Animals
meerkat

Meerkat Magic

Some of the magic moment of filming meerkats for the BBC’s Planet Earth Live.

Pond snails that consumed epicatechin found in chocolate developed long-term memories. Image: Kenneth Lukowiak

Snails improved their memory after “eating” chocolate

Turns out that flavonoids make snails smarter.

fish-xray

A radiographer’s view of animals

A mutation in Taqpep converts a mackerel tabby pattern (upper) to a blotched tabby pattern (lower). Image courtesy of Helmi Flick

How the cheetah gets its spots

There may be a big difference in size, but cheetahs and tabby cats have things in common.

Myotis muricola from Kuningan, West Java. Otherwise known as the wall-roosting mouse-eared bat, it is a species of vesper bat. Image: Universiti Putra Malaysia

New bat species found in Malaysia

Misclassification of species suggests that there is need for a revision of the taxonomic status of muricola bats.

There are less than 3,000 tigers in the wild. Image: Shutterstock

Tigers on the brink of extinction

Tigers and humans try to coexist, but will we be able to save this endangered species?

The Icelandic horse is a "five-gaited" breed: it can walk, trot, canter/gallop, tölt and pace. Image: Wikimedia Commons

A single gene controls movement in vertebrates

Scientists have found that one gene is responsible for variability in locomotion in horses and mice.

squid1

Dancing chromatophores

Music has the ability to get these pigmented cephalopod cells moving to the beat.

A tammar wallaby and her joey. The joey will remain in its mothers pouch for the first 200 days after its birth. Image: Shutterstock

Selective imprinting: how the wallaby controls the growth of its young

Many imprinted genes regulate growth and nutrient provisioning for the developing fetus.

Light and temperature trigger the loss of symbiotic algae (bleaching) in a nutrient-stressed staghorn coral. Image: University of Southampton

Corals can suffer from nutrient imbalance

Improving water quality could help save coral reefs.

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