Nature

2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 38 of 38.

This forest of 47,000 aspen trees is actually one single organism.On a Utah hillside, some 47,000 quaking aspen trunks spread across 43 hectares. Genetically they are all one male individual, joined by a shared root system. Named Pando, Latin fo…
The Portuguese man o' war isn't a jellyfish. It's a colony that sails.It looks like a single jellyfish with a gas-filled float, but a Portuguese man o' war is a colony of specialised units called zooids, all cloned from one egg and working as a sing…
Giant tube worms have no mouth or gut, and are fed by bacteria inside them.Around volcanic vents on the Pacific seafloor, red-plumed worms up to three metres long grow faster than any other known marine invertebrate. As adults they have no mouth, gut or …
Sailors' tales of monster waves were dismissed as myths until 1995.For centuries sailors described sudden walls of water far bigger than the surrounding sea, and scientists mostly waved them away. Then, on New Year's Day 1995, a laser on a North …
Death Valley's 'sailing stones' moved unseen for decades, until cameras caught them.On a dry lakebed in Death Valley, rocks, some as heavy as a person, leave long trails behind them, yet for decades nobody saw one move. Explanations ranged from hurricane-force wi…
Sloths grow algae in their fur, and moths live there too.A sloth moves so little that its shaggy coat becomes a tiny ecosystem. Green algae grow in its hair, camouflaging it in the canopy, and moths live in the fur. About once a week th…
High above thunderstorms, giant red 'sprites' flash for an instant, and they aren't lightning.People reported strange flashes above storms from at least 1886, but nobody photographed one until 1989, and then by accident. Sprites are vast red-orange discharges up to 90 kilo…
This desert plant grows only two leaves in its life, and may live 2,000 years.Welwitschia mirabilis grows in the Namib Desert, where rain can be almost non-existent. It produces just two leaves, which never fall but keep growing from the base for its entire…
When a whale dies and sinks, it can feed the deep sea for decades.A whale carcass sinking to the dark seafloor becomes an oasis. Scavengers strip the flesh, worms and snails colonise the bones, and bacteria feed on the fats inside for perhaps 50…
Wombats produce cube-shaped poo, and explaining it won a physics prize.An adult wombat leaves 80 to 100 neat little cubes of dung a night, which it uses to mark its territory. How a soft, rounded gut produces flat-sided droppings puzzled people for y…
Do trees really talk through a 'wood wide web'?Fungi weave through forest soil and link to tree roots, trading nutrients for sugar. Popular books describe trees using this network to feed their young and warn neighbours. A 202…
Did wolves really 'change the rivers' of Yellowstone? The truth is more complicated.When wolves returned to Yellowstone in 1995, elk numbers fell, willows recovered in places and beaver colonies multiplied. It became a famous story of a predator healing an ecosys…
A fungus hijacks ants, steering them to the perfect spot to die.In tropical forests, carpenter ants infected by the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis leave their colony, climb a plant to about 25 centimetres and clamp their jaws onto a leaf v…