Animal Behavior
How Do Ants Find Food?
Ants find food through a combination of individual searching and colony communication. A scout explores using smell, touch, vision, path integration and local memory.…
Oct 7, 2026 • 3 min readFIELD NOTES
Animal Behavior
Explore animal communication, movement, learning and social life, with attention to what observations reveal and what remains uncertain.
EDITOR’S PICK
Why Birds See Colors Humans Cannot
Many birds have four cone classes and can detect wavelengths humans cannot. Their view depends on retinal pigments, filtering and the light reaching the eye.
Sep 16, 2026 • 3 min readRead the discovery →LATEST
Latest discoveries
New stories, explanations and research from Animal Behavior.
Animal Behavior
How Do Beavers Build Dams?
Beavers build dams by cutting and transporting woody material, anchoring branches across moving water and packing gaps with mud, plants and stones. The sound…
Oct 7, 2026 • 4 min read
Animal Behavior
How Do Owls Fly So Silently?
Owls reduce flight noise through a combination of broad wings, slow wingbeats and specialized feathers. Comb-like serrations on the leading edge, a porous fringe…
Oct 6, 2026 • 4 min read
Animal Behavior
How Do Bats Use Echolocation?
Many bats echolocate by emitting high-frequency calls and analysing returning echoes. Delay indicates distance, differences between the ears reveal direction, spectral changes carry information…
Oct 5, 2026 • 3 min read
Animal Behavior
Why Do Cats Land on Their Feet?
Cats often land feet-first because their vestibular and visual systems detect orientation, then a flexible spine and coordinated limb movements rotate the front and…
Oct 4, 2026 • 3 min read
Animal Behavior
Why Do Cats Purr?
Cats use purring in more than one context. Research on the voice box explains how the low sound can form, while communication studies help…
Oct 3, 2026 • 3 min read
Animal Behavior
How Do Hummingbirds Hover?
Hummingbirds hover by sweeping their wings back and forth in a flattened figure-eight pattern while rotating them at the shoulder. Unlike most birds, they…
Oct 1, 2026 • 4 min read
Animal Behavior
How Do Fireflies Glow?
Fireflies glow through bioluminescence in specialized abdominal organs. Luciferase activates luciferin using ATP, then oxygen helps create excited oxyluciferin. As that product returns to…
Oct 1, 2026 • 4 min read
Animal Behavior
How Elephants Communicate Through Ground Vibrations
Elephant calls can produce vibrations in soil as well as sound in air. Playback experiments show that elephants can respond to this additional communication…
Sep 30, 2026 • 3 min read
Animal Behavior
How Spiders Read Vibrations Through Their Webs
A web carries mechanical information to a spider’s legs. Silk properties, tension and geometry affect what arrives, helping explain why the web is both…
Sep 30, 2026 • 3 min readWORTH KNOWING
Popular & evergreen
Animal Behavior
How Crows Recognize Faces and Share Threat Information
Mask experiments show that American crows can learn threatening faces and spread responses socially. These findings demonstrate memory and learning without implying human-style grudges.
Sep 19, 2026 • 3 min read
Animal Behavior
Why Octopuses Seem So Unusually Intelligent
Explore octopus intelligence, learning, camouflage and distributed arm control—and why the popular claim that they have nine brains is misleading.
Sep 12, 2026 • 12 min read