A single bat colony contains hundreds or even thousands of the winged mammals. But with less-than-ideal eyesight and so many neighbors, how do mothers identify their pups amid the extremely crowded conditions? Writing in a new study published today in the journal Frontiers in Ethology, researchers say it often comes down to the subtle, unique vocalizations emitted by their individual offspring. To assess their responses, the team relied on an even more delicate biological signal—the mother bat’s own heartbeat.

The investigation began when biologists at Japan’s Doshisha University noticed a surprising—but consistent—behavior among the Japanese house bats (Alionoctula abramus) in their laboratory colony. Whenever a pup wandered too far from its roosting area, only its mother raced to the rescue.

“We knew that pups emit isolation calls—acoustic distress signals—when separated. But seeing this strict behavioral selectivity made us wonder: what is happening inside the mother when she hears these calls?” recalled study co-author and Doshisha University biologist Kazuki Yoshino-Hashizawa.

To learn more, Yoshino-Hashizawa and his colleagues monitored four mother bats who each recently birthed a litter of three pups. Some of the litters only contained females, so they decided to exclude the young males from the study to avoid sex-based variations. At two days old, the team recorded clips of the female pups’ tiny isolation calls. These function like the cries from a human baby, and each vocalization has its own unique tones.

However, Japanese house bats grow quickly. The new generation started making echolocation calls at about eight days old, and they ceased isolation calls after around 12 days. After roughly one month, they began flying like adults and set off on their own within the colony. The researchers then recorded their adult echolocation calls, as well.

Around 40 days after the pups’ birth, the team isolated each mother and played them the various audio clips while monitoring their heart rates using an ECG machine. As a control, they also played the recording of a random adult male bat. The study’s authors quickly saw that a mother bat’s heart rate sped up when they heard cries of their own pups, but not the pups that belong to other bat moms. Surprisingly, the mother bats’ heart rates boosted the most from recordings of the older, independent pups. Researchers theorize this might relate to the bats’ memory of more recent calls, but that idea requires more study to confirm.

Still, don’t get overly sentimental. The team also recorded strong heart rate reactions when the mothers heard calls from the random adult male. It’s possible the bats interpreted the sounds as a threat, but the team stopped short of categorizing the reactions as good or bad.

“‘[Heart rate measurement] cannot distinguish between positive emotions, such as maternal motivation, and negative ones, such as stress or alarm,” Yoshino-Hashizawa added.

Instead, the study authors suggest heart rates may be a solid starting point when trying to analyze bat behaviors and responses to their everyday environment. At the same time, a mother bat’s heart certainly seems to patter a bit more for her pups.

“[This] suggests that these vocalizations instantly physiologically prime the mother to engage in maternal behavior,” explained Yoshino-Hashizawa.

The post Bat mothers’ hearts beat faster when they hear their pups appeared first on Popular Science.

Rattlesnake venom is a complex blend of necrotic toxins designed to quickly disrupt blood coagulation and destroy tissue cells. This effective biological weapon comes at a major premium, however. Snakes must regularly replenish their venom reserves, which means they need to dole out just the right amount with each bite. Injecting too little venom into prey may allow their next meal to escape, while delivering too much can leave a rattlesnake defenseless against its own predators.

But that doesn’t mean rattlesnakes adhere to a one-bite-fits-all policy. According to researchers at California’s Loma Linda University, the amount of venom routinely varies by individual reptile. Their recent findings published in Frontiers in Ethology indicate these dosage ranges aren’t randomly distributed, and that snakes and their venom are much more complicated than many people realize.

“This study gives us a better understanding that reptiles, such as rattlesnakes, are behaviorally complex and have personalities like humans do,” explained Loma Linda University biologist and study co-author Chelsea Martin.

Martin and her colleague, William Hayes, focused on the preferences of the Pacific rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus helleri). On three occasions over a four-week window, the team offered 48 snakes the chance to sink their fangs into a membrane-covered beaker. Previous experiments mainly focused on the frequency of bites, but Martin and Hayes also measured the amount of injected venom in each instance. They then compared the data across snakes.

“The results were striking in their consistency,” the study’s authors wrote in an accompanying Phys.org rundown.

The team also reported measured behaviors like aggressiveness, bite willingness, and the amount of venom amount were statistically significant and repeatable across many of the snakes. Additionally, their study further debunks the lingering myth that larger snakes actually produce less venom.

“Larger snakes expended more venom than smaller snakes, as expected given their greater capacity for venom storage,” explained the biologists, while noting that actual delivered levels still occasionally varied regardless of size.

The study’s authors emphasize that their findings shouldn’t be held against the rattlesnakes themselves. While often feared, the snakes generally do everything they can to avoid confrontations with larger animals like humans. Bites are almost always the result of an unintentional encounter in the wild rather than an overly aggressive serpent. If anything, it’s people who aren’t paying attention to their surroundings, and not the other way around.

“One practical lesson remains unchanged: No rattlesnake should be approached or handled on the assumption that it will behave predictably,” the authors said. “Consistent individual differences do not make any particular snake safe.”

The post Rattlesnake bite venom is based on their personality appeared first on Popular Science.

Our fingerprints, patterns on whale flukes, and fur patterns on cheetahs are examples of the natural ways we can tell one individual animal from another. For an Amazonian treefrog called the egg-eating spiny-backed frog (Osteocephalus oophagus), we need to look into their eyeballs. Fine black radial lines cross their golden irises, and form a pattern similar to our fingerprints. A study recently published in the journal Herpetozoa details the discovery.

The project began with study co-author Mélissa Peignier, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, admiring frog eyes. 

“At the time, I was doing my PhD, studying Allobates femoralis in the field in French Guiana,” Peignier said in a statement. “My first reaction was simply something along the lines of, ‘Wow, what beautiful eyes!’ That initial curiosity gradually turned into a genuine interest in the species, and I realised how little we actually know about them.”

There was also an ethical component. One of the standard ways to tell amphibians apart from one another is toe-clipping, where a section or all of a single toe is removed. This procedure can affect their survival, physiology, and behavior. 

“Other studies have used toe-clipping, which involves removing some of the digits. Personally, I was uncomfortable with this approach, especially given that these are arboreal frogs that rely on their limbs to climb trees.”

Looking for other markings could offer a more humane solution and a way to observe the animals natural behavior unimpeded.

For this study, fieldwork took place over three rainy seasons (2021 to 2023) on a river island in the Nouragues Nature Reserve in French Guiana. They identified 103 individual frogs over the course of the study.

During their later encounters, the team took pictures of each animal’s eyes without touching it and then compared the images with a reference library. This way, the recognised frogs were left undisturbed and their eyes appeared in their more natural state. The identifications were then independently verified using Wild-ID, a software package that analyzes photographic markings in animals.

