As humans, we generally think that we should be somewhat choosy when picking a mate. However, we are lucky in that making the wrong choice rarely results in being eaten by said partner. However, in spiders like the western black widow, females commonly engage in ‘precopulatory sexually cannibalistic behaviour’ – or in other words, a [...]

They may have the largest physical variety among all animal species on Earth, but dogs can still recognise one of their own over any other animal based on simple images of their faces. Since their domestication somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, dogs have been learning to use facial cues as an important part [...]

My photography skills – if I can call them that – are pretty atrocious. While on a break in Wales recently, I managed to photograph a sequence in which a Herring gull Larus argentatus (one of our most frequently encountered gulls) swallowed a Common sea star Asterias rubens. Yeah, that’s right, get into the habit [...]

Way back in November 2010 a remarkable photo appeared online, showing an adult Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus biting the trunk of an adult female African bush elephant Loxodonta africana (a plague upon those bloggers and others who identified the crocodylian as an… alligator. Duh). You’ve almost certainly seen the photo already: it was widely features [...]