The fireflies were most likely to change their own flashing rhythm in response when the LED blinked almost, but not quite, at the same time as the fireflies. The males would speed up their next flash if the LED blinked just before and waited a bit longer for their next flash when the LED blinked right after.
Frogmouths have another life that few people see: like vampires, they wake at sunset and night-hunt until dawn. These stolid creatures turn into zephyrs that silently swoop, catching prey on the ground and in the air.
These caterpillars use a surprisingly complex rhythm like a secret knock to convince the ants to come fetch them. That's according to research published on February 25 in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, which found that caterpillars can keep a beat called double meter that has so far been identified only in a couple of primates.
1 Rodney King beating. 2 Boreal forest (taiga). 3 Named storm in the UK. 4 Dr Faustus (Marlowe play). 5 Floella Benjamin. 6 Gentlemen v Players. 7 RNLI. 8 Classical music. 9 Plots against Elizabeth I. 10 Ways of having your steak in France. 11 Animals that can walk on water. 12 Birth states of US presidents. 13 Scales used to measure natural phenomena: tornadoes; earthquakes; hurricanes; hazard from near-Earth objects.
What's scarier than a spider? A really big spider, of course. A newfound defensive tactic takes advantage of this idea: researchers documented spiders building giant spiderlike silhouettes on their webs to ward off predators. These decoys are an example of web decorations that some spiders are known to produce, often to prevent getting eaten, avoid bird strikes or attract prey.
On a spring day in 1694, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - the father of microbiology - used a magnifying lens to look at a candle through the dissected eye of a dragonfly. But instead of seeing 1 candle flame, he saw hundreds of tiny flames, repeated over and over. But spoiler alert - this is not how insects see. Hi, I'm Niba, and today we're going to explore how insects really see the world.