You’ve just given me 2 lovely taxons to annotate. Small cats are so overlooked.
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Well today I learned a Hydra is a real thing. Luckilly NOT the immortal sea dragon of myth, but a tiny tentacled tube thing (still immortal though).
I learned this from this thread. Post 19
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/plant-animal-facts-you-can-t-stop-thinking-about/75077/18
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This week (well, last week) was huge for learning things for me since I was off for most of it. I learned that the genus Mandrillus does not only contain the mandrill but also the drill, which I had never heard of before. For some reason I thought Mandrillus was monotypic but you learn something new every day!
Most of my learning wasn’t related to wildlife though, mostly geography (I’ve been getting into GeoGuessr and I memorized all the countries of Asia and Africa on a map)
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A cow has been documented using tools for the first time.
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Humans are better at smelling bananas than dogs are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetU6iP79WA 6:40
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Fruit growers are starting to use Kestrel hawks to keep their trees healthy:
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You haven’t met my dog Maggie.
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What does the Brooklyn Bridge, the Christopher Columbus expiditions, and a possible highly sustainable seafood resource have in common?
It’s not a worm, but often mistaken for one.
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I learned that Ship-timber Beetle larvae don’t eat the wood but instead cultivate a yeast-like fungus that eats wood then eat that fungus. The females lay their eggs along with spores of the fungus ready for the newly hatched larvae to farm. The females take the fungus with them in specialised pouches when they reach adulthood to dust the eggs with.
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I also learned that Uloboridae the famously venomless spider family may not be venomless. Basically we’ve only looked for venom sacs in one species. Who knows if it’s an oddity?
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Leafcutter ants do that too. They take the blades of grass or other stuff into their nests and farm the fungus that grows on it.
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Really! What about leafcutter bees, do you know?
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Gut biomes prove that a vast swath of species (including us, of course) rely heavily on partner species for survival.
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Leafcutter bees use the leaves as construction material – they make little “pots” that they fill with pollen for the larva. Other species in the family use mud or resin or plant wool or chewed-up leaf mortar instead of leaf sections for the same purpose.
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Well now I know from reading your post that they exist. The ant thing was just something I saw in David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series.
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They are amazing – here’s a sequence of one at work!
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Unborn baby sharks swim from one uterus to the other.
I also learned from that piece that embryonic turtles will move to the warmest side of their shells.
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Cool things we have in common with fungi:
- Heterotrophic
- Take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide for respiration
- We are both opisthokonts! Our motile cells have a single posterior flagellum, as opposed to plants and most protists which have two anterior flagella. Aside from chytrids most fungi no longer have motile cells, but I thought this evolutionary connection was super cool.
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Yes! We are closer related to any mushroom than any plant. I believe that the next 50 years in fungal research with new tools will reveal multiple order of magnitudes of detailed awe about this secret kingdom.
They’re not only mostly out of our visual sight, but so much of their wonder lies in their scaling power. From the (arguably) largest single organisms right to micro and incredible molecular magic. And all encased in secret networks. Wish I could live long enough to see more of what they’re all about! They really hold so many deep, deep secrets.
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Yet another invasive species to look out for: https://entomologytoday.org/2025/11/24/elm-zigzag-sawfly-spreading-fast-zelkova-trees/
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