How we work
NatureHQ exists because the gap between what a study found and what you read about it is usually where the interesting part lives.
It would be straightforward to import a taxonomy and publish twenty thousand species pages. We have not, and we do not intend to. A page that tells you an animal exists, what it eats and how long it lives is a page you can already find, and it is not worth anyone’s time to make another one.
Instead we build a small number of subjects properly: the questions people actually ask, the research behind the answers, the experiments explained from scratch, the claims that circulate and do not hold up, and the questions nobody has answered yet. There are currently 191 subjects on the site. That is the point, not an apology.
Every claim on NatureHQ carries a status, a confidence rating, the studies behind it, the caveats, and — critically — the species it was actually demonstrated in. All 614 published claims cite at least one study.
You can expand any claim to see why we rate it as we do, and expand again to reach the studies. You do not have to. The top layer is written to be true on its own.
This is the single most common failure in popular nature writing, and this site is built to prevent it. Every claim states which animals or plants the evidence actually covers and how far we are willing to extend it, with a reason given whenever we go beyond the species studied.
So: New Caledonian crows make hooked tools. Crows, as a group, do not. Honey bees can be trained to tell photographs of faces apart. Bees, the twenty thousand species of them, cannot be summarised that way at all.
There are currently 23 contested claims on the site — questions where researchers actively disagree — and 761 recorded open questions. Both are published rather than smoothed over.
A claim check can end in “disputed” or “early evidence”. Those are answers, not failures to reach one.
One thing to know about the claim checks as a set: most of them are corrections, and that is because of what we choose to examine. A claim earns a page when it is uncertain, exaggerated or widely misunderstood — not when it is simply true. So the mix of verdicts describes the questions we went looking for, and not how often people are right about nature.
When a study appears in the news, the usual response is an article about that study. Ours is different: we attach the finding to the subject it belongs to, connect it to the claims it bears on, look for the earlier work it builds on or contradicts, and then ask whether the subject as a whole is good enough yet.
The rule we hold ourselves to is that every worthwhile new discovery should leave the underlying subject more complete than we found it.
Every subject page ends with what it is still missing, and a completeness figure computed from the data rather than asserted by an editor. Some of those gaps are substantial. The crow page has almost nothing on breeding; the flytrap page does not yet answer the most common question people have about flytraps, which is how to keep one alive.
This is a foundation to build on, not a finished work. Telling you where it is thin is more useful than pretending it is not.