Stories by Felicity Muth

Some animals defend themselves by spraying liquid at potential threats. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the skunk, whose spray contains chemicals that smell awful to the animals it's defending itself from.

Art and science are usually held up as two opposing disciplines. However, arguably very similar abilities are needed to be an artist and a scientist: an ability to observe the world in detail, to perhaps notice things that other people don't, to creatively come up with ideas and to draw novel connections.

As I wrote about in my last post, bees are capable of learning which flowers offer good nectar rewards based on floral features such as colour, smell, shape, texture, pattern, temperature and electric charge.

One of the first things I get asked when I tell people that I work on bee cognition (apart from `do you get stung a lot?') is `bees have cognition?'.

The males of many animals compete with each other for females. This can be through direct fighting, as in the case of crickets and fruitflies.

Many animals behave aggressively towards one another. This is usually when they are fighting for something like territory, mates or food.  However, an animal's decision to become aggressive isn't a simple on-off switch and many factors feed into how aggressive an animal is.

King penguins are pretty social animals. Not only do they tend to hang out in a big group, but even within the group, they form little sub-groups; cliques of penguins who like to hang out together.

For a change, I thought this week instead of writing about black widow spiders or praying mantids I'd write about an animal I often neglect: humans.

Visual illusions are fun: we know with our rational mind that, for example, these lines are parallel to each other, yet they don't appear that way.

If you're lucky enough, you may have seen a peacock displaying to a female. It's an impressive event to witness: the peacock spreads and ruffles his enormous, brightly coloured tail feathers for a female, who, after checking him out, may choose to mate with him or not.

There are a handful of traits that scientists and philosophers would argue would make us human, including self-awareness and language. Another key part of being human is thought to be our ability to empathize (although I sometimes find myself doubting some humans' abilities to empathize).

Bowerbirds are perhaps the most intriguing artists of the bird world. Their beautiful constructions are built purely to impress females (they are not nests, as often mistaken to be).

When you read the word `communication', you probably think of language in some form, likely spoken or written. This is because, as humans, we're obsessed with communicating through language; it's likely that an hour doesn’t go by in your day when you don't communicate with someone by phone, email or text.

We usually think about male and female mates getting along pretty well (that's `mate' in the biological sense, not your friendly British/ Australian friend).

The title of this article probably is an overstatement. Perhaps instead it should have been ‘a small subset of people in Reno, and possibly in Vegas (because everything you can think of exists there) celebrated pollinators for a week.

Working in the field of animal behaviour means that around World Cup season it’s hard to avoid being sent links to so-called ‘psychic’ animals that predict the outcome of matches, such as Paul the octopus, Leon the porcupine and Anton the tamarin.

A large portion of what animals do is interact with each other. As a social species, we can hardly go an hour without some kind of interaction with another human, be it face-to-face or via text or email.

I recently wrote an article about science communication, and in it mentioned that people can communicate science in many different ways using many different types of media.

I recently wrote about how bumblebees were able to perform some seemingly impressive feats, although the underlying reason they could do so was relatively simple.

You may have heard the claim that left-handed people are smarter than right handed people. Specifically, it seems that left-handed people are over represented in musicians, architects and art and music students.

In a week where gaze-following seems to be the hot topic, there being studies in both primates and dogs, another study took a rather different approach to looking at gaze-following.

I recently wrote about how humans and other primates follow the gaze of others. This week I read about two more interesting findings relating to gaze-following, the first in dogs, the second in robins.

I recently taught a class on science journalism and science communication. Although there have been a few articles on this topic already (in particular I'd recommend reading Ed Yong's and Carl Zimmer's) I thought I'd share a bit of advice from my own experience.

Everyone has experiences happen to them that they'd rather forget about. Every so often though, you might have a reminder of that experience: perhaps someone says something to you or you see something that jogs your memory.