations. This, in turn, makes the entire population healthier and less likely to die out.

Unlike an animal cell, a plant cell can't crawl or migrate. It's locked inside a rigid wall, cemented to its neighbors for life. A cell born at the center of a young fruit will still be there when that fruit ripens.

The salmon? Eaten. The days? Shorter. The bears? Fatter. 

After spending the summer eating the fatty pink salmon swimming through Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, it’s time to celebrate the park’s iconic brown bears (Ursus arctos). Fat Bear Week begins on Tuesday, September 22, and here is everything you need to know. 

What is Fat Bear Week?

Think March Madness, just without the basketball and significantly more bears. Fat Bear Week is a single-elimination tournament, where bear enthusiasts from around the world can vote online for their favorite chunky bear. After each round, the bear with the most votes advances until the winner is announced on September 29. According to the Katmai Conservancy, the event began as a one-day event in 2014 with 1,700 votes cast. Only 10 years later, 1.2 million votes were cast from over 100 countries.

The brown bears return to Brooks Falls for the salmon migration every year in late June, where viewers can watch them on explore.org’s livestream. There, they will feast to fatten up for the long winter ahead. By late summer, the nutritious fish will spawn and then begin to die. The bears will then move to the lower Brooks River in September and October to eat the dead and dying salmon near the river’s mouth.

Eating all of this salmon is important because the heftier the bear, the better chance they will survive their long winter hibernation. Despite being the poster species for winter hibernation, bears are not “deep hibernators,” they way that squirrels, bats, and bees are. Bears enter a state called torpor, which is an involuntary state primarily triggered by lack of food. During this time, the bears rely on stored fat reserves for energy. A torpid bear’s eating, drinking, and waste functions will cease, as its body metabolizes these stores it put on over the summer. 

When is Fat Bear Week 2026?

This year, Fat Bear Week begins on Tuesday, September 22, and a winner will be crowned on Tuesday, September 29. 

How can I vote?

Votes may be cast from noon to 9 p.m. EDT (9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PDT and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ADT)

from September 22 and 29 at fatbearweek.org.

Photographs comparing the bears from earlier in the summer and later in the summer will be shown, so voters can get an idea of just how much weight the bears put on during their salmon fest. An adult male bear can go from roughly 700 pounds in the early summer to over 1,200 pounds by fall. 

Voters are also encouraged to get familiar with each bear’s life history and the unique challenges they face to survive.

Which bears are competing this year?

The 2026 Fat Bear Week Bracket will be released on Friday, September 18. 

In 2025, Bear #32 (Chunk) took the crown, despite beginning the salmon run with a freshly broken jaw. He was likely injured while fighting with another bear for a mate, but he still managed to catch plenty of fish. Chunk is known for his dominance and size, but also narrow-set eyes, dark fur, a prominent brow ridge, and a distinctive scar across his muzzle. 

How can I support Katmai’s bears?

Donations can be made to Katmai Conservancy’s Otis Fund. The Otis Fund is named after Bear #480 (Otis), who won four Fat Bear Week titles before his death around 2024.  All donations made between September 22 and October 3 will be matched by explore.org. 

What happened with the bears this summer?

This year’s livestream featured an example of how wild (and upsetting to humans) nature can be. On Tuesday, July 28, the live-cams captured a young brown bear cub being killed and eaten by an unrelated mother bear (Bear #806). The deceased cub was born this spring and the child of Bear #909, a 10-year-old brown bear. Bear #909 started the season with two cubs, but now lost both. 

On Sunday, August 2, one of Bear #335’s (Jolly) cubs died, after following three unrelated cubs up a tree. The mother of the cubs already in the tree attacked Bear #335’s cub, who did not survive the encounter. The identity of the mother bear who killed the spring cub was not confirmed. 

Following the first cub’s death, naturalist Mike Fitz and park rangers Christine Loberg and Sarah Bruce said this likely the first documented case occurring at Brooks River. While there is no one answer as to why mother bears are killing cubs, some experts suspect bear adoption, food scarcity, and fights for dominance all play a role. 

