Animals, features and articles | Educational Science

May 29, 2023

Why do animals keep evolving into crabs?

A flat, rounded shell. A tail that's folded under the body. This is what a crab looks like, and apparently what peak performance might look like — at least according to evolution. A crab-like body plan has evolved at least five separate times among decapod crustaceans, a group that includes...

Jun 13, 2023

Watch cannibal crab gobble up baby crablets in Australia in David Attenborough's 'Our Planet II'

Incredible footage captures the moment billions of baby crabs risk their lives as they scurry past cannibal adults and swarm the shores of Australia's Christmas Island . The ultra-rare video features in Our Planet II — David Attenborough's latest Netflix series looking at how animals are adapting to our changing...

Aug 12, 2023

Pom pom crab: The crustacean that uses anemones as boxing gloves

Name: Hawaiian boxer crab or pom pom crab (Lybia edmondsoni) Where it lives: The Hawaiian Islands What it eats: Shrimp, squid Why it's awesome: The pom pom crab grows to only around half an inch (13 millimeters) wide, and its soft exoskeleton means its armor is pretty useless. Yet despite...

Sep 9, 2023

Hoff crab: The hairy-chested crustacean that farms bacteria on its hairs

Name: Hoff crab (Kiwa tyleri) Where it lives: East Scotia Ridge, Southern Ocean What it eats: Bacteria Why it's awesome: It turns out that the Yeti does exist — or at least it does underwater. Named after the abominable snowman, this family of deep-sea squat lobsters was first discovered in...

Oct 12, 2023

'Hauntingly beautiful' image of a golden horseshoe crab wins wildlife photography competition

A stunning image of a golden horseshoe crab shuffling along the seabed with three striped fish overhead has won this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Laurent Ballesta, a French underwater photographer and marine biologist, captured the striking scene in the protected waters of Pangatalan Island in the Philippines,...

Oct 19, 2023

More than 10 billion snow crabs starved to death off the coast of Alaska. But why?

More than 10 billion snow crabs recently vanished from the Bering Sea, and now we know why: They fell victim to one of the biggest marine heat wave die-offs on record, new research shows. The deadly heat wave, which struck polar waters between Alaska and Siberia in 2018 and lasted...

Nov 15, 2023

Crabs keep evolving to go from the sea to the land — and back again

Crabs have evolved to migrate from the sea to land then back again multiple times over the last 100 million years, scientists have discovered. A new study, published Nov. 6 in the journal Systematic Biology, found that true crabs (Brachyura) — which consist of 7,600 species across 109 families —...

Jan 23, 2024

'You can see its guts and things': Weird see-through crustacean with giant eyes discovered off the Bahamas

Using LED lights and glow sticks, scientists in the Bahamas have discovered an ancient deep-sea crustacean with giant eyes and a see-through body. Although the species, which they named Booralana nickorum, is newly identified, it has been on the planet for 300 million years and may play a crucial role...

May 2, 2011

What the Heck Is This?

Not goofing around today — this one is tough. I'll be surprised if anyone gets it without cheating. So make your guess before reading on… It's a giant jellyfish unlike most you might ever have seen. Instead of long tentacles, this creature has fleshy arms that capture food. See the...

Oct 16, 2020

Bird flies 7,500 miles nonstop, breaking world record

An international traveler just broke the world's record for longest nonstop flight. Among birds that is. A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) just flew for 11 days straight from Alaska to New Zealand, traversing a distance of 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) without stopping, breaking the longest nonstop flight among birds known...

Oct 19, 2020

Half-male, half-female songbird discovered in Pennsylvania

Biologists recently made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery of a bird that's male on the right side and female on the left. Researchers captured the bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus), at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve, an environmental research center in Rector, Pennsylvania. Plumage colors usually signal...

Nov 25, 2020

Dino-era bird had the head of a Velociraptor and beak of a toucan

In what may be one of the weirdest animal mash-ups, scientists have found the 68 million-year-old fossilized skull of an early bird with a Velociraptor-like face and a toucan-like beak, a new study finds. This crow-size bird lived in northwestern Madagascar during the late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs walked the Earth....

Jan 15, 2021

Raven 'queen' missing from Tower of London, feared dead

One of the iconic ravens that resides in the Tower of London is missing, and officials fear the worst. Will the tower fall, as legend warns? (Probably not.) Merlina, a female raven (Corvus corax), joined the corvid community at the tower in 2007, and has reigned since then as the...

Jan 16, 2021

'Joe the Pigeon' gets reprieve from death, after leg band found to be fake

Australia's avian celebrity Joe the Pigeon is getting a new lease on life after authorities determined he is not a biosecurity threat. Joe's story started last month when a man in Melbourne found the seemingly emaciated pigeon wearing a leg band in his backyard. According to Australia's 9News, the man,...

Feb 24, 2021

Video captures unusual death of baby bird drowned by a fish

When a sparrow's nest flooded during high tide in coastal Georgia, a fish jumped at the chance to make a meal of a newly hatched chick, and a scientist's video camera caught a first-ever view of the entire deadly encounter. Footage showed a small fish called a mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus)...