WEIRD NATURE
At least one species can switch from female to male within ten days. By Sarah Sloat – For the majority of organisms, sex is not something that can be changed. This is not true, however, for a fish called the bluehead wrasse. These …
“We wanted to test this widely stated but largely untested hypothesis.” By Peter Hess – Imagine picking up a half-empty soda on the sidewalk and taking a big sip. You have no idea what you’d be exposing yourself to. But this is basically …
By Michael Irving – A red-eyed tree frog was one of the amphibian species observed during an expedition to the Lost City of the Monkey God in Honduras. (Credit: Trond Larsen). In 2012, centuries-old legends of a lost city in Honduras were …
By Ben Coxworth – – It may not be much to look at, but it could conceivably spare a child from colitis. (Credit: decade3d/Depositphotos). Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) isn’t good for anyone to have, but it’s particularly hard on children – it can …
George Dvorsky – Image: NASA/IceBridge. Well here’s something you don’t see everyday: an iceberg so unbelievably geometric in shape you’d think it was deliberately carved with a gigantic chainsaw. Scientists have documented this sort of thing before, but this latest ‘berg, which …
Ben Coxworth – The fish-eating praying mantis chows down on its catch (Credit: Rajesh Puttaswamaiah). Praying mantises may not actually pray, but they do prey heavily on their fellow insects, along with other small land animals. Now, however, for the first time, …
Trees have been around for about a million years, and as you can see from these incredible pictures, there’s a good reason why they’ve survived for so long. Whether they’re growing in the middle of gale-force winds, on the tops of rocky platforms, …
Kimberly Lin – The Moeraki Boulders are huge spherical rocks on Koekohe Beach on the Otago coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Appearing like a congregation of planets, the stones, with their sheer size and nearly perfect shapes, give birth to an …
A recent study illustrates the connection between consumer demand in the U.S. and increased furniture production in China, which is, in turn, fueling logging in Central Africa. By John C. Cannon – Sustainable logging in Cameroon. (Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images) Logging to feed …
by Frank Jacobs – The geographic distribution of places named after animals provides an indication of the former range of those animals. In Feral, his book proposing a re-wilding of our natural environment, George Monbiot refers to Shifting Baseline Syndrome as …
