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This Adorable Sea Slug Is a Sneaky Little Thief
The summer months bring low morning tides along the California coast, providing an opportunity to see one of the state’s most unusual inhabitants, sea slugs. Also called nudibranchs, many of these...
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How Kittens Go From Clueless to Cute
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kittens end up in animal shelters, in need of permanent homes. A 5-week-old kitten plays at a shelter run by the Peninsula Humane Society and SPCA in Burlingame,...
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The House Centipede Is Fast, Furious and Hella Leggy
As California enters the winter rainy season, at least one transplant won’t be disappointed to see a change in the weather. West Coast rain is just fine for the house centipede, a guest from the...
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A Sand Dollar’s Breakfast Is Totally Metal
Pristine white sand dollars have long been the souvenir to commemorate a successful day at the beach. But most people who pick them up don’t realize that they’ve collected the skeleton of an animal,...
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Want a Whole New Body? Ask This Flatworm How
Nelson Hall wants you to know that the googly-eyed flatworm he just sliced into four pieces is going to be OK. In fact, it’s going to be great. Three of the flatworm’s four pieces have started to...
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Whack! Jab! Crack! It’s a Blackback Land Crab Smackdown
Last month, as much of Colorado was enduring a snowstorm, hundreds of crabs in Fort Collins were enjoying more pleasant conditions: 75-degree heat with 80 percent humidity. In the “Crab Lab” at...
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Turret Spiders Launch Sneak Attacks From Tiny Towers
Most Bay Area hikers pass right by without ever noticing, but a careful eye can spot tiny towers rising up from the forest floor. These mysterious little tubes, barely an inch high, are the homes of a...
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Jerusalem Crickets Only Date Drummers
Potato Bug. Child of the Earth. Old Bald-Headed Man. Skull Insects. Devil’s Baby. Spawn of Satan. There’s a fairly long list of imaginative nicknames that refer to Jerusalem crickets, those six-legged...
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How Your Dog’s Nose Knows So Much
On a sunny day near Martinez, California, a friendly-looking German shepherd named Zinka rushes down the crisscrossing trails of Briones Regional Park wearing a vest covered in sensors, batteries and...
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Samurai Wasps Say ‘Smell Ya Later, Stink Bugs’
Colonies of brown marmorated stink bugs reared at Oregon State University. (Jenny Oh/KQED) It looks rather harmless at first glance. With a speckled exterior and a shieldlike shape, the brown...
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How Lice Turn Your Hair Into Their Jungle Gym
At the end of spring break, your kids might be bringing back something more than just good memories of that family vacation. Holidays, it turns out, are a time when head lice spread. Anytime kids’...
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Porcupines Give You 30,000 Reasons to Back Off
At first, the idea of using porcupine quills to patch up wounds sounds torturous. But now researchers are taking inspiration from the spiky rodent to make a new type of surgical staple that may be...
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This Millipede and Beetle Have a Toxic Relationship
Across Northern California, as the rainy season is ending and spring is taking hold, bees are buzzing, flowers are growing and hikers are hitting the trails. But down at ground level, the pastoral...
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Honey Bees Make Honey … and Bread?
Spring means honey bees flitting from flower to flower. In California, this frantic insect activity that starts in late winter and continues through the summer is essential to growing foods like...
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These Face Mites Really Grow on You
I hate to break this to you, but you almost certainly have tiny mites living in the pores in your face right now. They’re called Demodex. And pretty much every adult human alive has a population of...
View ArticleBear Wanders Onto UC Davis Campus (Video)
College is where youth set out on their own, but UC Davis was not the right fit for this one Tuesday. Before dawn, a male black bear, weighing about 100 pounds, was spotted on the southside of campus...
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Crickets Chirp to Flirt
Ask most people about crickets and you’ll probably hear that they’re all pretty much the same: just little insects that jump and chirp. But there are actually dozens of different species of field...
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A Tsetse Fly Births One Enormous Milk-Fed Baby
Mammalian moms aren’t the only ones to deliver babies and feed them milk. Tsetse flies, the insects best known for transmitting sleeping sickness, do it too. A researcher at the University of...
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You Wish You Had Mites Like This Hissing Cockroach
As the weather starts to warm and cold days give way to balmier, sunny days, one rite of spring returns every year, just like spring flowers: cockroaches. A Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina...
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Kangaroo Rats Are Furry, Spring-Loaded Ninjas
Rulon Clark had a problem. He had studied rattlesnakes for years, but he wanted to learn more about the kangaroo rat, a diminutive animal that venomous snakes try to eat in deserts of the American...
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