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Insects

Signals from other workers can tell ants when and where to fan out and search for food.

Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals

An ant colony can thrive for decades, changing its behavior based on past events even as individual ants die off every year or so

Trending Today

Researchers Create First-Ever Honey Bee Vaccine

The compound protects against the American foulbrood disease, but the same technique could lead to protection against other major pathogens

New Butterfly Species Named After 17th-Century Female Naturalist

Maria Sibylla Merian documented the lifecycles of moths and butterflies with unprecedented accuracy

Cool Finds

Fruit Flies First Began Feeding on Our Fresh Produce About 10,000 Years Ago

It turns out the insects love marula fruit found in south-central Africa, which attracted them to human caves

Meet your new zombie overlord.

Cool Finds

These Wasps Hijack Spiders’ Brains And Make Them Do Their Bidding

Larvae of the newly discovered species in Ecuador hijacks the spider to build a super-tough incubation chamber

Lasius niger queen and worker ants each got their own individual two-dimensional barcode tags. The tags allowed researchers to track their movement in the colony.

Ants Take Sick Days, Too

A new study has found that when some members of the colony are exposed to pathogens, they spend less time in the nest

New Research

Brown Recluse Silk Is Stronger Than Steel Because It’s Constructed Like a Cable

Thousands of nanotendrils come together to form the flat, super-strong spider silk

The skull-collecting ants use chemical mimicry, a behavior usually observed amongst parasitic species, to entrap prey

These Ants Immobilize Prey With Acid Then Drag Them Back to Nest for Dismemberment

Decapitated heads, dismembered limbs litter the floor of Formica archboldi nests

Heatwaves May Dramatically Reduce Insect Fertility

Sperm production dropped by nearly three-quarters among male beetles exposed to lab-induced temperature increases

A new study has found that moths like the Antherina suraka, pictured here, may use their scales to avoid detection by bats.

Deaf Moths May Use Their ‘Fur’ To Avoid Hungry Bats

Fur-like scales on the insects’ thoraxes absorb the echoes of bat calls, according to new research

A platypus living in the most contaminated site could be routinely exposed to up to half of an adult human’s daily dose of antidepressants

Australian Rivers Are Contaminated With Pharmaceuticals. That’s Bad News For Platypuses, Study Says

The team found evidence of human medications in every insect tested, including those from national park previously believed to be free of contaminants

In the Pheidole genus of ants, some insects grow into soldiers with disproportionately large heads, while others grow to be smaller workers.

This “Useless” Organ Determines Which Ants Grow Into Large Soldiers

Rudimentary wing discs in ant larvae, which only grow to wings in queens, appear to influence growth into a soldier or worker

A study conducted during the 2017 total solar eclipse in North America found that bees remained active during the partial-eclipse phases both before and after the period of totality, but they essentially ceased flying during totality.

Busy Bees Take a Break During Total Solar Eclipses

The 2017 North American eclipse gave researchers an inside look at how bees respond to light—with the help of a few hundred elementary-schoolers

Cool Finds

Moths Love Sipping the Salty Tears of Sleeping Birds

A researcher in the Amazon happened up on the rare sight in the dead of night while looking for reptiles and amphibians

Females that inherited two copies of a mutated gene developed antenna and claspers similar to males, rendering them unable to lay eggs or bite their prey

Gene Drive Technology Eliminates Malaria-Transmitting Mosquito Population

Researchers introduced a sterilization mutation that wiped out lab populations in seven to 11 generations

Ants and honey bees have been observed reproducing without males before, and now all-female termite colonies join the asexual group.

All-Female Termite Colonies Reproduce Without Male Input

These insects seem to have dispensed entirely of the need for males and their sperm

R.I.P., guppy.

New Research

Praying Mantis Seen Hunting Fish for the First Time

The ravenous insect repeatedly returned to the hunting site, suggesting praying mantises may be capable of complex learning

Researchers fed microplastics to mosquito larvae in the lab.

New Research

Mosquitoes Are Passing Microplastics Up the Food Chain

These reviled insects are adding another charge to their rap sheet: ferrying harmful microplastics ingested from contaminated water

A monarch on tropical milkweed.

New Research

How This Popular Garden Plant May Spread Parasites That Harm Monarchs

Non-native tropical milkweed encourage year-round monarch populations which harbor a deadly parasite for the imperiled insect

A mesmerizing murmuration of starlings

New Research

Your Hysterical Tweet About That Spider in Your Sink Could Prove Useful for Science

A new study suggests mining social media for phenology data is fairly reliable and could assist researchers tracking how rapidly the world is changing

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