They found highly distinctive iris patterns. Within one season, between 56 and 80 percent of the frogs were recaptured and reliably re-identified. According to the team, this indicates that the patterns on their eyes remain stable enough to monitor the frog in the short-term. Photographs could even be taken of frogs while in their mating embrace (called amplexus) without disrupting them. The team hopes that this method will spread. 

“In a world where biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, it is essential that we minimise our impact on the animals we study,” added Peignier. “If we can reliably identify individuals using naturally occurring features, we may be able to reduce the need for more invasive marking techniques while still collecting the data needed to answer important scientific questions.”

While the reliability of the eye markings will vary between species, and should be done case by case, the team sees considerable promise for amphibians with complex irises. And working with them offers its own benefits. 

“Honestly, the frogs themselves are incredibly beautiful and surprisingly chill, which makes working with them a real pleasure,” Peignier said. 

The post Treefrog ‘fingerprints’ are on their eyeballs appeared first on Popular Science.

Fall is here, and with it comes very determined deer. Mating season for the hoofed ruminants typically begins once temperatures dive and the days grow shorter, but the annual event also poses problems for humans. The deer have one thing on their mind, which means they pay even less attention to vehicles and roadways. In New Jersey, roughly 41 percent of all annual animal collisions occur between October and December, while the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety routinely tallies over 275 fatalities from similar accidents nationwide every year.

Driving gets even riskier in rural areas, which frequently host higher deer populations and much darker roads. However, a recent pilot program in Virginia offers a promising tool that may keep commuters safe while also allowing the animals to do their thing. At the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), researchers designed an automated digital roadside sensor system that warns drivers of large jaywalkers like deer and elk.

According to VTTI engineer Shreyas Bhat, the year-long trial demonstrated a “measurable change” in how local drivers responded when alerted to oncoming wildlife. Bhat and his colleagues tested the system with help from the state’s Department of Transportation along a 14-mile section of Route 460 in southwest Virginia. The array was composed of eight portable, solar-powered trailers and customizable digital message signs. Each station included thermal cameras analyzed by onboard machine learning software, which triggered the sign alerts whenever it flagged nearby medium– to large–sized animals.

Over the course of the trial, researchers amassed driving data on over 10,000 vehicles, while the detection system maintained an estimated accuracy of around 97 percent. This is particularly impressive given the region’s environmental and infrastructural challenges.

“This system is unique because of the requirements of the area—it needed to be solar powered, portable, and be able to withstand all weather conditions,” explained VTTI engineer Jean Paul Talledo Vilela.

The team reported an average reduced speed of about three miles per hour thanks to the roadside warning signs. That may not seem like much, but even a slight slowdown can save lives. It also proved people took note of the system.

“Speed is an important data point to understand if drivers were actually paying attention to the message board,” said Talledo Vilela. “Even if they are not braking aggressively, some reduction in speed indicates that they may be paying more attention to their surroundings because they got that alert.”

While Talledo Vilela, Bhat, and their collaborators are still parsing through data from the program,(it ended in September) the initial findings remain promising. From here, the team hopes to refine the overall system while organizing future trials in other regions of the country. If successful, the relatively simple installations could also be adapted for other year-round road safety situations like construction or real-time weather hazards.

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Before giant manta rays (Mobula birostris) can grow to up to 30 feet long and 4,409 pounds, they must start small like most living things. Giant manta ray babies (called pups) in Central America don’t have their size to protect them from orca whales (Orcinus orca) and the numerous sharks in the open ocean. Their solution—sticking to the coast, where there is plenty of food to help them grow and defend themselves. A new study published today in the journal Frontiers in Fish Science details the baby rays’ behavior. 

“We show that manta rays’ lifestyle isn’t a one-size-fits-all behavior. Giant manta rays in Central America undergo a dramatic shift in space use as they mature,” Jeffry Madrigal-Mesén, a study co-author and project leader of Mantas Costa Rica, said in a statement. “Juveniles remained strictly within shallow nearshore waters that serve as coastal refuges, but most of the tracked adults executed long-distance transboundary migrations along the continental shelf break into Central America.”

Where the pups grow

In the study, the team used multiple methods to track and identify mantas at five locations between 2018 and 2025. Acoustic telemetry uses underwater sound pulses to monitor fish movements and allowed the team to track 59 individual rays. With satellite telemetry, transmitters track movement and behavior from a distance and helped the team track large-scale movements of 12 individuals. Lastly, photo identification helped to identify individual manta rays.

“If we hadn’t used all three technologies together, we simply wouldn’t have been able to piece this puzzle together,” explained Madrigal-Mesén. “Combining these tools turned fragmented data into a unified, undeniable story.”

The team ended up with a dataset of over 12,000 detections. The data showed that young mantas (those with a body about 10 feet or less) stick to shallow coastal refuges. In these more shallow spots, the pups have a safe place that doesn’t overlap with their predators’ hunting grounds. They have plenty of food and places to hide, and even get essential services like cleaning from reefs.

“Mature adults can rely on their massive body size and their ability to dive deep to evade threats. But juveniles don’t have that luxury,” said Madrigal-Mesén. “What is truly amazing is seeing how strictly young manta rays stick to coastal waters as long-term refuges. We see the same individuals more often than once a year. In fact, just recently, they were sighted again at the exact same tagging location. It is always a joy to see them again—they have truly become a part of the family.”

By comparison, nine mature mantas in the study went on expansive migrations along the continental shelf break. One manta ray nicknamed Mickey Mouse because of a spot pattern on his belly had movements that suggest the fish also continue to display loyalty to a particular site once they grow up. Unusually approachable for a manta, Mickey Mouse allowed the team tag him multiple times over several years, which provided a continuous dataset. In 2020, he logged 462 acoustic detections at a coastal hub called El Secreto. He returned to the same shelf in 2023, and stayed there for 38 days.

“Nearshore cleaning stations transcend basic hygienic function; they act as primary social hubs where courtship and reproductive interactions take place,” said Madrigal-Mesén. “Returning to a predictable coastal depot allows mature rays to prioritize social and cleaning needs before undertaking large-scale regional migrations.”

Traveling the manta swimway—safely

Once they leave coastal regions, adult manta rays face different dangers. Coastal areas are often legally protected marine reserves, but the open ocean is another story. They no longer have legal protection and are exposed to dangers from industrial fisheries and vessel strikes.

According to the team, this shows that marine protected areas alone are not enough to protect this highly mobile species as it swims across Central America. They say that multi-national “conservation swimways”  that link the domestic juvenile coastal refuges with adult migratory corridors could help keep the endangered rays safe. 

“This study opens a new chapter for manta ray research in Central America,” Madrigal-Mesén concluded. “We hope it sparks fresh enthusiasm and encourages future collaborators to join us in executing the new ideas and research projects we have planned for the conservation of this species.”

The post Baby manta rays stick to the shallows to avoid sharks and orca appeared first on Popular Science.

A coastwide index of Atlantic sturgeon abundance has been rising steadily since 2013, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission found in its 2024 stock assessment update, published in August 2024.