Additionally, this year also saw the cub with silver-hued fur, a cub who hopefully learned important lesson about porcupine quill safety, the unique fishing stylings of Bear #164 (Bucky Dent), and Bear #284’s (Electra) family who can “walk on water.”

The post Fat Bear Week kicks off September 22 appeared first on Popular Science.

In the wild, mimicry is an important tool for survival. Some baby hummingbirds disguise themselves as caterpillars with stinging hairs to avoid predators, while octopus, squid, and cuttlefish use camouflage to blend in with their surroundings and hide. Even plants get in on the mimicry fun, with some mimicking the small of rotten meat to attract flies and others using their petals to trick flies into pollinating on them.

True to its name, Iran’s spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) has a rather novel strategy. It uses a tail that looks like a spider to lure birds trying to eat the decoy spider. When the time is right, the snake jumps into action and eats the bird. 

The spider-tailed horned viper is a relatively new species to science, and a study published today in the journal The Anatomical Record is peeling back the layers of this master mimic. A team from the Field Museum in Chicago used X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scanners to take a look inside of the snake’s spidery tail and found that their tailbones appear rather normal. 

“Scientists first collected a specimen of this snake in 1968, and when they brought it back to the Field Museum, people thought that it had some sort of deformity at the tip of its tail, like a tumor,” Sara Ruane, a study co-author and the Field’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and Director of the Core Laboratories, said in a statement. “It sat on the shelves of the museum for decades, but it wasn’t until another specimen with a similar tail was found in 2003 that people revisited it.”

Scientists described the snake as a new species in 2006, using the specimen housed in the Field Museum’s collections as the holotype. Holotype specimens serve as a main standard-bearer and reference point for the physical characteristics of a species, so that scientists can compare and contrast them to see if a specimen belongs to one species or another.

Shortly after naming the spider-tailed horned viper, researchers recorded video of the snake using the spider-like appendage at the tip of its tail as a way to lure in unsuspecting birds. 

“I remember being a PhD student in about 2008 and first seeing the videos of this snake in the wild,” says Ruane. “The appendage at the end of its tail is so outrageous, I remember thinking it was so cool. It’s truly unique among snakes.”

In 2023, Ruane attended a conference with Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków. Georgalis mentioned that he was interested in studying the Field Museum’s spider-tailed horned viper holotype specimen. 

“I am primarily a paleontologist, so I try to use modern snake species to make sense of fossil remains,” said Georgalis, who is also a co-author on the new study. “In vipers, the vertebral column unfortunately doesn’t give us very many clues about what kind of snake we’re looking at. When we find fossils, we often just find individual bones rather than the entire skeleton, and the individual vertebrae are so different from each other along the snake’s body that it’s hard to use them to identify a species.”

The spider-tailed horned viper offered a unique opportunity to study snake vertebrae. Georgalis said that viper vertebrae in particular have not been very well studied. They also wanted to know more about this species’ unusual tail.

To take a closer look, they used the Field Museum’s XCT lab. With XCT, scientists can scan objects and take thousands of X-ray images. These images are then stacked together to produce a 3D rendering of the object’s interior. It essentially allows scientists to study rare or one-of-a-kind specimens in detail without cutting them open or and risking damage. 

“With the spider-tailed horned viper, we were particularly interested in seeing what the vertebrae at the tip of the tail look like, because the exterior of this snake’s tail is so unusual, and because it’s used for this unusual bird-luring behavior,” says Georgalis. “In some other snakes, like sand boas and rubber boas, the vertebrae at the tip of the tail have extreme shapes that look really alien. We wanted to investigate if the spider-tailed horn viper’s tail was similarly strange inside.”

Surprisingly, the scans revealed that the inside of the viper’s tail looked quite normal. The spider-tip tail is only visible on the outside of the snake and the vertebrae were the same as they would be in other vipers. 

“There was nothing in the snake’s skeleton that would suggest how extreme its tail looks on the outside,” said Georgalis.

Findings like these show how fossil skeletons only tell one part of the story of what an animal looked like and how it behaved. Nothing in the spider-tailed horned viper’s skeleton would suggest it has such a unique tail, or that the tail twitches in a way that tricks birds. 

