Tag Archives: Animal Behavior

The first great white shark was found dead in August 2023 on a beach in a national park on Prince Edward Island, Canada: a young male, 500 pounds, 8 feet 9 inches from snout to tail. Park workers soon arrived with a pickup truck, loaded the carcass and drove it to a cooler at the Atlantic Veterinary College at the …

Flower mites spend their lives slurping nectar and nibbling pollen in flowers throughout the tropics. To travel from one blossom to another, these tiny, eight-legged creatures hitch rides on the beaks of hummingbirds, taking shelter in the birds’ nostrils during flight. When a speedy hummingbird arrives at a flower to drink nectar, mites run toward its beak to get onboard …

In 1889, the naturalist Allan Octavian Hume wrote that he was puzzled by macabre decorations he observed in many birds’ nests: strips of dried snakeskin. “Are birds superstitious, I wonder? Do they believe in charms?” he wrote in “The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds.” If not, why were so many birds using pieces of snakeskin to adorn their nests? …

Corals come in a wide array of shapes, sizes and colors, and they build sprawling reefs that serve as refuges for vast amounts of biodiversity in the ocean. But they are not known for being fleet of foot. This is because out of the more than 6,000 species of coral known to science, most are colonial organisms — individual animals …

Ena Onishi, a doctoral student at Kyoto University, has spent over 600 hours watching chimpanzees urinating. She has a good reason for all that peeping, though. She is part of a team of researchers that recently discovered that the primates tend to tinkle when they see nearby chimps do the same. In a study published Monday in the journal Current …

You are in a desert and dying of thirst. All of a sudden, storm clouds appear overhead, and the sky starts to spit tiny drops of liquid. How would you quickly make the most of the potentially lifesaving precipitation? One more thing, you don’t have any hands. Prairie rattlesnakes have evolved an easy solution to this problem. They simply coil …

Carole Wilbourn, a self-described cat therapist, who was known for her skill in decoding the emotional life of cats, as confounding as that would seem to be, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84. Her death was confirmed by her sister Gail Mutrux. Ms. Wilbourn’s patients shredded sofas, toilet paper and romantic partners. They soiled …

Snakes like these are giants. Black mambas can stretch to 14 feet, and the longest king cobra ever recorded was 19 feet. Puff adders are petite by contrast, as short as six inches and no longer than six feet, but very thick. They have long, retractable fangs that can deliver poison into muscle. Their venom destroys blood-clotting factors, and victims …

Snakes like these are giants. Black mambas can stretch to 14 feet, and the longest king cobra ever recorded was 19 feet. Puff adders are petite by contrast, as short as six inches and no longer than six feet, but very thick. They have long, retractable fangs that can deliver poison into muscle. Their venom destroys blood-clotting factors, and victims …

For Wynne, the buttons are not only entirely superfluous to the communication humans and dogs already have but also potentially a distraction from their natural barks and howls, their tail wags and tucks. “I actually think that having dogs press buttons runs the risk of obscuring dogs’ voices in the sense of dogs’ expressions of themselves,” Wynne said. Rossano disagrees …