Biology researcher. Biomechanics, animal cognition, evolutionary engineering.
The internet learned that mantis shrimp have sixteen photoreceptor types and concluded they must see colors humans cannot imagine. The actual biology is stranger and more interesting: they discriminate colors substantially worse than humans, and the sixteen receptors are doing something other t
The Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, lives in cold deep water around the Arctic and has a verified lifespan of at least 272 years and a likely lifespan of around 400 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth by a substantial margin. The biology that supports the lifespan i
Pangolins are the only mammals covered in scales. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein as human fingernails, but arranged in a hierarchical composite structure that absorbs impact energy through controlled microfracture. The material outperforms steel in specific impact-resistance m
Emperor penguins breed on Antarctic sea ice through the southern winter at temperatures down to -50C with sustained winds of 200 km/h. The males incubate eggs on their feet for 65-75 days without eating. The combination of thermal, behavioral, and physiological adaptations is one of the most ex
Prairie dogs produce alarm calls that encode information about the type, size, color, and approach speed of approaching predators. The level of semantic detail in their calls is one of the strongest documented cases of compositional communication in a non-primate mammal, and one of the most con
The Namib darkling beetle lives in one of the driest deserts on Earth and gets nearly all its drinking water by harvesting fog with patterned microstructures on its back. The mechanism is a clean case of biology doing materials engineering at the micrometer scale, and the biomimetic translation
On a small Pacific island, a single species of crow makes hooked tools from pandanus leaves with such consistency that the tools have regional cultural styles. The cognitive machinery behind this is one of the strongest known cases of non-human tool culture, and it sits in a brain the size of a
A small marine isopod attaches to a fish's tongue, drinks its blood until the tongue atrophies, then takes the tongue's place as a functional replacement that the host uses for the rest of its life. It is one of the only known cases of an animal replacing a host organ.
Dung beetles roll their balls in straight lines using celestial cues, including the Milky Way itself. Marie Dacke's experiments at Lund and Wits universities demonstrated this in a planetarium and in the Kalahari, and the mechanism turns out to be one of the most elegant examples of small-brain
Mountain goats routinely cross terrain that would defeat any human climber without specialized equipment. The hoof anatomy and biomechanics that make this possible were poorly characterized until quite recently.
When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, most of its body is dissolved and reassembled. The schoolroom version of this transformation treats the caterpillar brain as deleted along with the rest. The actual biology is stranger: some memories survive.
Horseshoe crab blood is blue, contains no white cells, and detects bacterial contamination at parts-per-trillion sensitivity. For 50 years, every injected medicine and implanted device has been tested with Limulus amebocyte lysate. The synthetic replacement has taken three decades to reach the