Tag Archives: Animal Behavior

If you’ve ever really looked at how flamingos eat, you know how captivatingly peculiar it is. They bob their inverted heads in the water and do a kind of waddle cha-cha as they inch their way across shallow water, filter-feeding small crustaceans, insects, microscopic algae and other tiny aquatic morsels. Victor Ortega-Jiménez, an integrative biologist at the University of California, …

Five mornings a week, Dr. David Slotwiner, the chief of cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital, can be found tending to human hearts. But on Sunday mornings, he is on a grass-covered field at a rural farm in Hackettstown, N.J., standing among half a dozen sheep, whistle in hand, teaching his Border collies Cosmo and Luna to herd. “It helps me …

True friends, most people would agree, are there for each other. Sometimes that means offering emotional support. Sometimes it means helping each other move. And if you’re a superb starling — a flamboyant, chattering songbird native to the African savanna — it means stuffing bugs down the throats of your friends’ offspring, secure in the expectation that they’ll eventually do …

This is Ronan. She’s a California sea lion and she probably has better rhythm than you. Scientists earlier showed that Ronan, a resident of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was the first nonhuman mammal who could be trained to keep a beat, including moving in time with music. That was in 2013 when Ronan …

Male domination is the natural order of things, some people say. But bonobos, primates with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA, beg to differ. Bonobos are great apes that live in female-dominated societies, a relative rarity among mammals, especially in species where males are the larger sex. While females are smaller than their male counterparts, they reign …

When territorial animals are confronted by intruders, they instinctively protect their turf — no matter how small. For warty birch caterpillars, that means patrolling one of the tiniest territories on Earth: the tips of birch leaves. Scientists observed the caterpillars warding off intruders with loud vibrations that advertise they are in command of a domain that stretches a few millimeters …

After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings. The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others. Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of …

For a creature made up of only a single cell, the stentor is a giant. This trumpet-shape organism is among the largest unicellular organisms, stretching as long as a sharpened pencil tip. But sometimes it has a hard time vacuuming up the swimming bacteria and microscopic algae it eats to survive. New research reveals that stentors, which are part of …

In 1996, Kat Albrecht was a police officer and bloodhound handler in Santa Cruz, Calif. Her dog, A.J., had been a part of many search and rescue efforts, sniffing out and locating lost people in the woods. But when A.J. escaped Ms. Albrecht’s yard, there was no team of expert animal rescuers to turn to. So she sought help from …

There’s nothing worse than a noisy neighbor when you are trying to have a nice meal — even if that meal consists of liquefying the insides of your prey before sucking them back up. New research shows that some spiders living in cities somehow weave soundproofing designs into the fabric of their webs to manage unwanted noise, which can make …