The update extends the commission’s 2017 benchmark assessment with data from 2016 to 2022. It combines nine fishery-independent surveys into a single index of relative abundance, which the commission describes as variable from 1990 to 2022.

The composite index had a 100 per cent probability of being above its 1998 value, the year a coastwide moratorium on Atlantic sturgeon fishing took effect, and showed a statistically significant positive trend over the time series. The probability that total mortality exceeded the assessment’s threshold was less than 2 per cent.

Several states had closed their Atlantic sturgeon fisheries in the mid to late 1990s. New York imposed its own statewide moratorium in 1997.

The increase appears as a steady upward trend in the composite index. Most of the nine individual surveys showed either no trend or an increase. The commission still rates Atlantic sturgeon as depleted relative to historic levels, both coastwide and in every regional population it assessed.

That term covers more than the directed fishing that ended in 1998. The commission said the term acknowledges bycatch mortality, ship strikes and reductions in productivity from habitat loss. Bycatch in other fisheries, for which data begin in the 2000s, has generally been decreasing in recent years, the update said, except for estimates from gill nets in the federal observer programme.

Results for individual populations were more mixed. The New York Bight and Carolina indices had average probabilities of 59 per cent and 77 per cent of sitting above their reference year values. The other three populations came in below 50 per cent, with the Chesapeake Bay lowest at 27 per cent. The Gulf of Maine had a 56 per cent probability that total mortality exceeded the threshold.

The Hudson River, part of the New York Bight population, is presumed to be one of the two healthiest Atlantic sturgeon populations in the United States, alongside the Altamaha, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s species status assessment for its 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan.

The same document reports that the department has monitored juvenile Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson since 2004 and built a relative abundance index from fish aged about one to six years. The trends in that survey were initially positive but have declined in recent years, the assessment says.

A New York juvenile survey covering 2004 to 2022 is one of the nine indices in the commission’s coastwide composite. Genetic work on more than 500 juvenile and subadult sturgeon caught at Haverstraw Bay between 2017 and 2022 assigned the majority to the Hudson River population. The commission said this indicates the long-term survey data collected at Haverstraw Bay primarily reflects demographic trends in the Hudson River population.

Earlier estimates cited by the department put the Hudson’s spawning population at about 870 adults a year, against 343 for the Altamaha. A study published in 2020 and cited in the commission’s update used side-scan sonar and acoustic telemetry to estimate the Hudson’s 2014 spawning run at 466 fish, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 310 to 745.

The commission said that once reported spawning intervals are taken into account, the 2014 estimate appears similar to the earlier total adult population estimate.

Atlantic sturgeon were listed under the Endangered Species Act in February 2012. The New York Bight, Chesapeake Bay, Carolina and South Atlantic populations are designated endangered. The Gulf of Maine population is designated threatened. The species was reported present in 32 US rivers, with spawning in at least 14 of them, according to figures from 1998 cited in the New York assessment.

The Hudson’s Atlantic sturgeon are distinct from the river’s shortnose sturgeon, a separate species. On 27 June 2025 the department announced a study, coauthored by the US Geological Survey, that estimated the Hudson’s shortnose population at nearly 70,000, a figure that does not describe Atlantic sturgeon numbers.

The coastwide moratorium is meant to stay in force until each spawning stock has at least 20 protected year classes, a point the New York assessment says could take 40 years.

Sources:

• ASMFC, 2024 Atlantic Sturgeon Stock Assessment Update, August 2024
• NYSDEC, Species Status Assessment: Atlantic sturgeon (SWAP 2025)
• NYSDEC press release, 27 June 2025

The post The coastwide Atlantic sturgeon abundance index has risen steadily since 2013, while the Hudson’s own Atlantic juvenile index has declined in recent years. appeared first on Space Daily.

This year’s photomicrography contest captured the wonders of the very small, from flying ink droplets to the most adorable jumping spider you've ever seen.

The burial site also held three horse skeletons, a young bull, and a possible human sacrifice, hinting at some bizarre funerary rituals.

The movie Disclosure Day, directed by Spielberg, investigates a conspiracy about government suppression of alien evidence dating back to Roswell. This review questions current societal beliefs about extraterrestrials and Darwinian evolution. It exposes the deception, ultimately portraying alien visitation as a misunderstood age-old phenomenon rather than a new factual reality.

Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution suddenly, inexplicably turned up the dial.

Austin, Texas: A meteorite impact buried under the town of Ames, Oklahoma, struck about 370 million years ago, nearly 100 million years later than previously believed, University of Texas at Austin researchers have found.

The study, published in July 2026 in Meteoritics & Planetary Science as an open access paper, dated zircon crystals from granite struck by the impact. Zircon is a mineral that forms small crystals and is used in uranium-lead dating.

The earlier age of 467 million years placed the impact in the Ordovician period. It was grouped with a series of North American impacts centred around 467.5 million years ago, called the Ordovician Meteor Event, according to a University of Texas press release.

The new date puts Ames in the Late Devonian, close to the Frasnian-Famennian mass extinction about 372 million years ago. The release says that event led to the extinction of a huge percentage of marine life on Earth.

Whether the impact and the extinction are connected remains an open question.

“Our results establish a new hypothesis that the Ames impact is linked to the Late Devonian mass extinction, but they do not demonstrate the causal relationship,” Elizabeth Catlos, lead author and associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences, said in an email.

“Establishing this connection requires additional evidence, such as finding impact-related material in Late Devonian sedimentary rocks, identifying other impact structures of this age and understanding their environmental consequences,” she said.

Catlos said she had “a high degree of confidence in the age”. It came from two independent radiometric dating approaches, laser ablation and ion-beam methods, applied to zircon grains taken directly from the impacted granite, she said.

For an impact structure, the strongest age constraint comes from dating minerals in the impacted material directly and showing that they record the impact, she said. That is what the team did.

“No matter what technique we used, it was coming back to this younger signal,” Catlos said in the university’s press release. The release says the result means Ames could not have been part of the Ordovician Meteor Event.

Doubts over the fossil date

The old date was biochronological, meaning it came from fossils. Researchers had found teeth of conodonts, eel-like creatures that lived during the Ordovician, in rock from the site. The teeth were probably already millions of years old when the asteroid struck and got jumbled in the impact, Catlos said in the release.

Catlos said in an email that she does not question the identification of the Ordovician conodonts. “The issue is whether they remain in their original stratigraphic position and can therefore reliably date the impact itself,” she said.

The conodont evidence came from a conference abstract and a PhD dissertation, Catlos said. Those sources did not go through the same formal peer review as a journal paper, but they gave the historical basis for assigning an Ordovician age to the structure.

To show the zircons recorded the impact, the team worked with NASA to image the crystals using cathodoluminescence and electron backscatter diffraction, two imaging methods. A zircon hit by an impact recrystallises in a specific way that these methods reveal, the release says.

