62 subjects
Subjects
A deliberately small set, built in depth. NatureHQ would rather publish a few dozen subjects worth reading than a catalogue of thin pages — and every page here says what it is still missing.
Mammals
12 subjectsThey can tell which people are dangerous by voice alone — and they may call each other by name.
Elephants are the largest living land animals, in three species across Africa and Asia. They live in matriarch-led family groups, communicate over long distances including through the ground, and appear to address each other with individually specific calls.
Elephants · Elephantidae- The dam is not the house. It exists to keep the front door under water.
- Metabolic water is not the trick — every animal makes it. The kangaroo rat’s trick is that almost none of it ever gets out.
- The quills are barely attached to the porcupine and grip hard onto whatever they enter. Nothing needs to be thrown.
- Modelled through a lion’s eyes, zebra stripes blur into grey by fifty metres. Whatever they are for, it is not fooling lions.
- Nobody has ever measured a gorilla being ten times stronger than a person. What they can measure is each other, by ear.
- It hunts with its eyes shut, reading the electricity of its prey — and works out the range from the gap between two senses.
- The obvious explanation for why lions live in groups was tested in the Serengeti, and it was wrong.
- The pattern on a tiger is drawn in its skin before it grows any hair — and the colour is in the hair.
- Females stop breeding at around forty and can live to eighty — and lead the hunt when food runs short.
- One in five mammal species is a bat — and none of them are blind.
- There is no alpha wolf. The man who put the idea into circulation spent the next thirty years trying to take it out.
Birds
9 subjectsIn-depth coverage
They know your face. What that actually means is more specific — and more interesting — than the headline.
Crows are medium-sized black birds in the genus Corvus, found on every continent except Antarctica and South America. They are among the most intelligent birds studied, though the headline abilities belong to particular species rather than to crows as a whole.
Crows · CorvusRead on- Homing pigeonsA century of experiments on one bird, and the finding is that there is no single mechanism: what a pigeon uses depends on whether it recognises where it is.
- Bar-headed gooseTracked bar-headed geese fly at night, low, through the passes. The physiology is extraordinary; the flying-over-Everest story is not what the tags show.
- CuckooThe chick does not pretend to be one enormous nestling. It pretends, with sound, to be a whole brood.
- VulturesTwo unrelated groups of birds arrived at the same body, because there is only one way to live on carrion.
- Greater honeyguideIt is raised by strangers, never meets a honeyguide parent — and it still knows what a particular human call means.
- ParrotsA wild parrot chick develops a call unique to it, learned from whoever raises it. Swapping the eggs between nests is how anyone found out.
- PenguinEighteen species, and the famous one is the least typical bird in the family.
- Common ravenThey hide food more carefully when they might be watched — with nobody in sight.
Marine life
12 subjectsIn-depth coverage
A second, independent invention of a complex mind — with two-thirds of its neurons in its arms.
Octopuses are soft-bodied marine molluscs with eight arms, around 300 species, and a nervous system that evolved complexity entirely independently of ours — most of their neurons are in their arms rather than their brain.
Octopuses · OctopodaRead on- Sea starsIt eats a mussel by pushing its own stomach into the gap between the shells.
- Cleaner fishIts favourite food is the mucus of the animal it is cleaning. The honesty has to come from somewhere else.
- SalmonSalmon do smell their way home — for the last few kilometres. A river’s scent does not reach the open Pacific, and something else brings them to the right coast.
- IcefishIcefish are the only vertebrates with no haemoglobin. On the evidence, it is not an adaptation to the cold — it is a loss they got away with.
- CuttlefishA mollusc that changes pattern in under a second, matches colours convincingly, and by the standard test cannot see colour.
- Deep-sea anglerfishThe lure is not the fish’s light. It is a bacterial colony — and the evidence says each fish recruits it from the open sea.
- Humpback whaleIn two seasons, every male humpback off eastern Australia stopped singing their song and started singing someone else’s.
- JellyfishNo brain, no heart, no blood — and one species that learns from its mistakes in under five minutes.
- Sperm whaleA third of it is a nose rebuilt into a sound cannon, and it uses that to find squid a kilometre down in the dark.
- DolphinsA dolphin invents its own whistle as a calf and answers to it forty years later — even when the voice is stripped out.
- SharksA shark will attack a pair of bare electrodes that smell of nothing — because a living body leaks electricity.
Reptiles and amphibians
5 subjectsA turtle does not return to a beach. It returns to a magnetic signature — and when the signature drifts along the coast, the nests drift with it.
Sea turtles cross ocean basins and come back to nest on the coast where they hatched, decades later. The evidence says they are returning to a magnetic signature rather than to a place — and that signature drifts, taking the turtles with it.
Sea turtles · Chelonioidea- A frozen wood frog has no heartbeat, no breathing and ice through two-thirds of its body. In spring it thaws out and goes to breed.
- The poison is not theirs. They take it from mites and ants — which is why a frog bred in captivity is not poisonous at all.
- It can regrow a leg, and the leg only regrows because the stump can still be told what is missing.
- It never dislocates its jaw, it is not deaf, and it walks its teeth over dinner one side at a time.
Insects
9 subjectsIn-depth coverage
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 melliferaRead on- Aedes aegyptiIts eggs survive drying for months on the side of a container. That is why it travels so well.
- Monarch butterflyThe monarchs that reach Mexico are the great-grandchildren of the ones that left it. Nothing in that chain can be remembering the route.
- Peppered mothThe famous experiment had real flaws, the critics were largely right about them, and a seven-year re-run got the same answer. That sequence is the good part.
- Bombardier beetlesTwo harmless liquids, mixed on demand, fired at about 100 °C in hundreds of pulses a second — and aimed at whatever is biting.
- FirefliesA firefly flash is a code — so it can be forged. Some females answer another species’ code, eat the males that reply, and keep their chemical defences.
- Periodical cicadasSeventeen years underground, then a few weeks above it, and the whole defence is being too numerous to eat.
- AntsThe colony solves problems no ant is solving. That is not a metaphor; it is the mechanism.
- BumblebeesThey feel the electric field around a flower — with their hair.
Arachnids
1 subjectTrees
2 subjectsPlants
4 subjectsStart here
A cactus avoids drying out. A resurrection plant lets it happen — dries to a crisp, waits months, and revives within hours of rain.
Resurrection plants dry to a brown crisp, stay that way for months, and revive within hours of rain. They appear to do it by switching on in their leaves the desiccation-tolerance programme that nearly every flowering plant already runs in its seeds.
Resurrection plantsRead on- OrchidsAn orchid seed carries no food at all. A fungus has to feed the seedling before it can feed itself.
- Carnivorous plantsThey are not eating for energy. They are mining the soil for nitrogen, and the soil has none.
- Venus flytrapIt counts to five. The counter is a chemical concentration that fades in half a minute.
Fungi
4 subjectsThe 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.
Fungi are their own kingdom, closer to animals than to plants. The organism is a network in soil or wood; a mushroom is a temporary fruiting body. Somewhere around 95% of fungal species have never been named.
Fungi- A fungus with no muscles closes a ring around a worm in a tenth of a second — and it knew to build the ring because it was listening to the worms talk.
- The fungus is not in the ant’s brain. It fills the body and wraps the muscle fibres — and the brain is left alone.
- A mushroom fires each spore with a water droplet — then makes its own wind to carry it away.