Nature intelligence
You heard something interesting about nature.Here is what we actually know.
NatureHQ answers the question you arrived with, then shows you what the evidence actually demonstrates — which species it was really about, what the experiment could and could not show, and where scientists still disagree.
Is that true?
All 147 claim checksThings people have heard
A headline, a documentary, a post from a friend. Each of these takes the popular version apart and shows what the evidence supports — including when the honest answer is that researchers do not agree.
Claim check
Mostly supportedDo legumes add nitrogen to the soil?
The fixing is real, and the destination is the plant rather than the ground. Soil gains when nodules, roots and eventually the whole plant decompose — so how much a soil ends up with depends on whether the plant stays in it.
Where you may have met it: gardening and growing adviceRead on- Misleading
Are tropical mosquitoes now established in Britain?
On 3 September 2026 UK authorities confirmed Aedes aegypti breeding in Britain for the first time — and stated that the species is not established, that the detection was accidental importation, and that the public-health risk was very low. Breeding is not establishment, and establishment is not transmission.
- Misleading
Does bleaching mean the coral is dead?
Not yet. Bleaching is the loss of the photosynthetic partners that supply most of the coral’s energy. The animal is alive and starving, and can recover if the heat passes — which is a smaller reassurance than it sounds.
- Exaggerated
Is a lichen two organisms — a fungus farming algae?
The composite idea is right and the count is not. Many lichens carry a second fungus in their outer layer as well as the algae, plus bacterial communities — and "farming" is a Victorian polemic against the discovery, not a description of it.
- Supported
Do wild birds really lead people to bees’ nests?
It is true, and the measurements went further than the story. Guided searches find nests far faster than unguided ones, and playing back the specialised call honey-gatherers use more than doubles the chance of being guided — against other human sounds.
Read something
All 62 subjectsAnimals, plants, fungi and the rest
A deliberately small set, built in depth. Every page here says what it is still missing, which is the part a catalogue never tells you.
Insects
A million neurons, a dance that gives directions, and an argument that took thirty years and a radar set to settle.
The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is a social insect that lives in colonies of tens of thousands, communicates the location of food through a dance, and has become the most intensively studied insect in the world.
Honey bee · Apis mellifera · In-depth coverageRead on- TreesNo tree has a pump. Water is pulled to the top under tension — and at about 120 metres, that stops working.Trees
- BirdsThey know your face. What that actually means is more specific — and more interesting — than the headline.CrowsCorvus
- A spider with 100,000 neurons will take a detour to prey it can no longer see.Araneae
- They can tell which people are dangerous by voice alone — and they may call each other by name.Elephantidae
- Marine lifeA second, independent invention of a complex mind — with two-thirds of its neurons in its arms.OctopusesOctopoda
- The mushroom is not the fungus. The fungus is the network — and one of them has been mapped across nearly ten square kilometres of Oregon forest.
- Aedes aegyptiIts eggs survive drying for months on the side of a container. That is why it travels so well.
- Cleaner fishIts favourite food is the mucus of the animal it is cleaning. The honesty has to come from somewhere else.
- EarthwormsEvery gardening book is right about earthworms. Every one of them is describing a garden.
- The dam is not the house. It exists to keep the front door under water.
- Sea starsIt eats a mussel by pushing its own stomach into the gap between the shells.
- Humpback whaleIn two seasons, every male humpback off eastern Australia stopped singing their song and started singing someone else’s.
- Greater honeyguideIt is raised by strangers, never meets a honeyguide parent — and it still knows what a particular human call means.
- VulturesTwo unrelated groups of birds arrived at the same body, because there is only one way to live on carrion.
How anybody knows
The experiments underneath
Almost every strong result in this field comes down to one clever manipulation: play the sound when the animal is not there, label the water and see where the label ends up, follow the insect with radar instead of guessing. These are three of them, told as what somebody actually did.
The experiment
Playing a monkey a warning about a leopard that is not there
- The question
- Does an alarm call carry information about which predator is coming, or does the monkey simply see the predator?
- What they did
- Alarm calls given to leopards, eagles and snakes were recorded from wild vervet monkeys in Amboseli.
- What came out
- Each call produced the escape appropriate to its own predator and to no other.
The experiment
Labelling the atoms to find where oxygen comes from
- The question
- Photosynthesis consumes water and carbon dioxide and releases oxygen.