Danny Stockli, dean of the Jackson School and a co-author, said in the release that uranium-lead dating of zircon is the most accurate way to tell when such events occurred. Microstructures in zircon can also record the shock pressures of impacts, he said.

He said he would like to see the same done for more impact sites across the continent to build a more accurate timeline of these events.

Catlos said in the release that a more accurate timeline for mass extinctions and other big moments in Earth’s history is needed to understand how the planet works. The question is whether such extinctions were driven by an extraterrestrial force or an interior one such as a series of massive volcanic eruptions, she said.

In her email, Catlos said the findings allow researchers to investigate a possible connection that had not been considered before.

The work was begun by Andrew Parisi, a Jackson School graduate student who collected the Ames rock core from the Oklahoma Geological Survey, extracted the zircons and helped date them. He graduated in 2018 and has since died, as has co-author Michael Brookfield. Sean Gulick and Mark Cloos of the Jackson School also contributed.

The Ames impact structure is a major oil and gas producer, the release says. The crater is more than eight miles wide and lies about 20 miles southwest of Enid under 9,000 feet of sediment, according to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

It went unrecognised until 1991, when Continental Resources found an oilfield there. Many geologists had believed impact craters were unlikely places for petroleum, the society says.

Sources:

• Catlos et al., Meteoritics & Planetary Science, July 2026: https://doi.org/10.1111/maps.70191
• UT Jackson School of Geosciences press release, 28 Sep 2026: https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2026/09/meteor-hit-oklahoma-100-million-years-later-than-previously-thought/
• American Oil & Gas Historical Society, Ames Astrobleme Museum: https://aoghs.org/energy-education-resources/ames-astrobleme-oil-museum/

The post A buried crater under the town of Ames, Oklahoma, that produces oil and gas was dated to the wrong era by about 100 million years, and its new age of about 370 million years puts it close to a mass extinction that wiped out much of the sea’s life appeared first on Space Daily.

Theropod (noun, “THER-oh-pod”)

Theropods are a group of dinosaurs. Their name means “beast-footed.” The group includes many extinct species, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. It also includes modern birds.

Theropods first emerged about 230 million years ago. Early theropod species appear to have been mostly carnivorous. Over time, however, the group evolved into a diverse range of creatures. These included herbivores and omnivores. All non-bird theropods died out with the rest of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.

Theropods share certain characteristics, such as two legs, three forward-facing toes and hollow bones. Light, hollow bones allowed some members of the group to evolve flight.

Many extinct theropods sported feathers, scales or a mix of both. Yutyrannus huali was a dinosaur whose name means “feathered tyrant.” This species lived about 125 million years ago. It was one of the largest feathered species that ever lived. The oldest fossil of this species is about 10 meters (33 feet) long. These fossils show clear imprints of long feathers, which may have helped keep Y. huali warm.

All modern birds — from hummingbirds to emus to hawks — are theropods. Scientists learned this link between extinct dinos and modern animals thanks to theropod fossils. For instance, Archaeopteryx was a theropod that lived about 150 million years ago. Its hollow bones, clawed toes and feathers helped show how birds inherited features from their dino ancestors.

In a sentence

Famous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Allosaurus were meat-eating theropods that stood on two legs.

Check out the full list of Scientists Say.

Lead-melting temperatures on the surface of Venus should make life as we know it impossible there. But scientists have detected some curious chemicals in clouds above the planet’s surface. At those heights, temps and pressures would be similar to those on Earth.

These clouds sit 48 to 60 kilometers (30 to 37 miles) above the surface. Potential traces of oxygen, methane and phosphine gas have shown up in them. This has led some scientists to suspect the clouds might host microbes. But those single-celled life forms would have to survive harsh conditions when they occasionally sank into lower, hotter layers of the atmosphere.

In 2021, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, suggested how microbes might survive in clouds high above Venus. They would just need to tolerate briefly drying out whenever they sank into hotter cloud layers. Later, when swept back into cooler, wetter layers, the cells could revive. Noelle Bryan, Sara Seager and their colleagues proposed this idea.

Bryan had reasons for thinking this might be possible. Years before, she had collected microbes from Earth’s stratosphere. This hostile zone sits dozens of kilometers (miles) above our planet’s surface. The microbes she found seemed to survive extreme drying while up there — much as the Venus microbes would have to survive drying out.

What Bryan learned about those high-flying cells might now guide the search for alien life in solar systems light-years away.

For instance, some bacteria on Earth produce colorful pigments. These molecules can protect the cells from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Finding them on other worlds might point to life there. Extraterrestrial cells might use similar pigments to protect themselves from UV too.

Future telescopes looking at planets orbiting distant stars might be able to detect the colors of those pigments. This could reveal microbial life living in the clouds of faraway worlds, says Lígia Coelho. An astrobiologist, she works at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Coelho recently analyzed pigments in Bryan’s stratospheric bacteria. The pigments absorbed or reflected specific wavelengths of light, she found. She hopes to look for similar light and color patterns in distant planets.

Scouting for tiny Martians

The recent discovery of microbes in Earth’s stratosphere is probably most relevant to imagining life on Mars. After all, cells high above Earth endure conditions similar to those on the Red Planet’s surface.

Andrew Schuerger has spent years hunting Earthly microbes that might be able to survive on Mars. He works at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He recently teamed up with Rachel Harris. She’s an astrobiologist at NASA and Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Last year, the duo found a microbe that seems to check many of the boxes needed to make it on Mars.

Its name is a mouthful: Methanosarcina barkeri (Meh-THAAN-oh-sar-SEE-nuh BARK-er-eye). It gets its energy by turning carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methane.

M. barkeri normally lives in sewage, landfills, rice paddies and lake bottoms. Those buried habitats would hardly mimic Mars’ thin, dry air. But unlike microbes in Earth’s stratosphere, M. barkeri can live without oxygen, which is absent on Mars. And even at low, Mars-like pressures, M. barkeri can still make methane, Schuerger and Harris have shown.

That’s big news, because Mars orbiters and rovers have detected methane gas seeping into Mars’ atmosphere.

Unfortunately, methane-making critters on Mars would likely be hard to spot. They might need to hide deep underground to survive the planet’s low atmospheric pressure.

But finding that M. barkeri is active at low pressures means life might be able to survive quite close to the Red Planet’s surface, Schuerger says. A rover might only need to drill 20 centimeters (8 inches) down to reach single-celled Martians — if they exist.

Any pockets of microbes near Mars’ surface might be quite small and short-lived, says Lynn Rothschild. She’s an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center. It’s in Mountain View, Calif. She imagines microbes using Mars’ surface the way high-flying species seem to use Earth’s stratosphere. It would be a hostile place they briefly tolerate while moving from one home to another.

If she’s right, then windstorms on Mars might sweep up not only dust, but also Martian life. Microbes could be “floating around, just looking for a place to land [where] they can survive” and grow, she says. If so, then a rover might catch life the way a fence catches blowing leaves.

