Animal World

Gia, a female chimpanzee, twice tried and failed to smash a tortoise. But in this instance, a male chimp smashed the reptile and shared the meat. By Douglas Main Tortoises’ thick shells protect them from most predators. But our closest relatives have found a way to circumvent this defense: vigorously bashing them against trees. In a paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists report seven chimpanzees breaking open forest hinge-back tortoises in Gabon’s Loango National Park. The behavior occurred on multiple occasions over 5,000 hours of observation, and the primates often shared the meat with others in their group. This is the first time than any chimpanzee has been documented eating any kind of reptile. It’s also unique because the way in which the primates eat these tortoises—slamming them against tree branches and trunks—is a type of “percussive” technology that is akin to tool use, says study coauthor Simone Pika, who studies chimpanzees at Germa...

By Nadia Drake Tiny arachnids known as peacock spiders are remarkable for many reasons: their adorable many-eyed faces, elaborate courtship performances, and ninja-like jumping skills. Males also sport extremely colorful rear-ends, and will shake a florid array of blues, purples, golds and reds in a quest to woo potential mates. Now, scientists report, these fingertip-size spiders may also rely on super black patches, interspersed between their technicolor hues, to dazzle the ladies. (Read about the wild sex lives of spiders.) “If you frame a bright color in super black, it looks awfully different,” says Dakota McCoy, a graduate student at Harvard University who recently described these intensely black patches in two jumping spider species in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “We think the black makes them look more beautiful by emphasizing nearby colors.” According to the team’s observations, spider super black reflects less than 0.5 percent of incoming light, c...

A female earless dragon scuttles in grassland outside of Canberra, Australia. By Tim Vernimmen In the last remaining pockets of natural grassland in southeastern Australia lives a lizard so small it can hide in spider burrows. Inside the burrows, the grassland earless dragon, which weighs barely more than a quarter, finds shelter from the extreme temperatures found on the plains. The grassland earless dragon, which gets its name from its scale-covered ears, is very hard to find because of its reclusive lifestyle and camouflaged appearance, says ecologist Will Osborne of Australia’s University of Canberra. So difficult to find, in fact, that the lizard went undocumented for about 30 years until Osborne and his colleagues rediscovered it in 1991. It turns out that what scientists long thought was a single, elusive species of lizard living in southeastern Australia may in fact be several different species. A new analysis of the anatomy and DNA of dragons from different locatio...

A German hunter kills an old bull elephant in Namibia. There is a long-running debate as to whether and how trophy hunting benefits conservation. By Rachael Bale After a five-year suspension, the government of Botswana has decided once again to allow sport hunters to kill elephants, according to a statement issued on May 22 by the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resource Conservation and Tourism. Botswana is home to more than 130,000 elephants—about a third of Africa’s remaining savanna elephants—and it appeared to have largely escaped the recent ivory poaching crisis. Continent-wide elephant numbers dropped by 30 percent between 2007 and 2014, according to the Great Elephant Census, an 18-country aerial elephant count conducted by Elephants Without Borders that was completed in 2016 and funded by Vulcan. While hunting elephants is now legal in Botswana, American sport hunters may not rush there because it’s unlikely they’d be able to bring their trophies home. In 20...