The screwworms are here, as we predicted they would be. More than half a century after the parasitic pest was declared eradicated, the insects have escaped containment in South America and made it all the way to Texas, where they have not been seen since 1966. There are now five cases of the flesh-eating parasite in the United States, all confirmed in under a week. The first two were in calves in…

Recently, while picking up a banh mi in my neighborhood, I found myself transfixed by a TV in the restaurant showing what I assumed was a nature documentary. At first the footage soothed: Gentle humpback whales sailing through hazy blue waters and killer whales gliding in packs under glacial ice. But the longer I waited for my banh mi, which was not very long at all, the more unsettling the video…

No matter what brought you here—if you live with or without birds, if you have lain awake at night pondering the problem of your parrot's predilection for wanking it in the wee hours, or if you have no clue that or how a bird might whack off in the first place—I am here to tell you that yes, it is OK for birds to masturbate. In fact, it is not just OK; it is natural. As such, the birds in your…

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a tuxedo cat, approximately 8.5 pounds and 1 year old. Second, I made new friends who have two cats of their own: A tortico…

When the dead body of Timmy the humpback whale beached itself last week off the shores of the Danish island of Anholt, it was only a matter of time before Timmy would risk of the fate that befalls many a beached whale:

https://twitter.com/achillghost/status/2058958519747887516

The residents of Anholt, per the BBC, have watched Timmy slowly balloon in size as its guts and stomach begin to…

In the Western Baltic Sea, fisheries target migrating mackerel and needlefish with pound nets, which funnel passing shoals into a series of smaller nets until they are trapped. The traps are emptied every few days, but as the caught fish idle in the nets, they become quite attractive to passing seabirds, such as cormorants, gulls, and terns. The cormorants sample the fish like a charcuterie board…

One of the strangest tales in Icelandic folklore concerns a creature called the Loðsilungur, or the furry trout. The trout, as you might imagine, looks like a fish covered with a white shag of fur, which it allegedly evolved to stay warm in Nordic waters. The people of Iceland, especially the men, knew not to eat the furry trout. If a man did eat a furry trout, he would suffer the unfortunate…

Remoras evolved to be clingy. The suction cup on their foreheads allows them to attach to larger animals like fridge magnets. Remoras hitch free rides on creatures of their choosing: sharks, rays, whales, dugongs, turtles, even parrotfish. But it has been traditionally assumed that the remora's approach to such symbiosis was mutually beneficial to both parties: The fish eat parasites off their…

Pixar has always been investing in protecting the Earth, at least in its movies. _A Bug's Life_ illuminated the role of insects in an ecosystem, _Finding Nemo_ called attention to marine pollution and coral reefs, and _WALL-E_ , the most radical of them all, imagined a planet destroyed by corporate greed and rapacious consumption. These films all concerned a non-human protagonist leaving home and…

At a glance, the Japanese water scavenger beetle _Regimbartia attenuata_ looks like any other beetle. It is small, black, and pleasantly round. It has your standard set of beetle legs (six) and is otherwise unassuming. It is, you might imagine, the exact kind of bug that a frog would seek as a snack. But this water scavenger beetle is impervious to trials and tribulations that would kill any…

On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative of crickets famous for their mimicry of leaves. Katydids have veined bodies that are often bright green like a new leaf or…

The animal kingdom is ruled by open sexual relationships. Bats, beetles, and bonobos all have multiple partners over a season or a lifetime. Barnacles and barracudas don't even get to pick their partners, simply spewing their eggs and sperm into milky clouds underwater. But it's much rarer to be a nonmonogamous bird. An estimated 90 percent of birds are socially monogamous, meaning they choose…

More than a century ago, the Chinese paleontologist and archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found an unusual trove in the same cave near Beijing where he found the skulls of the early hominin Peking Man. Along with the remains of a 700,000-year-old _Homo erectus_ , Wenzhong unearthed a collection of 20 quartz crystals, one of which was a "perfectly faceted, smoky quartz crystal," the researcher Juan…

When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don't know the long-term psychological consequences of fame for child stars like Moo Deng. Then I saw a video of the seven-month-old Japanese macaque Punch dragging his Djungelskog IKEA orangutan toy, and…

The Cambrian period is most famously remembered as an era of biological experimentation, with bizarre creatures such as _Hallucigenia_ , whose body resembled anti-bird spikes, and _Wiwaxia_ , which looked like a medieval flail come to life. But the Cambrian should also be remembered as a time when shit got extremely real for fish. If life in the oceans seems scary now for anything small and…

Apologies to all otters, ferrets, badgers, ferret-badgers, weasels, fishers, polecats, wolverines, martens, and grisons, but the mustelid of the moment is the stoat. The mascots of the 2026 Winter Olympics are a pair of sibling stoats named Milo (short for Milano) and Tina (short for Cortina). Tina is white, just like stoats in the winter, and Milo is brown, just like stoats in the summer. Milo,…

If you are anything like I once was, you moved through life feeling pretty sure you were not going to get scammed. You had an eye for the desperation of a fake Craigslist posting. You were attuned to the strange formatting of a phishing email. You had not even written a book intriguing enough to attract the attention of the mysterious book thief. But then hubris got my ass, as it is wont to do,…