The Deep-Sea Unknown Off Japan: An Animalia Incertae Sedis Filmed at Depth
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 13, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 In April 2026, a paper in Biodiversity Data Journal described a small, pale, bilaterally symmetrical organism that had been filmed gliding above the floor of the Ryukyu Trench at roughly 9,130 meters [1]. The authors, working with the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research […]
The Sudden Vanishing of Bees: CCD
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 In the autumn of 2006, a Pennsylvania commercial beekeeper named David Hackenberg trucked roughly 400 colonies of Apis mellifera from the Susquehanna Valley to a wintering yard in central Florida. When he came back to inspect them in early November, the boxes […]
Elephant and Rhino Odd Friendship
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 8, 2026. A picture circulates every few years online: a small elephant calf with its trunk laid against the flank of a young rhinoceros, the two animals lying side by side in shaded straw. The caption usually reads as […]
Crop Circles: The Animal Connection
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 8, 2026. Crop Circles and the Animal Connection: What the Field Record Shows Most flattened-cereal crop circles in southern English wheat are anthropogenic, traceable to the 1991 admission by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley and the artists who […]
Interspecies Adoption: Dog Nursing Kittens
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 8, 2026. A lactating dog will sometimes accept orphaned kittens, groom them, and let them latch and feed. The behavior is reliable enough that shelters use it, and odd enough that the internet rediscovers it every spring. The […]
The Curious Case of Two-Headed Snakes
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The Curious Case of Two-Headed Snakes A two-headed snake is the most photogenic answer to a quiet embryological question: what happens when a single embryo begins to twin and then changes its mind. The condition is called bicephaly, or more precisely […]
Albinism in The Wild: A Dangerous Anomaly
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is Albinism in Wild Animals? Albinism in wild animals is a heritable autosomal recessive condition in which mutations on one of several pigmentation genes (most commonly TYR, OCA2, TYRP1, or SLC45A2) prevent the synthesis of […]
Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly Migration
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is the Mystery of Monarch Butterfly Migration? The mystery of monarch butterfly migration is that no single butterfly completes the round-trip journey. Each year, a “super-generation” born in late summer flies up to 4,000 kilometers […]