Ecology & Zoology

Giant flea-like animals, possibly the oldest of their type ever discovered, bit creatures much larger than they are 165 million years ago - and lived to talk about it.These flea-like animals, were…

I love four things about this story. First: there is an All England squid catching championship. Did you know that? I did not know that. Second: the weather this year was so bad the competitors were…

If a species´ reproductive strategy is evolutionarily adapted to the environmental constraints encountered by that species in its natural habitat, such as availability of food resources and…

Gobies are the little fish you may have seen under the pier or swimming around your feet in salty water if you’ve visited the coasts of Western Europe. These seemingly boring brownish fish live a…

I may have mentioned before that squid fishermen of the Falkland Islands go after two very different species: Illex argentinus, the shortfin squid, an open-ocean animal that migrates…

A small marine worm, Olavius algarvensis, is faced with a scarce food supply in the sandy sediments it lives in off the coast of Elba, so it must deal with a highly poisonous menu: it lives on carbon…

It's called Knowledge and it's a short story by John Frizell in Nature. Did you know that Nature publishes short stories, one at the back of every issue? They do! No human could have grasped the…

In Moby Dick, Melville scoffs that “fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Following the example of the Ancient Egyptians…

A new instance of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltonii, more commonly known as the colossal squid: A HUGE squid weighing 120 kilograms found off Portland [Australia, not Oregon] last week is believed to be a…

It was the year 2000, I think, and I was on a college field trip to the tidepools. The class was Invertebrate Zoology, so we were flipping rocks over and listing off the phyla as fast as we could…