Let’s say you’re a baby bird. In particular, you’re a chick belonging to the species Laniocera hypopyrra, which also goes by the elegant common name of the cinereous mourner. You hatch out of your egg and find yourself in a nest up in tree in a rain forest in Peru. You can’t fly. You can only wait for your parents to bring you food. You are, in other words, easy pickings.

So what might you do to avoid getting snatched up by a predator? Perhaps you might hold very still so as not to attract attention. Perhaps you might also grow dull, bark-colored feathers to help you blend into you background.

If you’re a cinereous mourner, however, this is not what you do. As you can see in this video, you grow brilliant orange plumage. You make yourself absurdly easy to see. Continue reading “The Caterpillar Defense” →

This week I wrote my New York Times columnabout one of those remarkable studies that makes you realize how little we understand about the natural world. Ken Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University, performed some elegantly simple experiments that revealed that electric eels use electricity as a taser and as a remote control for their prey.

To read mostly straight-text accounts of the research, you can read my column, as well as fellow Phenom Ed Yong’s blog post. But the video that Catania filmed as part of his research is so interesting I thought offer a moving-pictures recap here.

Continue reading “Masters of Electricity (The Video Version)” →