The stratosphere is both beautiful and deadly — a boundary between Earth and space, between life and death.

Hover within it, some 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles) above the ground, and you’d be nearly twice as high as any rain cloud. You would actually see the edges of Earth curve beneath you. And the sky above? It would look black — like outer space.

The air pressure here is just one percent of that at sea level. You’d never survive in such thin air. As you gasped for oxygen, this super-low pressure would cause your blood to boil inside you.

With temps as low as −60° Celsius (−76° Fahrenheit) and intense, DNA-damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the conditions here would kill most life as we know it. Yet some living things persist in the stratosphere. A surprising number of one-celled microbes somehow survive its extremes.

“If you took a microbe from [Earth’s stratosphere] and you put them on the surface of Mars, they wouldn’t even know the difference.”

Brent Christner

“If you took a microbe from those altitudes and you put them on the surface of Mars, they wouldn’t even know the difference,” says Brent Christner. A microbiologist, he works at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

His team began looking for life in the atmosphere back in 2008. They were hunting for the upper limits of Earth’s habitable zone. This, they hoped, might reveal whether life could persist on the cold, near-airless, radiation-pummeled surface of Mars.

Noelle Bryan, Christner’s graduate student at the time, sent sampling balloons as high as 38 kilometers (24 miles) into the air. What she found utterly shocked her: “We did not hit an altitude where we couldn’t find something [alive].”

In 2025, Christner’s team reported something that proved even more surprising. These microbes weren’t ones we usually imagine living in extreme conditions, such as volcanic hot springs. In fact, they were some of the same microbes found living on our crops, in our gardens and even on our skin.

Normally Earth-dwellers, these microbes seem to live a secret double life — sailing around the world at up to two or three times the height of a passenger jet.

For them, Christner says, the atmosphere “is like a highway.” It allows them “to move globally in periods of weeks.” From there, they can cross oceans to find new homes.

These discoveries could reshape what we know about how pathogens spread across our planet. They also could transform where we look for life on other worlds — from Mars to exoplanets light-years away.

Hunting for microbes in the sky

There’s a long history of looking for high-flying life.

In 1935, the U.S. Army Air Corps launched a helium balloon over the Black Hills in South Dakota. It reached 22 kilometers (14 miles) high, a world record. Two pilots went along in a pressurized gondola. They recorded air temperatures, magnetic fields, radiation levels and more. They also dropped a sterile sampling device designed to collect airborne microbes on its way down. After falling halfway, it closed and parachuted the rest of the way to Earth.

Scientists later grew 10 types of bacteria and fungi from that sample. But this was before scientists discovered DNA. So they never learned much more than the shapes of these mystery cells, the conditions they had survived and what nutrients they needed to grow.

Nearly four decades later, Soviet scientists launched rockets with sticky microbe collectors 48 to 77 kilometers (30 to 48 miles) into the mesosphere. It’s the layer just above the stratosphere. Those collectors parachuted back with a few living cells stuck on them. These, too, grew in the lab.

“But there’s just no way to know what [the Soviets had] sampled,” Christner says. The microbes could have been contamination from the ground. He doesn’t believe that the scientists actually found something alive at that altitude.

More recent U.S. studies started in the early 2000s.

NASA was flying a plane 20 kilometers (12 miles) up to collect cosmic dust. Its goal was to study the history of our solar system. Microbiologist Dale Griffin then worked for the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Fla. He arranged for sticky microbe-catchers to fly on several missions between 2003 and 2008.

Griffin grew several types of bacteria from those samples. He also performed a simple test on them, called genetic barcoding. It looks at a short part of a single gene. From this, biologists can get a general idea of a life form’s family or genus. And these microbes, he realized, were related to several known from remote islands and volcanic soils.

Perhaps, Griffin thought, eruptions lofted them high into the air.

The Russian and NASA findings were based on what they learned from growing sampled microbes in the lab. Yet scientists can’t grow 99 percent of the microbes that exist most places. They just can’t recreate the environments these cells need to grow.

As such, those early tests couldn’t measure how many living cells were in the stratosphere. They usually couldn’t identify the species. The scientists didn’t even test whether these microbes could survive stratosphere-like temps, dryness or UV radiation.

And they never learned the lifestyles of these microbes on Earth’s surface — whether they lived on plants, slurped raw sewage or grew in the armpits of NFL linebackers.

At last: Tallying living space microbes

Christner was at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (LSU) when he and Bryan began their search for life in the stratosphere. They planned to start low and sample higher and higher. They would try to grow the cells they collected, as others had. But they would also do something new: count the total number of living cells at these altitudes.

They expected that at some height, the number of living cells would drop to zero. This would mark the outer limit of life on Earth.

Bryan built her first collectors from Styrofoam and balsa wood, purchased at hobby and hardware stores. She dangled these homemade gizmos from helium balloons launched in Texas and Louisiana. Each collector had a control chamber that didn’t open during the flight. This helped her estimate how much her samples were contaminated with ground-level germs. Eventually, she got that contamination down to almost zero.

In 2013, Bryan started using a more advanced system. It was developed by LSU engineer T. Gregory Guzik. Its sturdy circuits allowed it to reach even greater heights. (In the mid-stratosphere, electricity can arc from one wire to another, damaging circuits.)

Bryan and Guzik used this system in a key series of balloon launches over Fort Sumner. This little town crouches amid a dry plain of grass and yucca in eastern New Mexico. The 19th-century gunslinger Billy the Kid is buried in a cemetery at one end of town.

The samples that Bryan collected here would be the final ones for her PhD research. They would also reveal some major surprises.

On the morning of August 21, 2013, Bryan, Guzik and several others wore hard hats as they emerged from a hangar at the local airport. They grasped the tether of a round, white helium balloon the size of a small elephant. It bobbed and tugged impatiently as they walked into an open field.

Then, they let it go.

A downward-pointing camera captured video as it surged upward.

At one point, a large jet streaked by far below, tiny and silent.

Later, the balloon was tossed by violent winds as it entered the stratosphere. At 18 kilometers (11 miles), an electric motor opened one of two collectors. It exposed a sticky surface to the air.

Minutes later, as the balloon ascended past 23 kilometers (14 miles), the collector closed. An electric heating coil severed the tether. This sent the balloon’s payload parachuting back to Earth. Using a GPS tracker, Bryan drove to where the collector had landed between a yucca and a prickly pear cactus.

In all, the team launched six balloons over three weeks. Some reached as high as 29 kilometers (18 miles). A seventh launch, on a larger NASA balloon, reached 38 kilometers (24 miles).

Microbes in living color

Bryan spent months growing her samples. The one from August 21 spawned a glistening orange colony of bacteria. She named it L6-1.

Samples from other launches grew into yellow, pink and black colonies. The colors likely came from protective pigments that shield the microbes against harmful UV light.

