Peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society, covering research across the biological sciences.
Manitoba and Bamfield researchers detected cortisol in North Pacific spiny dogfish blood, a hormone sharks were long thought not to make. The paper covers one species, and its experiments used groups of five or six sharks.
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University of Auckland researchers found 21 tracked southern right whales on two routes reached feeding grounds at about the same time. The data are tracks with no experimental control, so they show what the whales did on each route.
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Grey Gustafson's team reports that the tiger beetle tribe Manticorini is older than the split of South America from Africa. If the dating holds, the large flightless beetles on both continents were carried apart when the continents separated.
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Researchers detected avian cholera bacteria in 46 of 49 Adélie penguins sampled after a 2024 die-off in Antarctica's Danger Islands. H5N1, the first suspect, turned up in only a few, so a test for flu alone would have named the wrong cause.
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Parma researchers found dogs looked more at a round shape on hearing 'bouba' and a spiky one on hearing 'kiki', in tests on 70 dogs. Dogs have co-evolved with people for thousands of years, so the result cannot yet say whether the link is old or learned.
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Penn State researchers found guinea fowl raised with leg weights later carried the load at no added energy cost, while untrained birds used 23% more. The comparison is controlled and the groups are small, so it supports a narrow causal claim about leg loading in one species.
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Monash University and partner researchers linked hotter weather to faster telomere loss in wild fairy-wrens that often face heat above 40C. The evidence is observational, but it gives conservation planners a measurable sign of heat stress in birds that live through hot spells.
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University of Southern Denmark researchers found male tokay geckos inhale for about 0.1 seconds between call notes, then add pulses to lengthen the call. The study of seven captive males explains how a call already known to grow longer in noise does so within a limit set by breathing.
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Aveiro and Brasilia researchers found that 377 people rating 92 snake photos gave similar-looking snakes similar fear, disgust and liking scores. Their lab treats spotting a snake and fearing it as separate steps, and this study measured only the second.
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A study of 136 museum skulls from Hokkaido found winter snouts about 7 percent taller and 6 percent wider even as the braincase shrank. The authors call it a reverse Dehnel's phenomenon.
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Oregon State and Columbia researchers found livestock spread across Madagascar about 1,200 years ago, as its large native herbivores declined. People may have arrived millennia earlier, so the timing argues against hunting alone as the cause of the extinctions.
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Yitzchak Ben Mocha and colleagues rechecked the demographic data behind classic cases of female reproductive skew, and found nests with no adult female helpers and groups whose mature females raised each other's young.
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An international team reconstructed speciation and extinction rates for the reptile group that produced dinosaurs and crocodiles. The shape matches what family trees have shown, and three hypotheses still compete to explain the slowdown.
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Ornaments chase a preference that keeps moving, while weapons face a steadier opponent. A Freiburg and Swansea team wrote that contrast into equations, then checked it against evolutionary rates in ten animal groups.
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A Proc R Soc B paper argues that fire added as much as four hours to the day, and that fireside storytelling pushed human communication past the ape repertoire. The part worth watching is that a lab can check most of it.
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A study built on 22,000 hours of den footage finds temperature and day length interact to time black bear hibernation, which puts warm-winter bears out of step with their food.
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A Bielefeld synthesis of 28 experiments across seven bird species reports fitness benefits from fresh plants in nests. Which of the two leading explanations does the work is still open.
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