Tag Archives: Animal Behavior

In January 2023, scientists attached tracking devices to eight grey plovers on the coast of the Wadden Sea off the Netherlands. The hope was to learn more about the birds’ yearly migration to breeding grounds in the Arctic. And all was going well until late May, when one of the …

When scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they typically thank family and colleagues, maybe their universities or whoever funded their research. This year, as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun accepted the most prestigious award of his career, he spent a few minutes lauding his experimental subject: a …

North-facing, sloping ground with loose, sandy soil — if you’re a bumblebee queen on the market for a winter home, these features will have you racing to make an offer. But scientists were recently stunned to find there’s something else these monarchs like in a place to hibernate: pesticides. In …

Running into a moose when driving a car or truck is bad enough, but crashing into the giant animal while riding on two wheels can be worse. Kevin Connors barely survived such an encounter while cruising on his motorbike just after sundown on a highway in Newfoundland, a Tennessee-size island …

It may seem like a hopeless place, but locusts find a way to breed in the scorching heat of the Sahara at midday. The biblical voracity of these insects make them among the world’s most destructive pests. They devour agricultural crops in swarms that number in the billions and stretch …

The sea robin has fascinated scientists for decades. It has the body of a fish, the wings of a bird and the legs of a crab. “Legs on a fish sound like, um, well, that’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” said David Kingsley, a developmental biologist at …

In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned …

The human brain, more than any other attribute, sets our species apart. Over the past seven million years or so, it has grown in size and complexity, enabling us to use language, make plans for the future and coordinate with one another at a scale never seen before in the …