Animals

Like humans, animals experience complex emotions like empathy, love, grief and joy. They can also hold grudges. In a recent study, a team of biologists found that ants can learn from experience and hold grudges when confronted with competitors from another nest with whom they’ve had previous negative experiences. “We often have the idea that […]

Most spiders have eight legs, no ears and use fine leg hairs connected to nerve cells or their webs to hear sounds in their environment. But how do they smell? A new study by an international team of researchers has found that male spiders “smell” with their legs, using olfactory hairs — wall-pore sensilla — […]

New international research has found that nearly 30,000 wild animal species have been traded throughout the United States, according to data from the U.S. Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS), a wildlife trade monitoring organization maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Led by University of Hong Kong (HKU), the analysis looked at 22 […]

A quarter of all freshwater animals, including crustaceans, fish and insects, face a high risk of extinction from threats like pollution, farming and dams, a new study has found. Rivers, lakes, wetlands and other bodies of freshwater cover a relatively small amount of Earth’s surface — less than one percent — but are home to […]

In Australia, researchers are considering how genetic engineering could allow mosquitoes to produce venom proteins, like those produced by spiders and sea anemones, in their sperm to transfer the poison to female mosquitoes when mating. In a study led by Macquarie University, researchers first used genetically modified fruit flies to test what has been dubbed […]

President Joe Biden is planning to ban the development of offshore oil and gas across 625 million acres of United States coastal waters in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico. The move is an effort to provide permanent protection of U.S. coastal waters and the communities that rely on them from oil and […]

Each leopard can be identified by their own unique roar, the first large-scale study of its kind has found. Using a combination of camera traps and recordings, the research team was able to identify the vocalizations of individual leopards with 93.1 percent accuracy, a press release from University of Exeter said. “Discovering that leopards have […]

In devastating news for the Pacific Northwest population of southern resident killer whales (SRKW), Tahlequah, a 25-year-old member of the group, has lost another newborn female calf. The mother made headlines seven years ago when she swam with her deceased calf for 17 days around the Salish Sea in an act of grieving. She has […]