Take the long way
Guided journeys
Every page here can be read on its own, and some of them are much better read in a particular order. These are those orders — short routes of four or five stops, each written as an argument for why one page follows another rather than as a list of things that are related.
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
From a sound to a meaning
Start with an animal that answers to its own name, and work outward to what it would actually take to call any of this a language.
- Dolphins
- Animal communication
- Do animals have language?
- Animal culture
- Animal intelligence
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
4 steps
What one animal learns from another
Work out where a behaviour came from — invented, inherited, or copied — and what it takes to tell the three apart.
- Social learning
- Animal culture
- Tool use
- Animal intelligence
5 steps
How a bird learns to sing
Follow one song from the adult that sang it, through the young bird copying it, out to a valley full of birds singing the same variant — and to the question of whether any of it means anything.
- Birdsong
- How birds learn to sing
- Birdsong dialects
- Vocal learning
- Do animals have language?
5 steps
From a seed to a forest
Take one seed through every gate between it and a canopy: getting somewhere, waiting for the right year, running on light, and joining a system.
- Seed dispersal
- Germination
- Photosynthesis
- Trees
- Forests
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
Seeing with sound
How two unrelated groups of mammals arrived at the same solution, and what it costs to build a sense that has to announce itself.
- Animal hearing
- Echolocation
- Bats
- Dolphins
4 steps
Light you cannot see
Three properties of light a human eye throws away, and what happens to a flower, a compass and a snake when something reads them.
- Ultraviolet vision
- Honey bee
- Polarised light vision
- Infrared sensing
Reading movement in what is around you
Water being pushed aside, and the ground shaking — two channels no list of the senses mentions, and the animals that live in them.
- The lateral line
- Sharks
- Feeling the ground
- Spiders
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
4 steps
Home without landmarks
A turtle that left as a hatchling comes back decades later to the coast it started on. There is nothing to remember and nothing to see — so what is it following?
- Magnetoreception
- Animal navigation
- Sea turtles
- Migration
4 steps
The long way home
Salmon do smell their way home. They also cross an ocean where there is nothing to smell — and the two halves of that journey needed two different answers, sixty years apart.
- Smell, and how far it really works
- Salmon
- Magnetoreception
- Sea turtles
4 steps
Navigation without a map
An ant crosses a salt pan with no landmarks, finds food a hundred metres from home, and runs straight back. Pick it up and move it, and it runs the same line into empty ground.
- Path integration
- Polarised light vision
- Ants
- Animal navigation
4 steps
What “adapted” is hiding
One word is doing three jobs, on three timescales. Take them apart, and most of what you have been told about animals in hard places changes shape.
- Adaptation
- Extreme survival
- Heat tolerance
- High-altitude adaptation
5 steps
The five ways of not being there
Hibernation, torpor, diapause and cryptobiosis were named by different fields studying different animals. Underneath, they are running much the same machinery.
- Dormancy
- Torpor
- Diapause
- Cryptobiosis
- Tardigrade
4 steps
Ice, on purpose
Two opposite solutions to freezing, one of which involves manufacturing the thing the other spends all autumn removing.
- Freeze tolerance
- Wood frog
- Antifreeze proteins
- Icefish
4 steps
The arithmetic of a desert
The famous desert animals are not tough. They are keeping accounts — and one of them balances the books by condensing water out of its own breath.
- Desert survival
- Kangaroo rat
- Countercurrent exchange
- Extreme survival
4 steps
Where the limits actually are
Four famous extremes, and in every one of them the popular account has the mechanism wrong — usually by making it more dramatic than it is.
- Deep-sea pressure
- Bar-headed goose
- Hypoxia tolerance
- Extremophiles
4 steps
How not to be seen
Concealment is not a property an animal has. It is a relationship with a particular pair of eyes — and once you see that, the whole subject changes shape.
- Camouflage
- Disruptive coloration
- Peppered moth
- Zebra
4 steps
The predator’s problem
Hunting is not a demonstration of capability. It is a sequence of separate problems, most attempts fail, and the famous abilities are rarely what decides it.
- Predation
- Ambush and pursuit
- Cooperative hunting
- Predator–prey arms races
4 steps
Warning, and borrowing a warning
A warning colour is not a property of the animal wearing it. It is a fact about what predators have learned — which is exactly why it can be stolen.
- Warning coloration
- Poison frogs
- Mimicry
- Eyespots
Every defence has a price
Escaping is not free. Follow four defences and their bills — and find that the most famous ones are usually described without theirs.
- Autotomy
- Playing dead
- Bombardier beetles
- Armour and spines
4 steps
What the group knows
Animals in a group are not necessarily helping each other — and the information moving between them does not stop at the species boundary.
- Group defence
- Mobbing
- Crows
- Animal communication
5 steps
The untested obvious
Five things everybody knew about animals, and the five different ways they turned out to be wrong — or unchecked, which is not the same thing.
- Constriction
- Mutualism
- Scavenging
- Convergent evolution
- Collective behaviour
5 steps
Living off something else
Every organism runs on another organism somewhere. Five relationships, sorted by what the other one loses — and one where it loses nothing.
- Predation
- Predatory fungi
- Parasitism and predation
- Brood parasitism
- Mutualism
5 steps
One change, many consequences
Take one species out and see how far the effect travels — from a shore where it is measurable to a national park where it is argued about.
- Keystone species
- Sea stars
- Trophic cascades
- Beavers
- Wolves
5 steps
Living together
Four partnerships across four kingdoms — and the discovery that none of them is a friendship.
- Symbiosis
- Lichens
- Mycorrhizal networks
- Coral and its symbionts
- Mutualism
Who gets the resource?
Why similar species do not simply eliminate each other — and why the textbook answer has never been tested on the textbook example.
- Ecological niche
- Competitive exclusion
- Niche partitioning
- Character displacement
The hidden half of the food web
Follow what happens to everything that is never eaten — which, in a forest, is most of what the plants make.
- Detritus
- Decomposition
- The soil food web
- Soil
- Nutrient cycling
4 steps
From arrival to establishment
A mosquito is found somewhere new. Four separate questions decide what that actually means — and most arrivals never reach the fourth.
- Invasive species
- Invasive mosquitoes and range shift
- Aedes aegypti
- Ecology
Why these are written rather than generated
NatureHQ records a few hundred evidenced connections between its subjects, and it would be easy to walk them and produce a path automatically. That path would be genuinely connected and worth nothing. Knowing that trees and fungi are related is not knowing that the useful order is the tree, then its roots, then the interface between them, then the fungus, then what happens when the tree dies — nor that reading the mycorrhizal page before the roots page makes an exchange look like generosity.
So each step below carries a paragraph saying what the previous stop left unresolved and what this one settles. That paragraph is the only thing on a journey page that does not exist somewhere else on the site, and it is the reason the page exists.