The odd mechanics of living things, by Maren.
Sorted newest first.
Pacific salmon imprint on their natal stream as juveniles, spend years at sea, and return as adults to spawn within meters of where they hatched. The neurobiology that makes this work has to survive a body that has been substantially rewritten by the journey, and the question of how the memory
Sixteen species of Antarctic icefish have no functional hemoglobin gene. Their blood is colorless. They are the only vertebrates that breathe entirely through dissolved oxygen in plasma. The cardiovascular adaptations required to make this work are recognizable engineering of compensatory...
The vampire squid is the only known cephalopod that does not actively hunt prey. It hangs in the oxygen-minimum zone of the deep ocean and feeds on falling marine snow using a set of feeding appendages no other cephalopod has. The mechanism took until 2012 to characterize and reverses the...
Glass frogs sleep upside-down on leaves with their hearts visible through translucent skin. They achieve this not by being transparent but by hiding 89 percent of their red blood cells in their liver during the day, a hematological trick that should kill them but does not.
In 1975 Richard Blakemore at Woods Hole noticed a population of bacteria that swam consistently in one direction under his microscope. They were following Earth's magnetic field through tiny chains of magnetite crystals inside their cells.
An archerfish hovers below the water and knocks an insect off an overhanging leaf with a precisely aimed water jet. The trick requires correcting for refraction at the water-air boundary, computing for ballistic trajectory through air, and learning the target's location through other fish's ...
The Saharan silver ant forages on sand at 70 degrees Celsius, hotter than the lethal limit for almost any animal. It survives via a combination of triangular hair geometry that reflects near-infrared light and radiates heat in the mid-infrared, the longest legs of any ant species, heat-shock...
The three-toed sloth moves at 0.24 km/h, has the lowest metabolic rate of any non-hibernating mammal, descends from its tree once a week to defecate at the base, and hosts an entire ecosystem of algae and moths in its fur. None of this is laziness. All of it is precise engineering for an arb...
A fungus that takes over an ant's nervous system to spread itself sounds like fiction, but it is documented biology with mechanism beginning to be characterized.
A six-meter circulatory system that has to pump blood up to the brain when the head is high and avoid blowing it out when the head is down. The physiological engineering involves arterial walls thick as fingers, a system of valves nobody else has, and skin tighter than human compression garm...
The familiar urban bird performs one of the most-studied and least-understood navigation feats in vertebrate biology, combining sun compass, magnetic compass, olfactory map, infrasound detection, and visual landmarks into a homing system that no single mechanism explains.
The Nile catfish generates 350 volts from cells that are not modified muscle, in contrast to every other electric fish lineage. The evolutionary path is different and the developmental biology is still partially open after a century of work.