Zoology

Inside the bizarre evolution of blind, albino cavefish

To adapt to their eternally dark surroundings, Mexican cavefish have gone blind, lost their pigment, and changed their sleep cycle. You can see one in the photo up top. Here’s the weird thing though…all those fish are the same species. The cavefish, known as Astyanax mexicanus, is really the same species as a surface-dwelling fish…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 22

How birds use optical illusion to woo females

To attract females, male great bowerbirds of Australia build huge, elaborate structures called bowers. They’re impressive structures, complete with courtyard and triumphal arch. But the males also use forced perspective to make themselves look more impressive to prospective mates. You can see an example of one of these bowers in the photo on the left,…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 22

The Circus Elephant Retirement Home

Elephants weigh 3 tons and eat 200 pounds of food per day. Sustaining these massive animals is an enormous (and expensive) task. So what happens to circus and zoo elephants when they grow old and can no longer earn their keep by entertaining audiences? They move to a retirement home in Tennessee. Here’s how two…

io9 Keith Veronese Jan 20

ScienceOnline2012 is the coolest (un)conference you’ve probably never heard of

Are you big on science and science communication? If you are, do yourself favor and check out ScienceOnline2012 (or scio12 to those in the know), the sixth annual international meeting on science and the internet. Scio12 kicked off yesterday and will run through tomorrow — and odds are high that many of your favorite bloggers,…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 20

Amputated gecko tails jump and move around long after their bodies are gone

As a last-ditch effort to distract predators and escape, some animals will remove a limb or organ from their body. Geckos take this already hardcore survival strategy to insane new levels — their tails effectively remain alive long after amputation. A ton of species are known to jettison appendages in a desperate attempt to save…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 19

Meet the 20,000 new species we discovered in a single year

The latest State of Observed Species report is out. And biologists might have just earned the title of Hardest-Working People in Science, discovering a staggering 19,232 species in just one year, including nearly 10,000 new types of insects. To put that in perspective, when Carl Linnaeus began his taxonomic organization of all known species in…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 19

Mysterious “white nose syndrome” is demolishing bat populations in the Northeast

It’s been just five years since the deadly fungus was first identified in a small population of New York bats. In that time, “white nose syndrome” has spread to 16 states and four Canadian provinces. Once infected, afflicted bats have been known to behave erratically, flying far from their nests, never to be seen again,…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 18

How scientists deciphered the “waggle dance” language of bees

This is one of the most succinct and interesting videos I’ve ever seen about how bees communicate with each other. Using a series of precise dance moves, they inform their hive mates about the locations of food sources. The vid was made by researchers working with a group at Georgia Tech called the Multi-Agent Robotics…

io9 Annalee Newitz Jan 17

These textbook doodles are absolutely beautiful

Few people can resist the urge to doodle in the margins when confronted with a long-drawn presentation, lecture, or meeting — but few of us can make a page of scientific instruction look as stunning as Paula Swisher, the artist behind the captivating pieces seen here. Using leaves of paper from old engineering and science…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 16

This snow-sledding crow will remind you what it means to make your own fun

It’s widely acknowledged that crows are remarkably intelligent animals (did you know that they’re commonly referred to as feathered apes?), but seeing one engage in a pastime as distinctly human as snow-sledding is a sight to behold. The description for this clip describes this particular corvid’s antics as “snowboarding,” but to me, the activity is…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 14

That ostrich over there? It is totally into you.

No, seriously. The next time you find yourself at an ostrich ranch (yes, they exist, and yes, they are everything you ever dreamed they could be and more), there’s a pretty decent chance of you getting hit on by an ostrich. Evidently, being raised entirely by humans (as is standard operating procedure on ostrich farms)…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 13

Did bigfoot really exist?