- What they did
- No amount of measuring how much gas comes off can answer this, because the two candidate sources are chemically indistinguishable once mixed.
- What came out
- The released oxygen carried the isotopic signature of the water in both conditions, and never that of the carbon dioxide.
The experiment
Following a bee by radar
- The question
- When a bee watches a waggle dance, does it actually use the information — or is it just following a scent?
- What they did
- For thirty years there was a genuine argument about whether the famous waggle dance conveys anything, or whether recruits simply follow the smell of the food.
- What came out
- Bees released normally flew the direction and distance encoded in the dance, then began searching for the flowers.
Every experiment on NatureHQ carries a field called what it does not show, and it is required rather than optional. How we read evidence
Guided journeys
Some of these pages are much better read in a particular order. Each route is written as an argument for why one page follows another, rather than assembled from whatever happens to be nearby.
From forest to fungus
Follow a tree downward — into its roots, across the interface where it trades with a fungus, and out the far side into what happens when it dies.
- Trees
- Roots
- Mycorrhizal networks
- Fungi
- Decomposition
5 steps
How a bird finds Africa
A warbler hatched in a Surrey hedge, alone, at night, arriving somewhere it has never been. Four things have to be true for that to work, and one of them was not established until 2015.
- Bird migration
- Animal navigation
- Magnetoreception
- Migration
- How we know where animals go
5 steps
Fields you cannot feel
Two senses built on physics that passes straight through a human being — one of them solved, one of them still missing its receptor after fifty years.
- Animal senses
- Electroreception
- Platypus
- Magnetoreception
- Animal navigation
4 steps
From a bee to a flower
Follow a foraging bee out of the hive and all the way into the flower — navigation, the dance that shares a route, and what pollination actually requires.
- Honey bee
- Animal navigation
- Pollination
- Flowers
Across species
All 129 in ExploreQuestions that are not about one animal
Which animals use tools? What counts as culture? These pages are assembled from the same evidence as the subject pages, arranged by ability or mechanism rather than by organism — so a crow, a bee and a carnivorous plant can appear side by side.
- Invasive mosquitoes and range shiftFound, breeding, established, transmitting. Four different states, and most introductions stop early.
- Nitrogen fixationNo plant fixes nitrogen. Legumes build an organ to house bacteria that do, and pay in sugar.
- Nutrient cyclingAdding dead leaves to soil can leave plants with less nitrogen, not more — for months.
- The rhizosphereRoots do not so much feed the soil as leak into it. The microbes gather where the carbon is.
- The soil food webA springtail grazing leaf litter is mostly eating the fungus growing through it.
- Soil carbonThe leaf that rots fastest may leave the most carbon behind.
Recent research we have read
Not a news feed. Each of these has a page explaining what it found, what its authors concluded, and how far we think the result can actually be pushed.
UK Health Security Agency
Aedes aegypti breeding detected in England: surveillance statement
Aedes aegypti was confirmed breeding in Britain for the first time, at residential properties in east London.
Nature Ecology & Evolution
African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls
The model identified intended receivers better than chance, and elephants responded more strongly and more quickly to calls originally addressed to them.
Nature Communications
Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations
Coda structure varies systematically along dimensions the authors name rubato — smooth variation in overall duration — and ornamentation, an extra click added at the end of a coda.
Current Biology
Associative learning in the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora
Within a few minutes the animals increased their distance from the wall and increased successful avoidance turns, adjusting behaviour to the altered contrast.
Fungal Ecology
Electrical potentials in the ectomycorrhizal fungus Laccaria bicolor after a rainfall event
Electrical potentials were low and largely unstructured before rain and increased after it, with the signals from nearby fruiting bodies more strongly related to each other than to those further away.
How NatureHQ is built
Every claim carries its evidence, the species it was actually shown in, and an honest note about how far it can be pushed. We would rather have a small number of subjects worth reading than a catalogue of thin pages — which is why the numbers below are at the bottom of this page rather than the top of it. They describe how much has been built. They do not describe how much there is to know, and no page here claims to be finished.
- Subjects
- 191, each publishing its own gaps
- Claims
- 614 backed by at least one study
- Research
- 720 studies read and summarised
- Open questions
- 761 recorded rather than smoothed over
How we work · Evidence standards · Where our sources come from