All articles tagged with #animal behavior
The 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards finalists have been revealed, featuring 47 images and nine videos selected from a record 10,000 submissions across 112 countries. The shortlist includes humorous scenes such as a giraffe appearing to wear a tree, a bear doing yoga, and a mantis posing on a leaf. Winners will be announced on December 8 in London, with the top prize being a safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara.
The 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have released their finalists, selected from a record-breaking 10,000 submissions across 112 countries. The shortlist includes 47 images and nine videos, featuring humorous scenes such as a mantis posing in Peru and bears sparring in Alaska. Public voting for the People's Choice Award is open, with final winners to be announced at a ceremony in London on December 8, 2026.
The 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have released their finalists, selected from a record 10,000 submissions across 112 countries. The shortlist features 40 images, including a 'sexy' mantis in Peru and a squirrel attacking an owl in California. Winners will be announced on December 8 in London, with the top prize being a safari in the Masai Mara.
The 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards have released 40 finalists from a record-breaking 10,000 submissions across 112 countries. Winners will be announced on December 8. Highlights include a squirrel attacking an owl in California, a bear doing yoga in Alaska, and a mantis posing in Peru.
Great tits (Parus major) exhibit complex behaviors including predation on bats, cultural conformity, and urban adaptation. Research shows they hunt hibernating bats during food scarcity, kill competitors for nest sites, and develop local traditions through social learning. Urban environments influence their song pitch, plumage color, and sleep patterns, while genetic factors contribute to boldness and extra-pair paternity.
A Golden Retriever responded to the distress of foster puppies by collecting and delivering a variety of items, including toys, a shoe, and a bra, to the door where the puppies were crying. The dog’s actions, captured in a viral video, suggest an instinctive desire to comfort distressed animals through the provision of familiar objects.
Recent viral incidents of dogs confronting bears have sparked public fascination, but new scientific analysis suggests these actions are driven by innate predatory instincts rather than a desire to protect humans. Researchers analyzed hundreds of bear-canine encounters to determine the true motivations behind these confrontations. The findings indicate that while dogs may inadvertently shield people, their primary drive is not loyalty. This insight challenges common assumptions about canine protective behavior in wild settings and highlights the unpredictable nature of interspecies interactions in increasingly shared habitats.
Researchers at UC San Diego have identified the neural mechanisms allowing schooling glassfish to detect danger through social cues. By observing the escape or sudden disappearance of neighbors, fish trigger collective avoidance, a strategy vital for survival in low-visibility environments.
Discover Wildlife highlights ten animal species that engage in autophagy, the consumption of their own body parts. Examples include lizards eating shed tails, spiny mice gnawing off skeletal remains, and octopuses consuming tentacles. Other cases involve snakes eating their tails, mammals eating placentas, ladybirds consuming non-viable eggs, primates eating nasal mucus, crickets eating wings, and spiders gnawing off reproductive organs. These behaviors serve various functions, from resource recycling and infection prevention to nutritional recovery and mate competition.
A new commentary in Animal Behaviour challenges the popular narrative that Toxoplasma gondii manipulates host behavior to facilitate transmission. While the parasite is known to infect warm-blooded vertebrates and requires cats for reproduction, zoologist Andrew Davinack argues that many observed behavioral changes may be the result of 'ecological sorting' rather than direct manipulation. Davinack suggests that animals with naturally risky traits are more likely to encounter the parasite, creating a correlation that mimics causation. However, controlled lab studies still show specific behavioral shifts, such as reduced fear of cat odors in rodents, suggesting the parasite does have some influence, but the evidence in wild populations remains ambiguous due to methodological limitations.
APOD explains how animals react to a total solar eclipse, using a Polish stork roost as an example: birds fall quiet during totality, crickets and frogs are less audible, and as sunlight returns the dawn chorus resumes; the post also notes APOD’s site migration to science.nasa.gov.
New Red Sea footage shows day octopuses punching lagging fish partners during mixed-species hunts, sometimes with no immediate food payoff. A 2024 study expanding the 2021 report finds the octopus often acts as the group’s decision-maker, inhibiting movement until the timing is right while faster foragers locate prey and slower fish hang back. Researchers discuss possible reasons—from punishment to partner control to spite—and caution that interpretations vary, but the work reveals a structured division of labor rather than random host–predator dynamics.
Drone footage off the Azores and Balearic Islands provides the first direct observations of sperm whales colliding head-on, lending empirical support to the idea that the spermaceti organ functions as a battering ram. The three documented head clashes involved sub-adults, leaving the exact purpose—whether in mating contests or other social interactions—unresolved. While the findings confirm a long-standing anatomical hypothesis, they also underscore the need for more extensive drone-based monitoring to determine how common and why this behavior occurs.
Vampire bats regurgitate blood to feed starving roost-mates, including non-relatives, and remember who helped them, forming a memory-based reciprocity rather than kin-based sharing. Across decades of experiments, donors tend to give back to partners that have fed them before, with 64% of sharing pairs not related and returns about 8.5 times higher than kin-based expectations. Initial low-cost grooming can escalate to food donations, suggesting a cautious audition process that builds partnerships over time. While captivity and lab studies have limits and researchers caution against anthropomorphizing, the evidence supports a small, memory-driven ‘favour economy’ among bats.
Australian researchers filmed bottlenose dolphins using seashells as fishing tools (shelling), with two adult females observed in 2025 and a calf mimicking the technique, suggesting the behavior may be more widespread and learnable across generations, though it is not always clear whether a meal is captured.