“It’s one of the, let’s say, frustrations of the life of a paleontologist,” says Georgalis. “We work with beautiful animals, but most of the time, we’re trying to put together puzzles with some of the pieces missing, and in the end, we can’t be 100% sure of what the animal actually looked like.”

It’s also a reminder that prehistoric life may be even stranger than we can imagine by looking at bones alone. These findings also lay some groundwork for scientists studying how tissues evolve and develop and underscores the value of museum collections.

“Specimens that were collected 50, 100, 200 years ago are still being used all the time to learn new things,” said Ruane.

The post Snake that hunts with fake spider on its tail shocks scientists appeared first on Popular Science.

In the movie Whalefall, a sperm whale accidentally swallows a scuba diver. It’s technically possible, but unlikely to play out in real life.

Four scientists splashed into the middle of the Indian Ocean near a small, tropical island in January 2024. They timed their arrival for midday — when sharks are less active. A ship had brought them as close to Nelsons Island as it could get without running aground on shallow coral reefs. From there, the scientists had to jump in and swim the rest of the way. They towed waterproof bags full of supplies through the waves. Those bags held camping gear, science equipment, food and water — everything they would need for two weeks on the island.

“There’s no feeling quite like being dropped off on an island by boat,” says Alice Trevail. She’s an ecologist at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England. This was her fifth expedition to the Chagos Archipelago. A chain of some 55 islands, it sits about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) south of India and 3,400 kilometers (2,100 miles) from the eastern coast of Africa.  

It took the team all afternoon to tote their supplies to Nelsons Island. Once on dry land, the island’s residents — thousands of seabirds — greeted them. Some perched in trees. Others wandered the shore. The stink of bird poop filled the air along with chirps, squawks and chatters.

Red-footed boobies are one of 18 seabird species that nest on Chagos islands. They’re large, about the size of a goose. They get their name from their bright red, webbed feet. On tropical islands, they gather twigs with their blue and pink beaks to build nests in trees and shrubs. There they’ll raise fluffy white chicks.

But these birds spend only a fraction of their time on land. A large part of their days is spent far out at sea, where they forage and dive for fish and squid. While scientists travel to remote places to find the birds, red-footed boobies head to even more remote places to find food.

These seabirds were the reason the scientists had made their long journey. Like many uninhabited tropical islands, Nelsons is remote and tiny. But seabirds can have huge impacts that reach far beyond an island’s shores. These scientists had come to learn how red-footed boobies affect the plants and animals around them — and what they need to survive.

Until recently, the time these birds spend at sea had been a bit of a mystery. “We know so much less about what they do when they go off beyond the horizon,” says Ruth Dunn. Another ecologist who made this trip with Trevail, Dunn works at Lancaster University in England. She and her teammates now are using high-tech tools to find out what red-footed boobies do when they fly off.

And they’re learning how the birds link ecosystems on land with those at sea.

High-tech tracking

To track red-footed boobies in flight, the scientists outfitted the birds with small, lightweight loggers and cameras.

One type of data logger, a global positioning system (GPS) unit, tracks a bird’s location from satellite signals. A global location sensor (GLS) tag tracks its location based on light levels. An accelerometer logs when a bird dives, swerves or flaps its wings. And an immersion logger records when a bird leaves the air for the water.

Over several years, the ecologists have used these tools to collect data on the birds’ journeys.

In 2024, they added tiny video cameras for the first time to the birds’ backs so they could see what the birds see. Watching those videos is incredible, says Dunn. Now she can see when red-footed boobies fly alone, when they meet up with other birds and how they catch fish.

The scientists work quickly as they catch and tag each bird. They want to disrupt the birds as little as possible. Skilled at handling seabirds, Trevail can tag a bird in about 10 minutes. Even so, she notes, there’s always the risk of injury. “They are quite strong birds,” says Trevail. “We wear gloves and glasses, because their beaks are very sharp.”

Tagging is a two-person job. One scientist holds the booby. Another uses stretchy waterproof tape to stick the loggers to certain feathers on its back and tail. Very small tools, like GLS and immersion loggers, can be attached to a ring around one leg.

