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When first discovered in 1986, the site yielded part of a mammoth and a few stone tools. In 2014, Surovell and his team ...
06/10/2022

When first discovered in 1986, the site yielded part of a mammoth and a few stone tools. In 2014, Surovell and his team stumbled on archaeological gold. While widening a path 12 meters away from the 1986 find, a team member’s shovel struck a large stone artifact, a tool probably used for chopping. “All of a sudden the site expanded hugely,” Surovell says.

Since then, the researchers have unearthed a dramatic story of how early hunters gathered triumphantly around their kill. The mammoth bones mark where the animal lay; nearby is a string of fire pits, presumably where people camped as they butchered the meat. Near the campfires lie domestic artifacts such as bone needles and bone beads, which suggest that several families or a small village temporarily settled around the mammoth kill.

Because many predators in coral reefs hunt by sight, a cover of darkness may give young sixbar wrasses the best chance o...
03/10/2022

Because many predators in coral reefs hunt by sight, a cover of darkness may give young sixbar wrasses the best chance of settling into a reef undetected. In fact, Shima has shown that some of these fish appear to stay at sea several days longer than normal to avoid a homecoming during the full moon. Moonlight might similarly influence larvae of many kinds of reef fish and affect many aspects of the life cycle, Shima says.

Bad moon rising
Moonlight may flip the switch in the daily migration of some of the ocean’s tiniest creatures.

In the seasons when the sun rises and sets in the Arctic, zooplankton plunge into the depths each morning to avoid predators that hunt by sight. But many scientists had assumed that, in the heart of winter when the sun is absent, zooplankton take a break from the up and down.

Shima suspects that bright nights enable larvae to better see and hunt plankton. And like a child’s reassuring night-lig...
03/10/2022

Shima suspects that bright nights enable larvae to better see and hunt plankton. And like a child’s reassuring night-light, the moon’s glow may allow larvae to “relax a bit,” he says. Likely predators, such as lantern fish, shy away from moonlight to avoid the bigger fish that hunt them by light. With nothing chasing them, larvae may be able to focus on foraging.

But when young fish are ready to return to the reef, moonlight may become a hindrance. In a different study, more than half of over 1,000 young sixbar wrasses (Thalassoma hardwicke) observed arriving at coral reefs in French Polynesia over 11 months did so during the darkness of a new moon. Only 15 percent came during a full moon, Shima and colleagues reported in Ecology in 2018.

Road to recovery“There is a huge commitment across Australian society to try to recover from this tragedy,” Woinarski sa...
30/09/2022

Road to recovery
“There is a huge commitment across Australian society to try to recover from this tragedy,” Woinarski says. “We can’t give up yet on any of the species, environments, or vegetation types that have been so charred and degraded.”

One of the best things to do to help forests bounce back is to leave them to regenerate naturally and not disturb them further, Commander says. Clearing burnt vegetation and disturbing soils full of seeds ready to resprout can slow recovery.

In places where there are small patches of habitat left unburnt, “making sure that those continue to be protected, and can form nuclei for onward regeneration, is going to be an important thing,” Hobbs says.

It’s unclear if there are any costs to losing one or two tails, Chotard says. “You survived, you escaped from a predator...
25/09/2022

It’s unclear if there are any costs to losing one or two tails, Chotard says. “You survived, you escaped from a predator, but maybe there’s a trade-off and maybe your flight will be [slower].”

Some moth tails can deflect the attacks of echolocating bats (SN: 2/16/15). “Now we have evidence that butterfly tails provide a similar benefit against visual predators,” says evolutionary biologist Juliette Rubin of the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the study.

Future work determining the survival benefits of the tails could be one next step, Rubin says. “It would be informative to see how live swallowtail butterflies — both with and without tails — fare against bird predators.”

The answer: Spiders are hydraulic machines (SN: 4/25/22). They control how much their legs extend by forcing blood into ...
21/09/2022

The answer: Spiders are hydraulic machines (SN: 4/25/22). They control how much their legs extend by forcing blood into them. A dead spider no longer has that blood pressure, so its legs curl up.

“We were just thinking that was so cool,” Yap says. “We wanted to leverage it.”

Her team first tried putting dead wolf spiders in a double boiler, hoping that the wet heat would make the spiders expand and push their legs outward. That didn’t work. But when the researchers injected fluid straight into a spider co**se, they found that they could control its grip well enough to pull wires from a circuit board and pick up other dead spiders. Only after hundreds of uses did the necrobots start to become dehydrated and show signs of wear.

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