Birds Sleep in Giraffe Armpits, New Photos Reveal

The best way to guarantee breakfast in bed for some small African birds is falling asleep on your dinner plate—even if it’s a giraffe‘s armpit.

Scientists have long known that yellow-billed oxpeckers hang out on massive African mammals like giraffe, water buffalo, and eland during the day—an often beneficial relationship that provides hosts with cleaner, healthier skin. These small brown birds can often be seen perched on top or hanging off the animals, picking through their hair in search of tasty parasites like ticks.

Read more at National Geographic. 

Fish called ‘sarcastic fringehead’ has a wider mouth than body

Sarcastic fringeheads have a stronger temper than your average fish, but it isn’t a sharp tongue that you have to look out for: it’s their gaping, fluorescent mouth.

When threatened by other males, these fish can open their mouths about as large as their entire head, displaying an outer and inner row of teeth. It’s all an effort to show other fringeheads that “I’m bigger than you and you shouldn’t come into my area,” says Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp at the University of California Los Angeles.

Read more at New Scientist.

Octopus Chokes Dolphin to Death in First-Ever Discovery

Nobody ever told Gilligan the dolphin not to bite off more than he could chew.

The male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin is the first known cetacean to die from asphyxiation by octopus, a new study says.

He “seems to have been extremely greedy and thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to swallow it whole,'” says study leader Nahiid Stephens, a pathologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

Read more at National Geographic.

Newly-discovered fungi turn luckless ants into kamikaze zombies

Fifteen newly discovered fungi can all control the brains of ants in cruel and unusual ways in the moments before killing them.

Zombie ant fungi are parasites, mostly found in tropical forests. The fungus first infects an ant using spores. Once inside its host, the fungus alters the ant’s behaviour in ways that favour its own reproduction. It often compels the ant to seek a place other ants are likely to pass. The fungus then sprouts a long stalk, sometimes right through the back of the ant’s head, which passes on more infectious spores.

Read more at New Scientist. 

In the Maldives, the Virtues and Limitations of Pole-and-Line Tuna Fishing

KELSEY MILLER, fisheries researcher with a global advocacy group, wobbled for balance on a 50-foot fishing boat as silvery tuna flew through the air towards her. It was 2014, and as the vessel pitched off the coast of the Maldives, a collection of atolls several hundred miles southwest of the southern tip of India, a dozen or so fishermen working in the stern pulled the fish from the water one by one with fishing poles, flipping their catch towards the boat’s bow.

There is one thing that all sides can agree on: Bycatch is a problem for the fishing industry everywhere.

When the fishermen took a break, Miller and her colleagues went to work, hastily counting, weighing, and measuring the fish — along with any other sea creatures, from juvenile sharks to mahi-mahi, that were incidentally caught in the process. The team was conducting research for a study, published in PLOS One last spring, on “bycatch” — the myriad unintended sea creatures captured by fishermen, typically in massive nets as they pursue a commercial species. As the study notes, Miller and her colleagues with the International Pole and Line Foundation, a U.K.-based tuna conservation group that advocates for the less impactful fishing technique, spent more than 100 days monitoring accidental catch — and found surprisingly little.

Read more at Undark. 

‘Scary’ spider photos on Facebook are revealing new species

Freaky photos of giant spiders on social media may have revealed dozens of new species.

“When people see an animal that they think is frightening or dangerous, the most common response is to take a photo and post it to social media,” says Heather Campbell, previously at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and now at Harper Adams University, UK.

Read more at New Scientist.

A shipwreck has been found from the time of Alexander the Great

Archaeologists have used drones and an old cold war spy boat to identify three shipwrecks on the Mediterranean seabed. One contains artefacts dating back over 2000 years, hinting at a vast network of trade during the rise of ancient Greek city states like Athens.

“If our dates are correct, this is just as Alexander the Great is beginning his conquest,” says team leader Ben Ballardat the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), whose father Robert discovered the wreck of the Titanic.

Read more at New Scientist.

For Immigrant Mongooses, It Can Take Time to Earn Society’s Trust

Immigration policy isn’t just contentious among human societies: Different species of mongooses also have radically different ways of dealing with newcomers. For instance, some mongoose societies gladly take in immigrants based on merit—while others will deport even their own relatives to protect their offspring.

Even for relatively welcoming groups, however, immigrants may face a long road before they find acceptance. “Things might take a bit of time. There’s a bit of an integration or adjustment period needed for both parties—residents and immigrants,” says Julie Kern, a post-doctoral biology research associate at the University of Bristol and the lead author on a study published today in the journal Current Biology.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

How Stressed Out Are Zebras? Just Ask Their Poop

For conservation scientists, the proof isn’t in the pudding—it’s in the poop. It turns out that wild zebras have been dropping vital clues about their stress levels in the form of feces, and researchers are now beginning to unravel these pungent piles of data to glean important clues to the animals’ well being.

“Poop allows us to get into the inside of the animal,” says Rachel Santymire, director of the Davee center for Epidemiology and Endocrinology at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. “I always say they can’t lie to me.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

Can Fear Alone Drive Animals to Extinction?

In the wild, a predator that eats too much of its prey can drive that species toward extinction. But there are other, less understood influences that predators can have on their prey’s survival. Take, for instance, odor: New research shows that the very smell of predators may be enough to increase the chances of a whole population of animals going extinct. Fear alone, it suggests, can shape the fate of a species.

Traditional ecological theory holds that smaller populations of any creature will usually breed more productively than larger, denser populations, since individuals have less competition and more luck in mating, says Ryan Norris, a biologist at the University of Guelph. But when hungry predators hover around, small populations of prey may not be as insulated to stress as larger ones.

Read more at The Atlantic.