Laos is saddled with the distinction of one superlative: it is the most heavily bombed country on earth. During the nine-year secret war against the Communists, during the Vietnam War, the U. S. dropp...
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds—can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.
A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds— can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy. Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an ana...
And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn’t have a chance to grow.
At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball...
I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritatio...
Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?
Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas modeled their approach on Jane Goodall’s: they began their studies by relinquishing control. In the masculine world of Western science, where achievement is typically m...
If the person was out of the room, the octopus would pull off the magnet on the inside of the tank which, with another magnet on the outside of the tank, held a glass-cleaning tool in place. The outsi...
His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world’s mistreatment of pigs,
A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific...
Species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to anothe...
Reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege.
Bear-time seems slow to us, perhaps, because we do not have the patience for such a life.
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body...
The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as theory of mind.
One of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.
A voltmeter picks up the fish’s electric pulse. A light, actually powered by the eel’s electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey, an...
Hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it...
Showing 41 to 60 of 80 results