Bryan assumed that these still-unidentified cells would turn out to be tough cookies. For example, some bacteria can form dry spores that survive boiling. But as she isolated and barcoded the cells’ DNA, a very different picture emerged.

These cells “should have been nothing but spore-formers,” Bryan says. They “should have been nothing but extremophiles.” But only one out of a dozen or so bacteria were.

L6-1 and several others belonged to a genus often found on plants: Curtobacterium. Others belonged to groups that live in soil. The fact that these critters came from such everyday places posed a mystery that Bryan desperately wanted to solve.

Radiation? No biggie       

Bryan spent most of 2014 and 2015 running lab experiments. From these, she estimated that at 24 kilometers (15 miles) up, each cubic meter (m³) of air held about 100,000 living cells. At 36 kilometers (22 miles), the air still held nearly 8,000 cells/m³.

In 2016, Bryan exposed her stratospheric cells to UV-C radiation to see how tough they were. These wavelengths of ultraviolet light kill cells better than the UV-A and UV-B types that cause sunburns. UV-C is absent at Earth’s surface, because the ozone layer blocks it. But this radiation is plentiful in the mid-stratosphere.

In these experiments, Bryan compared her stratospheric germs to a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans (Dye-noh-KOK-us Ray-dee-oh-DUR-uns). It is said to be the toughest organism on Earth. It can survive roughly 1,000 times the gamma radiation needed to kill a human. It’s also uniquely resistant to UV-C radiation.

Surprisingly, her L6-1 cells tolerated UV-C just as well as D. radiodurans did. Some of her other plant and soil bacteria from the stratosphere weren’t far behind. Bryan was shocked to see this. “I [fudged] up,” she remembers thinking.

Bryan repeated the experiments over many months, looking for mistakes she might have made. But her results never changed.

As the team realized the results were actually correct, it “all sort of came together,” Christner recalls. These plant-dwelling bacteria had a secret talent: They could survive, at least briefly, on the edge of space.

Were these cells infectious?

Bryan got her PhD in 2017. (She now works at Mass General Brigham in Boston, Mass.) Around that same time, Christner moved to the University of Florida. There, he began looking into a strange question.

Bryan’s DNA barcoding had showed that L6-1 and several of the other stratospheric bacteria were closely related to a germ that sickens crops. It’s called Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens. From the 1920s to the 1970s, it had browned and wilted Midwestern bean fields. After disappearing for a while, C. flaccumfaciens reemerged around 2003.

Christner and Bryan wondered: Did L6-1 also cause disease?

“Plant pathogens in the stratosphere — that was the furthest thing that
we expected to run into.”

Brent Christner

To find out, Christner teamed up with two plant pathologists. Brian Kvitko works at the University of Georgia in Athens. Robert Harveson is at the University of Nebraska in Scottsbluff. Last year, they reported that L6-1 really does cause bean plants to yellow and wilt. So do two other Curtobacterium microbes that Bryan collected from as high as 29 kilometers (18 miles).

Adam Ellington was a graduate student in Christner’s lab in Florida. In 2020, he sequenced the full genome of L6-1. This showed it to be a new species. It also was a genetic match for an unidentified germ that Harveson had isolated from diseased millet years earlier.

Christner’s group described it in Microbiology Spectrum in 2025. They named it C. aetherium.

“Plant pathogens in the stratosphere — that was the furthest thing that we expected to run into,” Christner says.

Harveson, a Curtobacterium expert, had long thought this germ spread through infected seeds. Learning that at least some members of its genus could survive high in the atmosphere stunned him. This discovery, he says, could “change our thought processes about movement of diseases.”

Life finds a way

By flying through the atmosphere, a microbe could cross oceans and drop into new ecosystems. A pathogen like C. aetherium could escape regions where plants had become resistant to it and land on new hosts.

Leaf-dwelling bacteria are known to experience frequent drying. This can damage their DNA in a manner similar to radiation. So some of these microbes have evolved ways to repair their DNA fairly well. Such tricks might help them survive other harsh conditions, too.

Leaf bacteria can also enter the air with surprising ease.

One 1982 study showed that during each hour on a warm day, 20 billion or so cells per hectare (50 billion per acre) enter the air from an alfalfa field. Breezes and rising warm air may loft most of these. Bacteria may even encourage this by clumping onto tiny leaf hairs where air currents can more easily lift them.

Once microbes are aloft, big thunderstorms, dust storms, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions can lift them into the upper atmosphere. Smoke plumes from large wildfires can also ferry billions of live cells into the air.

Ellington’s work suggested that C. aetherium could have started as one of these leaf-squatters. Over time, as it got lofted higher, it could have evolved new traits to survive extreme altitudes.

He learned this by studying a Curtobacterium species that has never been found in the atmosphere. When exposed to UV-C, it quickly adapted. This indicates that some plant-dwelling bacteria already have a flair for evolving strong radiation resistance.

Ellington also found that UV-C radiation turns on several DNA-repair enzymes in C. aetherium. One of them repaired an unusual type of UV damage. This type occurs only when a cell is so dehydrated that its DNA folds into a somewhat different structure. Cells drifting in the stratosphere are very dried out. So their DNA might actually fold this way, Ellington notes. Having this enzyme might allow them to repair a type of DNA damage that often happens up there.

Still, many mysteries remain.

Bryan was able to grow only 12 or so species of bacteria from the stratosphere. For every type that did grow in the lab, 100 to 1,000 others might have also been present and alive. They might not have grown for Bryan simply because she didn’t provide them with the right conditions.

Burak Erkorkmaz wonders about these other microbes.

“The next question would be to understand the whole community” up there, he says. He’s a microbiologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He’d like to take those thousands of live cells per cubic meter of stratospheric air and sequence all of their genomes. It would provide a fuller picture of the diversity of species there. It also could hint at whether they, too, carry genes for surviving high altitudes.

Erkorkmaz and other scientists have already started doing this with airborne cells caught a few meters above the ground.

Most aerial microbes likely never reach the stratosphere. They probably travel at lower altitudes, where conditions are milder. But finding even a few microbes alive in the stratosphere has huge implications. It might hint at whether microbes can survive in other worlds (see sidebar).

Many years may pass before these lessons from Earth’s stratosphere are applied to the search for extraterrestrial life. But for Bryan, the excitement of it began years ago when she made her first shopping trips to buy materials for her germ catchers.

“It was space exploration,” she says. “It was uncharted territory.”

Juli Clover:

The iPhone 18 Pro Max has a battery capacity over 20 watt-hours, which means there are additional shipping requirements. If an iPhone 18 Pro Max needs to be shipped somewhere, its maximum battery capacity has to be limited through firmware.

[…]

Customers who need to ship the iPhone 18 Pro Max for repair, trade-in, or other purposes have to use a new Prepare to Ship feature. Prepare to Ship discharges the battery to below 20Wh and sets a charge limit so the iPhone stays below the threshold during the shipping process.

