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THE BEST ANIMAL STORIES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX. Enjoy timely, meaningful news designed to entertain and educate you about our wild kin, plus updates from National Geographic and The Walt Disney ...
- Animals - Kids
Weird But True: Marine Animals. Penguin facts and photos....
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Learn all you wanted to know about animals with pictures, videos, facts, news, and more. Composite photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark. Amphibians.
- Overview
- ‘Virgin births’ in a rare bird
- COVID-19 found in wild deer, other animals
- World’s smallest reptile discovered
- Black-footed ferret cloned
- World’s bee diversity hotspot found
- Some elephants are evolving to lose their tusks
- Jaguars moving into the U.S., reclaiming old territory
- Wild horses and donkeys dig desert wells
- These sea slugs chop off their own heads
Here are our editors’ picks for the most compelling wildlife findings of the year, from ants that can regrow their brains to the world’s tiniest reptile.
Tuskless female elephants are proliferating in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. The country’s civil war led to widespread poaching, which killed most elephants and led some survivors to evolve a lack of tusks.
As we approach the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid increasingly destructive climate change, news coverage of science can sometimes be a heavy read.
But Earth is still an incredible place, bursting with promise and mystery. Research into the wonders of the natural world continue to show us how amazing life on our planet really is.
California condors—magnificent scavengers with a wingspan of over nine feet—almost went extinct by the middle of the 20th century, due to poisoning, poaching, and habitat destruction. In an ambitious bid to save them, all 22 condors were captured from the wild in 1987 and bred in captivity, before being released back to parts of California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California. The total population is now more than 500.
Researchers have kept careful track of the birds’ breeding habits and genetics, and in October, they discovered that two female birds had given birth to young—without breeding. This is the first evidence of virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis, in this species (and likely any non-domesticated bird). Scientists think that this form of reproduction is significantly more common in the animal world than thought, in part because it’s difficult to detect and rarely tracked.
Although parthenogenesis could serve as a life raft for rare species when mates are scarce, it could also have downsides, such as reducing genetic diversity.
Why did this happen? “We just don’t know,” says Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. “Will it happen again? I rather believe so.”
The virus that causes COVID-19 doesn’t just afflict humans: It can also infect a wide variety of animal species.
So far, researchers have found evidence of infection in captive or domesticated animals, including tigers, lions, gorillas, minks, snow leopards, domestic dogs, and domestic cats. Generally, the virus is thought to cause mild symptoms in other animals.
But the virus also infects wild white-tailed deer in North America. Scientists in Iowa found active infections in about 80 percent of deer, according to research published in November on bioRxiv, a site that posts preliminary scientific findings. The analysis suggests that deer have been infected multiple times from people and are passing it to one another‚ though nobody knows how deer might have picked up the virus. This research is similar to a study published earlier in the year showing that 40 percent of 152 deer tested in three states—Michigan, Illinois, and New York—had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.
Having a reservoir of the virus in a common animal is concerning, since deer could potentially transmit it back to humans, researchers say.
In February, researchers announced a new species of chameleon discovered in a rainforest in northern Madagascar, named Brookesia nana, or B. nana for short. This so-called nano-chameleon is about the size of a sunflower seed, and may be the smallest reptile on Earth.
Finding such a tiny reptile raises interesting questions about the lower limits of body size in vertebrates. It also highlights the astonishing—and highly threatened—biodiversity of Madagascar, scientists say. Its discoverers suspect the chameleon will soon be listed as critically endangered.
To save another endangered species, scientists have successfully cloned a black-footed ferret, using preserved cells from a long-dead wild animal. This is the first time any native endangered species has been cloned in the United States.
The achievement, announced in February, is a major advance, since there are only about 500 black-footed ferrets remaining—all of which are closely related and descendants of a single colony found in 1981 in Wyoming after the species was thought to be extinct.
But cells from one female named Willa, who died in the mid-1980s without reproducing, were preserved on ice at the Frozen Zoo, a program of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. These cells have now been cloned and made into a viable ferret named Elizabeth Anne.
Researchers hope that her offspring will be able to be reintroduced to the wild in the coming years, injecting a much needed dose of genetic diversity into the inbred population.
The San Bernardino Valley, straddling Arizona and Mexico, is one of the most important inland wetlands in the U.S. Southwest. Over the eons, water has traveled south from the mountains and forced its way out of artesian wells, giving rise to a bevy of plants and flowers throughout the year. This diversity of plants also supports a huge range of insects, including bees.
In April, a study published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, found that 497 species of bees live within just over six square miles of the valley—10 times smaller than Washington, D.C. This is, by far, the highest concentration of bee diversity on Earth.
Mozambique’s civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, was brutal for African elephants: More than 90 percent of the animals were killed for ivory in the country’s Gorongosa National Park. But the carnage had an unexpected result: Some elephants are evolving without tusks—thus giving them a lower chance of being killed by poachers.
As National Geographic previously reported, about a third of younger female elephants in Gorongosa, born after the war ended in 1992, never developed tusks.
Research published in October in Science shows that such elephants have mutated copies of two genes that normally promote tusk development.
Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.
Arizona and New Mexico are traditional jaguar territories: As recently at the early 1900s the big cats were found throughout both states, and as far north as the Grand Canyon. But in the past 15 years, a total of seven male jaguars have been reported in Arizona.
As National Geographic reported in March, scientists now know that one adolescent male jaguar inhabits protected land a few miles south of the border where Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico meet—a sign that the species may be extending north from a breeding population in Sonora, Mexico.
Though some consider wild horses and donkeys, or burros, to be an introduced menace, they can impact their environment in ways that help other animals.
In April in the journal Science, scientists reported these animals can use their hooves to dig more than six feet deep to reach groundwater, in turn creating oases that serve as a boon to other wildlife. The team found such wells in the Sonoran Desert, in western Arizona, and in the Mojave Desert, recording a total of 57 species that visited the water sources. These include American badgers; black bears; and an array of birds, including some declining species, such as elf owls.
Usually, when an animal loses its head, that animal’s life is over. But not so for some sea slugs. As described in a study published in March in Current Biology, two species of the marine animals can rip off their own heads. Each dismembered head can then regenerate an entirely new body.
These creatures are also unusual in that they can steal chloroplasts from algae and potentially harvest energy from the sun within their own bodies.
Jul 15, 2015 · By Simon Worrall. July 15, 2015. • 13 min read. Do animals feel empathy? Does an elephant have consciousness? Can a dog plan ahead? These are some of the questions that award-winning...
An endangered species is a type of organism that is threatened by extinction. Species become endangered for two main reasons: loss of habitat and loss of genetic variation. Loss of Habitat. A loss of habitat can happen naturally. Nonavian dinosaurs, for instance, lost their habitat about 65 million years ago.
Dec 4, 2020 · Here are 10 ways wildlife benefited: 1. Wildlife have benefited from some of our pandemic-induced lifestyle changes. The coronavirus, with early human spread linked to a wet market in Wuhan,...
Feb 5, 2019 · Extinct species, explained. Extinctions happen when a species dies out from cataclysmic events, evolutionary problems, or human interference. February 05, 2019. • 4 min read. The truth is,...
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