Minute warty birch caterpillars ardently defend their leaf tip homes from invading caterpillars, but how do they defend against lethal ladybeetle attacks? Jayne Yack reports in Journal of Experimental Biology that the tiny day-old caterpillars are able to distinguish between the footsteps of approaching adult ladybeetles and shuffling caterpillar attackers, allowing the defending caterpillar to evade deadly ladybeetle attacks by first falling silent and then by hurling themselves from the leaf on a silken safety thread.

For generations, scientists believed a queen honeybee was made almost entirely by diet: feed an ordinary larva enough royal jelly and a ruler emerges. But new research suggests queens are created through a more elaborate process.

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.

• Fossil fragments suggest Praearcturus gigas represents the largest scorpion ever discovered, perhaps one metre in length

• Specimens held in the Natural History Museum collection since the 1870s have been reinterpreted using modern techniques

• Giant scorpion lived tens of millions of years before other famous “giant” arthropods, reshaping ideas about how and why early arthropods grew so large

A new study from Thailand demonstrates that the debris-heavy webs of orb-weaving spiders can serve as natural, non-destructive tools for collecting and culturing viable environmental fungi. Through the isolation of living organisms, this innovative approach has already uncovered potentially new, undocumented fungal diversity within tropical rice fields.

For years, an unidentified beetle has attacked blueberry bushes in North Carolina. Researchers at NC State University used a technique known as genetic barcoding to identify the beetle as Prionus imbricornus, a type of longhorn beetle. This identification will aid efforts to combat the pest, allowing growers to more precisely target their pest management strategies and avoid treating the wrong parts of their plants. 

As soil health becomes a defining goal of the EU Soil Strategy for 2030, researchers at Aarhus University are rethinking how we model what lives beneath our feet. Their new spatially explicit population model for the soil invertebrate Folsomia candida (springtails), published in the open-access Agricultural and Environmental Modelling journal, marks a significant step beyond standard laboratory testing.

Researchers at Tohoku University look beyond the life-taking venomous stings of box jellyfish, and focus on life-creating processes in a new comprehensive study of their reproductive traits.