Laptops, of course, have larger batteries, but they aren’t affected because each cell is below the limit.

When a new disease emerges, things can get a little weird. We start to clean groceries with antibacterial wipes, the sound of a sneeze can trigger our fight-or-flight response, and we generally become more cautious. Humans may not be the only primate species that change their behavior in the face of disease. 

According to a study published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) that lived through a deadly outbreak in 2020 became noticeably more cautious about food that appeared contaminated, even though this disease was not spread by food or feces. This indicates that purposefully shifting behavior to avoid a pathogen can be shaped by our appearance and that disgust may have deep evolutionary roots. It also sheds light on the behavioral immune system—a collection of behaviors that help animals avoid an infection before the biological immune systems respond.

“We can show now, in non-human primates, that this is the same for them,” Federico Rossano, a study co-author and cognitive psychologist at the University of California San Diego, said in a statement. “Even with no knowledge of how disease is transmitted, being exposed to others getting sick and dying changes the likelihood of engaging in behaviors that potentially could lead to some form of sickness.”

2020 was a big year for outbreaks

In 2020, the staff at a primate sanctuary in southern Texas confirmed the presence of simian retrovirus Type II. This disease can cause AIDS-like immunodeficiency and is primarily transmitted through bites and scratches. It caused severe illness and death in some of the monkeys. The sanctuary staff separated the groups and implemented testing and quarantine measures in response to the outbreak. Since the groups live in separate enclosures, scientists then had the chance to compare animals with similar backgrounds that had experienced very different social and disease environments. 

In total, three groups of monkeys experienced the outbreak while one had not. The team tested 

55 macaques to see how they responded to a choice between food that was put on a clean wooden surface and food placed on a surface covered with real macaque feces. The food with the feces was sealed under a layer of clear epoxy, so that the monkeys could see the food and poop without risking infection.

In the group that had been exposed to the outbreak, some of the individuals had been infected while others had lived alongside sick monkeys without getting sick. This allowed the researchers to question if experiencing an outbreak without getting infected could change the macaque’s behavior. To test that further, the clean surface was replaced with a brightly colored kitchen sponge in some of the scenarios to see if the animals were just avoiding unfamiliar objects. 

Previous studies found that macaques aren’t necessarily deterred by contamination—as long as the payoff is tempting. When presented with a favorite treat (such as a peanut) wild Japanese macaques would still eat food from a surface covered in feces, but will avoid it for food like grains of wheat.

Continued caution

The team found that macaques from groups that went through the outbreak were far less likely to eat the food from the contaminated surface. They ate from the fake contaminated surface in only 47 percent of trials. The monkeys that did not experience the outbreak ate from the potentially contaminated surface in 79 percent of trials.

The monkeys from outbreak-exposed groups also behaved similarly whether or not they themselves had been infected. According to the team, this suggests the behavioral change was associated with their experiencing living through the outbreak, instead of actually getting sick

“Groups have histories, and those histories show up in behavior,” added study co-author and UC San Diego cognitive psychologist Stephan Kaufhold. “Living through the disease outbreak appears to have made those monkey groups more cautious around food that looks contaminated.”

The virus was spread through blood or saliva from bites and scratches, and not through contaminated food. Interestingly, the macaques who saw their fellow primates get sick, were more reluctant to eat food placed on a surface that visually suggested contamination in some of the tests.

Disgust’s evolution

In addition to shedding light on how illness affects primate behavior, it also offers insight into the evolution of disgust. The team did not measure disgust directly, but found that monkey’s avoidance of potential sources of infection can change with their experience, similar to what humans do.

Human disgust is believed to play an important role in protecting us from pathogens. We recoil from the smell and sight of poop, spoiled food, and other potential sources of infection. Our sensitivity to those cues can also change depending on context.

Since primates are capable of social learning, the team believes that heightened pathogen avoidance could be learned from other members in the group and persist over time. Future studies could see if newly introduced animals adopt the behavior of a group that has already experienced an outbreak.

The post Monkeys also avoid germs after viral outbreaks  appeared first on Popular Science.

With Alaska’s fat bears done packing on their winter weight and spooky season in full swing, it’s time to turn our collective animal-loving attention to a smaller mammal—bats. The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) annual Bat Beauty Contest returns on October 24 and promises “plenty of batty puns.”

Beginning Saturday, October 24, BLM will post photos of the competitors to their Facebook and Instagram accounts and ask you to vote for the best-looking one. All of the competing bats are part of wild populations that live on land managed by the public agency and are photographed by wildlife technicians. The winner will be announced (appropriately) on Saturday, October 31.

The bats in this competition are known for their squishy faces and clever names. In 2024, a hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) from Oregon named Hoary Potter took the crown. Other contestants included a long-eared myotis (Myotis evotis) named Honey Bunches of MyOtis, a myotis bat (Myotis myotis) named Robert Battinson, and western small-footed bats (Myotis ciliolabrum) named Batt Damon and Batlor Swift. The contest was not held in 2025 due to the 43-day-long federal government shutdown. 

The contest is not all bat puns and a way to keep the spirit of Fat Bear Week alive. It falls during Bat Week (October 24-31). Bat Week raises awareness about the Earth’s only flying mammal. More than just a Halloween symbol, bats play a critical ecological role as plant pollinators and through eating insects that can threaten crops and forests around the world. According to Bat Week, one bat can eat up to its body weight in insects every night. Only three species of bats eat animal blood, with two specializing in bird blood. Female lesser long-nosed bats even make tequila possible. Every spring, they migrate from south-central Mexico up to the southwestern United States, following “nectar corridors” of columnar cacti and agave plants. They pollinate agave plants, which are then used to make tequila and mezcal. When they feed on cactus fruits and nectar, they may also help disperse cacti seeds. Other bats eat pollen, nectar, or fruit.

Bats are increasingly threatened due to habitat loss, light pollution, and diseases like white-nose syndrome. This fungal disease infects the skin of the muzzle, ears, and wings of hibernating bats. In about 20 years, it has killed millions of bats across North America and affects about half of the species on the continent. Bats also are often misunderstood as carriers of diseases such as rabies. 

The planet is home to over 1,400 species of bats, and they make up almost 20 percent of all mammal species. Bats also can be found almost everywhere on Earth, even in desert and polar regions. To look up which bat species live near you, you can use Bat Week’s state bat database.

Stay tuned for more Bat Week updates!

The post Bat Beauty Contest returns October 24 appeared first on Popular Science.

Snakes will bite, rattle their tails, and even spit venom to escape danger. But of all the world’s species, southeast Asia’s dwarf reed snake (Pseudorabdion longiceps) relies on an especially fascinating escape method. When threatened, the diminutive serpent rolls away like a speeding wheel.

An adult dwarf reed snake typically measures less than 12 inches long, but its unique locomotive maneuvers allow it to retreat as fast one foot per second—about four times faster than it travels by simply slithering on the ground. It’s not a flailing getaway, either. The snake also easily rolls along a straight path while somehow keeping its head both stable and facing forward.