In a manner of speaking, yes, Bigfoot did exist — although, perhaps not in the way many modern day cryptid enthusiasts surmise. In a piece written for Smithsonian’s Hominid Hunting, Erin Wayman serves up the facts on Gigantopithecus — the car-sized quadruped that went extinct long before humans ever speculated about the existence of a…

io9 Erin Wayman - Hominid Hunting Jan 13

And now, a chicken grown in a Petri dish

A fertilized, incubated chicken egg takes about 21 days to hatch; and while most of us have seen what chicks look like at either end of the developmental spectrum (either sunny-side-up in a frying pan or newly hatched in a nature documentary), the fact that egg shells aren’t see-through means that not many people have…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 12

Behold: the first photos in history of a Myanmar snub-nosed monkey

Chalk another one up to camera traps! You’re looking at a close-up of one of the only known photos of a living Myanmar snub-nosed monkey — a bizarre species of primate that is so snub-nosed, it reportedly sneezes when it rains. https://gizmodo.com/this-leopard-is-so-happy-to-be-alive-it-can-barely-stan-5865358 “The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey was described scientifically in 2010 from a dead specimen…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 10

Watch this fish seek refuge in the anus of a sea cucumber

This video pretty much does what it says on the tin. The fish in question belongs to a species of pearlfish — small, tropical fishes known to seek out shelter inside various species of invertebrates… and if you happen to be a sea cucumber, “inside” means you’re going to have these little guys all up…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 10

New species of eyeless shrimp discovered swarming the deepest volcanic vents on Earth

Hydrothermal vents are epicenters to some of the most extreme geochemical processes on the planet. The hot spots of geological activity make their home on the ocean floor, where jets of scalding hot, mineral-rich water spew forth into the depths of the near-freezing ocean. Under the right conditions, these intense underwater processes give rise to…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 10

The ocean floor is like a rainforest where feces and dead animals rain from the sky

When many people hear the word “biodiversity,” they immediately think of tropical rainforests, or coral reefs; but as this picture demonstrates, biodiversity is a concept that ought to be more closely associated with the ocean floor, as well. Incredibly, the species you see gathered in the image up top were were collected in a single,…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 10

Octopuses rewrite their RNA to function in frigid Antarctic waters

We all know octopuses are clever, but a recent study reveals that the brainy beasts are crafty even at the molecular level. In a study published in the latest issue of Science, researchers reveal that octopuses living in the hypothermic climes of Antarctica rely not on their DNA, but the revision of their RNA, to…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Jan 6

Sabertooth predators had huge forelimbs

Sabertoothed cats weren’t just modern cats with huge freaking teeth. They also had immense and muscular forelimbs. In fact, there were a number of other large-toothed carnivores beyond the smilodon, and new research by Julie Meachen, a paleontologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC, shows that they all might have had big,…

io9 Tim Barribeau Jan 5

How to get six rhesus monkeys in one body

These two rhesus monkeys are called Roku and Hex. They look like regular old rhesus monkeys, and indeed they were born completely normal and healthy. But they are, in fact, chimeras, each the result of splicing six different genomes together. Animals created by mixing together genetically distinct material are called chimeras after the mythological beast…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 5

Inside the bizarre evolution of blind, albino cavefish

How birds use optical illusion to woo females

The Circus Elephant Retirement Home

ScienceOnline2012 is the coolest (un)conference you’ve probably never heard of

Amputated gecko tails jump and move around long after their bodies are gone

Meet the 20,000 new species we discovered in a single year

Mysterious “white nose syndrome” is demolishing bat populations in the Northeast

How scientists deciphered the “waggle dance” language of bees

These textbook doodles are absolutely beautiful

This snow-sledding crow will remind you what it means to make your own fun

That ostrich over there? It is totally into you.

Did bigfoot really exist?

And now, a chicken grown in a Petri dish

Behold: the first photos in history of a Myanmar snub-nosed monkey

Watch this fish seek refuge in the anus of a sea cucumber

New species of eyeless shrimp discovered swarming the deepest volcanic vents on Earth

The ocean floor is like a rainforest where feces and dead animals rain from the sky

Octopuses rewrite their RNA to function in frigid Antarctic waters

Sabertooth predators had huge forelimbs

How to get six rhesus monkeys in one body

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