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 57 subjects on the site. That is the point, not an apology.
Each claim on NatureHQ is a record with a status, a confidence rating, the studies behind it, the caveats, and — critically — the species it was actually demonstrated in. All 306 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 the model is built to prevent it. Every claim records the taxa the evidence covers and how far we are willing to extend it, with a stated reason 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 13 contested claims on the site — questions where researchers actively disagree — and 425 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.
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 dataset. Telling you where it is thin is more useful than pretending it is not.