Scientists haven’t always been able to track seabird journeys. But as new tools are invented, scientists can collect more types of data, says Alice Bernard. An ecologist at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she has explored the history of seabird tracking.

“GPS tracking devices really made a difference,” she says. GPS was first used to track seabirds in 2001. Just a decade later, some 100 projects were using it on seabirds around the world. Fewer birds have been tracked in the tropics, Bernard notes, so less is known about flight paths of tropical species, such as boobies.

The tools have a little heft. That means data loggers work best with bigger species, such as boobies. Still, the scientists can’t weigh down a bird too much. Scientists typically make sure these tools do not exceed 3 percent of a bird’s weight.

As technology advances, data loggers have shrunk, allowing scientists to attach them to more types of birds. So more data are filling online seabird databases, Trevail has noticed. And, she adds, “Research has become so much more collaborative because everyone is sharing the data.” That’s helping scientists better understand birds that fly between countries, continents and oceans.

A day in a booby’s life

Once tagged, the boobies go about their daily lives, flying, feeding and resting. The scientists will retrieve the cameras and GPS loggers — and their data — later in the expedition. Some of the smallest loggers can transmit data via satellites. So the researchers will leave these on the birds until a follow-up trip.   

The scientists traced the boobies’ flight paths using the GPS data. Most of the Chagos birds, they learned, take daytrips when they fly out to sea to find food.

They typically leave the islands in the morning. Many meander above the water all day in search of fish. Their trips ranged widely. The shortest was about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles). Some spanned more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). On average, these birds flew nearly 300 kilometers (190 miles) while foraging.

As dusk approaches, most make a beeline home. “The longer the boobies waited before starting to return back to the colony, the faster and the more direct they flew,” Trevail reports.

Red-footed boobies are excellent navigators. How they navigate, though, is not entirely known. They can find their way across the ocean despite a lack of landmarks. “There’s some kind of learning of these routes back to the colony,” she says.

The tracking data also show where red-footed boobies dine. Birds that nest in different places hunt in different parts of the ocean, these data show. Knowing this can help scientists identify parts of the sea that need to be protected from problems such as overfishing. 

Like many seabirds, boobies live and nest in colonies. A colony offers protection from predators. There are several colonies of red-footed boobies on Chagos islands. Logger data show that each colony’s birds tended to forage in a different part of the sea. That would help reduce competition between groups.

But a booby must still compete for food with the rest of its colony. So larger colonies tend to hunt over larger spans, flying farther.

Red-footed boobies in the largest Chagos colony traveled up to about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) roundtrip on foraging trips. They tended to leave earlier in the morning and came back later at night “to give themselves more time to reach these foraging grounds that are further away,” says Trevail. “Being in a bigger colony must be worth having to forage slightly further out at sea,” she says.

Fish storms 

Red-footed boobies are well adapted for plunging into the water. While foraging, they soar above the sea. When they spy a fish, they dive. With strong necks and streamlined bodies, the birds pierce the water surface at high speed. Webbed feet and waterproofed feathers help them pursue their prey.

But boobies have another hunting strategy, the scientists have learned. And it’s rather unexpected.

From accelerometer data, Dunn noted that these birds more often chase after fish when the weather is windy. This surprised her. “I kind of thought that in high winds the water might be a bit more choppy,” she says. Birds should be less able to see fish in rough water. Why, she wondered, would boobies pursue fish on windy days?

To learn more, Dunn and her team spied on the boobies. Tiny video cameras, each about the size of a human thumb, were attached to the boobies’ backs. These recorded their flights at sea. After the birds returned, the scientists collected all the cameras they could find.

Watching these videos “was just like the best thing ever,” says Dunn. They showed red-footed boobies chasing after fish — but not plunging into the water. The boobies were catching flying fish — in mid-air.

Flying fish mostly swim. At times, though, they soar just above the surface. To get out of the water, a flying fish speeds toward the surface and leaps. The fish swishes its tail back and forth to propel itself upward. Once in the air, a flying fish extends the fins at its sides like airplane wings. This lets it soar.

