Explore across species
Some questions are not about an animal at all. These pages are assembled from the same evidence as the subject pages, arranged by ability, behaviour or phenomenon — so a crow, a bee and a carnivorous plant can appear side by side.
Animal navigation
A butterfly’s navigational clock is not in its brain. It is in its antennae.
3 subjects linked: Sharks, Snake, Spiders
Animal communication
A vervet monkey has one call for leopards and another for eagles — and the others react correctly with nothing there.
3 subjects linked: Bats, Honey bee, Lion
Animal memory
A jay will ignore its favourite buried food if enough time has passed for it to rot.
3 subjects linked: Jellyfish, Sharks, Slime moulds
Mycorrhizal networks
The fungi are real. The forest internet, as usually described, is not.
Tool use
Not "which animals pick things up" — which ones pay a price now for a payoff later.
6 subjects linked: Ants, Crows, Dolphins, Elephants, Gorilla, Octopuses
A sense of number
A bird, an insect and a plant, all responding to number — by three completely different mechanisms.
5 subjects linked: Ants, Crows, Honey bee, Lion, Venus flytrap
Recognising individual humans
A crow, an elephant and a bee all "recognise" people. Not one of them means the same thing by it.
3 subjects linked: Crows, Elephants, Honey bee
Plant communication
Plants do send chemical signals. The best evidence says they are talking to themselves, and the neighbours are listening in.
Flowers
Everything you find beautiful about a flower is an advertisement, and it was not aimed at you.
Pollination
A honey bee can sit on a tomato flower all day and pollinate nothing. It cannot buzz.
Seed dispersal
A jay is not planting an oak wood. It is burying food and forgetting some of it.
Photosynthesis
The oxygen you are breathing is water that light took apart. A tree is mostly air.
Germination
A dormant seed is not asleep. It is being actively held back, waiting for evidence.
Lichens
No roots, no waterproofing. That is why a lichen can live on bare rock — and why it tells you what the air has been like.
Nectar
A flower holds a sip, not a drink. Filling up would defeat the purpose.
Pollen
A pollen grain is not sperm. It is a tiny organism that makes sperm and then grows a tunnel.
Plant defence
A chewed plant smells different from a torn one. Wasps can tell, and that is not the plant asking.
1 subjects linked: Oak trees
Mimicry
A stick insect is not mimicking a stick. Nothing is fooled into treating it as one.
2 subjects linked: Platypus, Tiger
Animal sleep
A fly kept awake sleeps in longer afterwards. That, and not stillness, is what makes it sleep.
7 subjects linked: Dolphins, Honey bee, Lion, Octopuses, Orca, Penguin, Sperm whale
Bird migration
Move a young bird 500 km and it flies the same heading into the wrong country. Move an adult and it corrects.
Mushroom safety
The deadliest mushroom in Europe is a plain greenish-white one that tastes fine and kills you three days later.
Hibernation
A hibernating ground squirrel spends much of its winter fat budget rewarming — apparently in order to sleep.
2 subjects linked: Bats, Penguin
Insect migration
Trillions of insects cross overhead each year at a few hundred metres. Almost nobody has ever seen it.
Seasonal survival
A hibernating insect cannot be woken by a warm November. That is the point, and increasingly the problem.
11 subjects linked: Bats, Bird migration, Bumblebees, Hibernation, Honey bee, Insect migration, Oak trees, Penguin, Periodical cicadas, Snake, Tardigrade
Regeneration
Mammals do not fail to regenerate so much as succeed at something else, quickly, that makes it impossible.
4 subjects linked: Axolotl, Jellyfish, Octopuses, Spiders