A male webfoot octopus (Amphioctopus fangsiao) with its hectocotylus curled up (upper left) Keijiro Haruki For a male octopus, there is one appendage it cannot afford to lose. This is its third right arm, which has a specialised role in sex. Therefore, they take extra care to protect it. A new study led by Keijiro…
Female sperm whales hold the newborn calf above water until it can swim on its own Project CETI A sperm whale giving birth has been assisted by 10 other females in her social unit – the first time such an event has ever been observed in non-primates. In July 2023, scientists who have been monitoring…
When sperm-whale calves are born, weighing about a ton, they are pretty helpless. They can’t immediately swim—their flukes are bent from being cramped in the womb—and, to use the technical term, they are “negatively buoyant.” Left to their own devices, they will sink. What the footage showed is that, for the first three hours of…
A northern tamandua – a kind of anteater – using the fig tree latrine Tropical Canopy Ecology Project A host of tree mammal species, including opossums, two-toed sloths and wild cats, have been found sharing a latrine in the forest canopy. Jeremy Quirós-Navarro, an independent ecologist in Costa Rica at the time, first discovered a…