Now, researchers finally have a better understanding of how the dwarf reed snake achieves such dizzying acrobatics. In a study published today in the journal Current Biology, a team at Japan’s Toho University detailed the specific physiology that enables its locomotion after filming the snakes with high-speed cameras. Essentially, the snake doesn’t rotate its entire body in a singular, forward motion—it whips one side of its body forward towards the ground while an arched portion swings down by its head in what the study’s authors call a “stroke.” The snake then alternates between its left and right side coming into contact with the ground for each successive stroke. Essentially, it’s like twirling a rope in a lateral circle while holding one end in your hand—except that end is the snake’s head.

The cumulative efforts bypass the traditional idea of a wheel requiring something like a central axle. Instead, this ingenious, highly controlled movement allows the animal to keep its head and sensory organs upright and facing ahead while traveling at such high speed. This is compounded by the dwarf reed snake directing regions of its body to engage in large, alternating rotations while stabilizing its head.

By gaining better insight into these biological mechanisms, researchers also highlight the difficulty in trying to predict an animal’s capabilities based solely on its physiology. A snake may have primarily evolved to slither—but that doesn’t mean it can’t get creative when necessary.

The post This snake cartwheels to escape danger appeared first on Popular Science.

October is officially Bat Appreciation Month. In the spirit of the season and conservation, a team of biologists in California recently spent time finding bats at Muir Woods National Monument and Samuel P. Taylor State Park. And while Halloween is fast approaching, the activity had nothing to do with spooky festivities and everything to do with tracking hoary (Lasiurus cinereus) and western red bats (Lasiurus blossevillii). 

The goal of their survey was to put GPS trackers on bats from the two migratory species. Hoary bats have grey-white fur and are the most widespread bat species in North, Central, and South America. Western red bats, also known as southern red bats, sport a reddish fur and are found in parts of South America. In redwood forests, bats like nesting within holes inside large trees. 

“When they migrate, those little guys can cover a LOT of ground!” the Golden Gate National Recreation Area writes, referencing both species. “By learning about these migratory patterns, we can better understand entire ecosystems like Muir Woods.”

Bats are important members of such ecosystems. They are pollinators, they spread seeds, and they help manage insect populations. To catch these helpful agents, scientists set up a sheer, delicate net called a “mist net” over a creek at dusk. All bats are nocturnal, and when they went searching for their next meal—bugs—they flew into the net. 

It was a bit of a trick for the winged mammals, but a treat for the human team. “Expert bat wranglers” carefully took them out of the nets, noted their weight and size, presumably attached the GPS tracker, and then returned them to the wild. 

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area’s shared pictures of tiny, disgruntled looking bats carefully pinched between gloved fingers. In one image, an expert holds a bat wing up to the light of a colleague’s headlamp. In fact, illuminated wing membrane patterns literally shed light on the bat’s age and developmental stage.

While this survey focused on two bat species, researchers at the Muir Woods National Monument have previously spotted 10 different species.

The post Expert ‘bat wranglers’ put GPS trackers on California’s bats appeared first on Popular Science.

Excerpted from PENELOPE by Paul Bochner. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Bochner. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

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On the evening of March 18, as it was growing dark, I went to the window, not knowing what was drawing me. Next to the house stood a shadow, ghost-like, shrunken, at one with the dusk, almost translucent, and I recognized The Girl with the Broken Foot.

I walked out into the falling wet snow, slowly approaching her, and she allowed me to come close. Nine months old, she was the size of a fawn half that age. Starkly emaciated, her body seemed to be collapsing inward, her head held low. Literal hunger and a deeper starvation were palpable. She bore the haunted look of terminal solitude seen in souls driven to the margins of society, among the liv-ing, yet apart. She seemed so frail that I couldn’t imagine she would live more than another day or two.

Going inside and returning with a bowl of apples, I cut them into pieces and placed a few on the ground between us. She was raven-ously hungry and I gave her a few more apples, and still more, until she had eaten a total of eight. After she had finished eating, she stayed with me. We stood about a foot apart. She showed no fear of me, a fact which I would later come to recognize as meaningful. The moment had the compelling quality which has been present at the onset of many enduring connections in my life, of being un-bound by linear time.

“I am watching over you,” I said softly. “If you come here, I will take care of you. You are not alone.”

It was fully dark when we parted, having been together for an hour. I expected that she would recede into the woods, yet the next morning she was sleeping against the house, directly beneath the window closest to where I sit all day to work. Save for the wall separating us, she could not have gotten any closer to me.

When I went around to the front of the house, she struggled to her feet and approached. In the morning light, I was better able to assess the state of her health. Months of solitary survival had taken a severe toll. Her body seemed hollowed, her ribs and pelvis sharply visible beneath her skin, and it felt a miracle that she was alive. On her right flank was a hemispherical mass the size of a cantaloupe, which I took to be a tumor, yet it had an open, running wound at its center, which she periodically craned her neck to lick. Her eyes were running and had congealed masses at their inner corners.

I bent to get a look at her injured foot. From not being walked on, the backward-facing cloven hoof had grown to an abnormal length and was curling upward. The wrist, which unnaturally bore her weight, had a flattened forward surface, an oval about two inches across, worn raw, without hair or skin, only pale pink–grey flesh, which, at its center, appeared to have been further abraded to the bone. Her right front foot, forced to compensate, was splayed and rockered, her right scapula protruded, and her front quarters were substantially lower than her hips.

I again placed apple pieces on the ground between us. I spoke very gently to her, saying, “You are the best one of all the deer. You are the most beautiful. You are good.” I continued to talk to her while she ate her apples, and when she had taken all she could, she returned to her resting spot under the window. I went inside to work, keeping periodic watch, pleased that she seemed to have claimed a place. But in a few minutes, from around the corner of the house came the twins, followed by their mother who immediately and ag-gressively charged at her. The Girl with the Broken Foot lurched upright and hobbled down the embankment, across the road and into the woods.

She was once again alone, but a step had been taken. Since the previous evening, things had changed. Even before her second feed-ing she had recognized me on sight. She had approached and had again allowed me near.

Although I had seen her fewer than half a dozen times in the preceding months, from the night of our first connection, she began to come to the house every day. She slowly gained strength and I would watch for her and thrill to the sight of her slow approach. It was our private time. We stood together, and I placed her food on the ground between us. After she ate, she would stare into my eyes for long periods, seemingly entranced. I told her stories. I sang softly to her. I told her she was my beauty.

So began our journey, and one of the greatest loves I have ever known.

About the Author

Paul Bochner began his professional life early, as a working musician through his mid-teens in Los Angeles, then moving to Montreal at the invitation of the National Film Board of Canada. He has won several international awards for his films and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

The post The remarkable bond between a man and a deer appeared first on Popular Science.