“These fish can fly really far, like dozens and dozens of meters [yards]. And they seem to do so more when it’s windy,” says Dunn. Flying fish might even take longer flights if wind helps them glide on the air.

People had occasionally seen red-footed boobies nabbing flying fish in the air, says Abigail Schiffmiller. But until the videos, no one knew how common it was. Schiffmiller studies red-footed boobies as a graduate student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. (She taught Dunn how to attach cameras to these seabirds.)

Like the team in Chagos, Schiffmiller uses cameras and loggers to find out how the birds forage. So far, she’s videoed more than 30 birds in the Pacific Ocean. Like Dunn’s videos from the Indian Ocean, these show the birds catching flying fish mid-air. “They dive and kind of pull up before they actually enter the water,” explains Schiffmiller.

She invented the term “fish storm” to describe a swarm of flying fish above the water. These fish storm out when they’re trying to avoid predators, such as tuna and dolphin. “[They] basically only fly when there are marine predators pushing them up,” Schiffmiller explains. Once airborne, the fish are safe from threats in the water. But red-footed boobies and other seabirds now can gobble them up, the new videos suggest.

In some of Schiffmiller’s videos, the boobies fly back and forth through clouds of flying fish, catching and eating as many as they can. The boobies caught about one-fifth of their prey this way. “Mostly, it’s flying fish,” she says. “But they are also going after flying squid.” (Like the fish, some squid can propel themselves into the air.)

For a red-footed booby, it’s far easier to catch a fish in the air than by plunging into the sea. It takes a lot of energy to dive and then take off. “They have to flap really hard and do a long run to get up off the water,” explains Schiffmiller.

Her research aims to figure out if red-footed boobies rely on fish storms to get enough food. If so, overfishing of predators, such as tuna, might hurt the boobies, too. There might be fewer fish storms.

And less food for boobies could in turn have ripple effects to both the islands where they nest and the coral reefs nearby.

Seabird poop connects land and sea

After a day catching fish at sea, most red-footed boobies return to their island homes for the night. On Nelsons Island, the visiting scientists tried to sleep on cots under mosquito nets. The seabirds squawk and chatter all night. “It’s such a noisy place to sleep. It always takes me a few nights to get used to it, because they’re so loud,” says Trevail.

As noisy seabirds digest the fish they caught by day, they also poop. A lot. Red-footed boobies are particularly prolific poopers. Their islands are covered with splats of guano. “They eat a lot and, therefore, poo a lot,” observes Dunn.

Guano is smelly and messy. It’s also valuable. Chock full of nutrients, such as nitrogen, guano helps an island’s plants grow faster. When washed into reefs, the poop’s nutrients feed corals and algae, too. Reef fish grow larger with more to eat.

So seabird poop helps fertilize both island and coral-reef ecosystems.

To better understand this nutrient cycle, Dunn, Trevail and others worked with Stephen Votier. He’s an ecologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Together, they estimated how much nitrogen red-footed boobies bring to the Chagos islands.

Their first question: How much time do the birds spend on land? Answer: For adults it’s about 80 days a year — and 281 nights. Those data came from small GLS loggers, which stayed on boobies’ legs for up to two years.

How much guano will build up also depends on how much the boobies poop. Luckily, the team didn’t need to figure this out. Years earlier, other scientists collected data on the birds’ pooping. Each bird makes some 26.4 grams (almost an ounce) of guano per day. Of that, 18.1 percent is nitrogen.

With these numbers, the scientists calculated that the more than 43,000 adult red-footed boobies that nest in the Chagos Archipelago add 37 metric tons (41 U.S. tons) of nitrogen to the islands each year. That’s about the weight of six African elephants. Because they only collected GLS data for adult birds, these numbers didn’t include poop from young boobies. So the total is probably much larger.

All this poop likely affects tropical ecosystems in many ways. Ecologists are still exploring how the nutrients help coral reefs, algae and plants. But it’s clear that red-footed boobies play a big role in moving nutrients between the ocean and land.

After nearly two weeks on Nelsons Island, it was time to leave. The scientists packed up their supplies, equipment, data and wastes. Then they swam to meet their ship beyond the reef.

