Some snakes like to snack on squirrels. Knowing this, squirrels have come up with some pretty ingenious ways of avoiding their fate as snake food. For example, a grad student at UC Davis recently discovered that California ground squirrels and rock squirrels routinely chew shed rattlesnake skin, mush it up inside their mouths, […]
Archive for December, 2007
Remember those TV ads for venus fly traps? A fly buzzes innocently near those weird leaves that look like almonds with eyelashes and . . . snap! The leaves close on the fly and that’s that. Awesome!
Well, the venus fly trap is just one of dozens of flesh-eating plants. There’s […]
Beetle Poop Helps Burnt Forests Recover
Published December 11th, 2007 in Bizarre and Animals. 1 CommentWildfires can devastate huge areas of forest. But wooded areas can and do recover . . . thanks in large part to beetle dung, otherwise known as frass.
Scientists have known for some time that the dropping of deadwood beetles–so called because they live and in and around burnt, dead trees–may play a role in […]
You’ve heard about tryptophan, right? That’s the amino acid in turkey (and also in other kinds of poultry, chocolate, red meat, and lots of other foods) that supposedly makes you sleepy. But that may not be the case. What tryptophan may actually do, though, according to scientists at the University of Oxford, […]