Antipredator training can make animals born in captivity regain their fear of enemies, necessary to prepare them for release into the wild. But now, researchers in the US have found that an alternative method may be more efficient: training pregnant females instead, relying on maternal effects to transmit the learned fear to their offspring. They showed that daughters of the endangered Pacific pocket mouse showed more vigilance behaviors around live snakes if their mothers had undergone antipredator conditioning that taught them to associate these with an aversive but harmless stimulus. However, no such effect was found for male offspring. The mechanisms by which this maternal effect is passed on are still unclear, but could involve prenatal programming through stress hormones, or maternal postnatal care.

Kyoto, Japan -- As climate change alters the temperatures of animal habitats, it seems natural that endotherms, warm-blooded animals like us, would prefer to hang out in the shade during hot weather. The use of microhabitats in the sun and shade is an important thermoregulatory behavior that has been reported across a wide range of animal species, and researchers are becoming increasingly interested in how animals -- especially those with long lifespans -- flexibly cope with thermal stress.

Japanese macaques, sometimes colloquially called snow monkeys, reside further north than any other non-human primates, and also have the highest hair density, which may make it difficult for them to dissipate heat. While observing some macaques in the field, a researcher at Kyoto University noticed that some of them appeared to choose resting sites that were neither fully sunny, nor fully shaded.

"That observation led me to wonder whether semi-shade might play a more meaningful role in thermoregulation than previously recognized," says corresponding author Yoshiyuki Tabuse.

Researchers studying the ant Formica japonica found that rice straw biochar applied at moderate levels, especially 2.5% to 5%, improved several colony behaviors linked to soil health. Ants in moderately amended soils showed stronger habitat preference, built larger and more complex nests, found food more quickly, and maintained more effective social recognition. However, when the biochar dose reached 10%, the benefits declined and ant survival dropped sharply.

Threatened plant species could be conserved by planting them "inter situ" - in wild environments outside their current geographic range - per Amazon rainforest case study

The first large-sized bovines grew to up to half a ton 4 million years ago in the European Early Pliocene, an early step toward our modern diversity of large-bodied buffalo and cattle, according to a study published June 3, 2026 in the open access journal PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

A newly discovered fossil site in Egypt is reshaping scientists’ understanding of how marine ecosystems recovered after the asteroid impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. In a study published in Science Advances, researchers report that compositionally modern marine fish communities were already established just 4 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

The site, known as Qreiya 3 and dated to 62.2 million years ago, preserves an exceptionally diverse offshore marine ecosystem from the early Paleocene. Hundreds of fossil fishes recovered from the site include more than 20 groups of ray-finned fishes, making it the richest and most diverse Danian fish assemblage yet discovered.

The fossils reveal that many fish groups common in today’s oceans—including early relatives of tunas, mackerels, jacks, moonfishes, and pipefishes—had already diversified shortly after the extinction event that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. At the same time, several predatory fish groups dominant in Cretaceous seas are notably absent, suggesting a rapid ecological turnover in marine ecosystems.

Led by researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in collaboration with the University of Michigan and KU Leuven, the study provides some of the clearest fossil evidence yet that modern-style marine fish faunas emerged remarkably quickly after one of Earth’s greatest mass extinctions.

Fossils from 520-million-year-old rocks in China provide the first clear evidence that bryozoans were part of the Cambrian explosion. Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial animals common in today’s oceans, but their early history has long been unclear because they did not appear in the fossil record until about 50 million years after most major animal groups. These newly discovered fossils fill that gap, showing that bryozoans emerged during the Cambrian explosion alongside other early animal groups.