According to Trevail, the birds don’t appear affected by visiting researchers. “They seem to carry on as usual,” she says.

But being on an island full of seabirds always affects her. “It’s a really special feeling,” she says. “You’re completely immersed in that environment.”

Captive-reared crocodiles adapted well after release, but a translocated wild crocodile showed strong homing instincts, offering new insights for conservation planning. A new study suggests that saltwater crocodiles born or raised in captivity may successfully adapt to life in the wild without returning to the facilities where they were bred. Researchers say the findings could [...]

Researchers have developed an AI-based system that automatically and objectively detects the moment when fish experience loss of equilibrium (LOE) due to temperature stress. The system combines DeepLabCut, a deep-learning AI that captures animal posture from video, with ResNet34, a deep-learning AI-based image classification technology. Their system is expected to help predict the effects of climate change on fish.

Once coyotes get a taste for city living, the call of the wild fades to a whisper. Food is abundant and predators are few. Research indicates that coyotes enjoy the benefits of urban areas enough to put up with all the people, and Seattle is no exception.

WA's trapdoor spiders are endangered. Jackson Rendall is here to help—because he thinks they're "just really cool."

Two lawsuits seek to reverse the Trump administration’s moves to open the habitats of imperiled wildlife to commercial activities.

This extinct dog was raised for its wool and its only known pelt has finally returned to canada.

GPS collars reveal hyenas retreating while male lions repeatedly close the distance.

Elephants struggled when scientists changed the rules but then adapted surprisingly fast.

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Like humans, elephants are famously social creatures. But unlike teenage humans, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) can think before they act.

Scientists in Thailand discovered this after 16 Asian elephants at the country’s National Elephant Institute successfully participated in a detour test. In this sort of challenge, the animal has to resist an obvious but ineffective strategy (an impulse) to get a treat and follow an effective but indirect alternative—an ability called inhibitory control. 

“Although we are beginning to understand how intelligent elephants are, we still know very little about their capacity for inhibitory control,” Sydney Hope, a postdoctoral researcher at Hunter College in New York, tells Popular Science. “Understanding elephant inhibitory control will help us understand how this aspect of cognition may have evolved across species, including humans. It will also help us understand how elephants may cope with environmental—including anthropogenic—changes.”

In their new study published today in the journal PLOS One, Hope and her colleagues presented Asian elephants with a transparent box filled with fruit. The box also had small holes, so that the elephants could see and smell the goodies inside. The temptation here was to reach directly through the barrier, whose holes were presumably too small for the elephants’ trunk to fit through. The elephants could consistently resist this impulse, and instead used an opening on the side of the box, as they had previously been taught to do. 

In a second version of the trial, the researchers rotated the box. Initially, the elephants gave in to the urge to reach for where the opening used to be, but then rapidly amended their behavior. This fix came slower in older elephants. That’s potentially because of cognitive decline with age, though the team says that further research is necessary on this point. 

More broadly, the study shows that elephants are able to resist an impulsive, ineffective action (like reaching through a perforated, transparent barrier or continuing a no longer successful approach) in favor of e indirect effective behaviors, even if they must change a previously effective strategy. And they’re in good company—inhibitory control is important for humans’ and other animals’ decision-making and cognitive flexibility. For elephants, it might play a significant role in their famous problem-solving and socializing capabilities, according to the researchers. 

“These results may also help conservation efforts,” Hope points out. “One major threat to Asian elephants is human-elephant conflict, often occurring when elephants navigate around barriers (e.g., electric fences) to enter agricultural lands. Understanding how elephants detour around barriers in controlled experiments may help with developing new techniques to mitigate conflict.”

The post Smart elephants can look before they leap appeared first on Popular Science.

A new comparative review, published in The Anatomical Record, examines factors that may lead to birth complications among humans and other mammals. The study suggests that fetal sex may play an important role in risky births in humans and several other species.

A new comparative review, published in The Anatomical Record, examines factors that may lead to birth complications among humans and other mammals. The study suggests that fetal sex may play an important role in risky births in humans and several other species.