Subjects

They know your face. What that actually means is more specific — and more interesting — than the headline.

Corvus · In-depth record

They hide food more carefully when they might be watched — with nobody in sight.

Corvus corax

Eighteen species, and the famous one is the least typical bird in the family.

Spheniscidae

Females stop breeding at around forty and can live to eighty — and lead the hunt when food runs short.

Orcinus orca

They can tell which people are dangerous by voice alone — and they may call each other by name.

Elephantidae · In-depth record

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.

Canis lupus

Nobody has ever measured a gorilla being ten times stronger than a person. What they can measure is each other, by ear.

Gorilla

It hunts with its eyes shut, reading the electricity of its prey — and works out the range from the gap between two senses.

Ornithorhynchus anatinus

The obvious explanation for why lions live in groups was tested in the Serengeti, and it was wrong.

Panthera leo

The pattern on a tiger is drawn in its skin before it grows any hair — and the colour is in the hair.

Panthera tigris

A spider with 100,000 neurons will take a detour to prey it can no longer see.

Araneae · In-depth record

A million neurons, a dance that gives directions, and an argument that took thirty years and a radar set to settle.

Apis mellifera · In-depth record

The colony solves problems no ant is solving. That is not a metaphor; it is the mechanism.

Formicidae

They feel the electric field around a flower — with their hair.

Bombus

Seventeen years underground, then a few weeks above it, and the whole defence is being too numerous to eat.

Magicicada

A second, independent invention of a complex mind — with two-thirds of its neurons in its arms.

Octopoda · In-depth record

A dolphin invents its own whistle as a calf and answers to it forty years later — even when the voice is stripped out.

A shark will attack a pair of bare electrodes that smell of nothing — because a living body leaks electricity.

No brain, no heart, no blood — and one species that learns from its mistakes in under five minutes.

Cnidaria (Medusozoa)

A third of it is a nose rebuilt into a sound cannon, and it uses that to find squid a kilometre down in the dark.

Physeter macrocephalus

It counts to five. The counter is a chemical concentration that fades in half a minute.

Dionaea muscipula

An orchid seed carries no food at all. A fungus has to feed the seedling before it can feed itself.

They are not eating for energy. They are mining the soil for nitrogen, and the soil has none.

The mushroom is not the fungus. The fungus is the network — and one of them covers fifteen hectares.

In-depth record

A mushroom fires each spore with a water droplet — then makes its own wind to carry it away.

No tree has a pump. Water is pulled to the top under tension — and at about 120 metres, that stops working.

An oak makes ten thousand acorns in one year and almost none the next. That is the strategy, not the weather.

One cell. Millions of nuclei. No nervous system. It still finds the short way through a maze.

Myxomycetes

It survives the vacuum of space by turning into glass — and dies at the temperature of a warm bath when it is awake.

Tardigrada

It can regrow a leg, and the leg only regrows because the stump can still be told what is missing.

Ambystoma mexicanum

It never dislocates its jaw, it is not deaf, and it walks its teeth over dinner one side at a time.

Serpentes