Biology
The pistol shrimp is famous for its acoustic stun mechanism. The sensory side of the same animal — how a 5-gram crustacean with a few hundred thousand neurons targets prey accurately enough for the 0.6-millisecond claw release to land — has been characterized much more recently.
Biology
Box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes arranged in clusters around the bell, including pairs that look much like camera-style vertebrate eyes with lens and retina. The species has no brain to process the visual information, and the question of how it uses what its eyes see is genuinely strange.
Biology
The goblin shark lives in deep ocean water below 200 meters and has a jaw mechanism that can launch forward at striking speeds documented at over 3 meters per second. The mechanism has no close parallel among other sharks and was only directly observed on video in the last decade.
Biology
Sea otters are the only marine mammals known to routinely use stone tools, and the behavior has features the cetacean and primate tool-use literature does not prepare biologists to expect. The patterns suggest something about how cultural traditions stabilize in non-human species.
Biology
A small octopus from the western Pacific shallows carries coconut-shell halves around its habitat and assembles them into shelters. It also walks on two arms while doing it, in a gait that has no obvious analog elsewhere in invertebrate biology.
Biology
Velvet worms are 500-million-year-old soft-bodied predators that hunt by spraying pressurized adhesive slime in oscillating jets from glands beside the mouth. The slime nets immobilize prey and stiffen on contact with air, producing one of the most unusual predatory mechanisms in biology.
Biology
Each bottlenose dolphin develops a unique whistle in the first year of life and uses it for the rest of life as a self-identifier. Other dolphins call them by it. The closest analog to human naming in any non-human species, with sustained research dating to the 1960s.
Biology
The pom-pom crab holds a small sea anemone in each claw and uses them as living defensive weapons. The anemones come from a species that does not exist freely in the wild; the crabs propagate them by induced fission, making this one of the cleaner cases of animal-driven domestication.
Biology
Anser indicus migrates twice a year over the Himalayas at altitudes where oxygen partial pressure is roughly one-third of sea level. Most birds cannot fly at these altitudes. Most mammals at these altitudes cannot walk briskly. Bar-headed geese flap.
Biology
Argyroneta aquatica is the only spider known to live its entire adult life underwater. The mechanism is a silk-and-air diving bell that the spider builds, maintains, and uses as a portable lung. A strange piece of biological engineering hidden in a small European pond animal.
Biology
Naked mole rat colonies maintain colony-specific vocal dialects that allow individuals to recognize colony members. The 2021 Barker et al Science paper showed the dialects are learned, not genetic, with cross-fostered pups adopting their adoptive colony's signature.
Biology
Bowhead whales are the longest-lived mammals on Earth, with documented ages exceeding 200 years. The cellular mechanisms involve enhanced DNA repair, a duplicated tumor suppressor gene, and unusually slow metabolism. What the longest-lived mammal tells us about mammalian aging.