Wonders and Curiosities 5
News from the Animal Kingdom
Been a little while since I did a round-up of recent(ish) news/discoveries/reports that have caught my eye, so I’ve got a bit a backlog to start trying to clear.
As usual for these posts, something for everyone, then a bit more for paying subscribers: cool coelacanth news, an amazing new ‘bone collector’ caterpillar, yawning fish, a famous bird revealing new tricks and more …
1. First Face-to-Face with the Indonesian Coelacanth
If you’ve listened to the relevant episode, you know there are two species of coelacanth: one off the south-east coast of Africa, the other in the Indonesian archipelago. We know more, relatively speaking, about the former than the latter.
But now, for the first time, we’ve got direct encounters between divers and the Indonesian coelacanth, and the photos to go with them. They’ve been seen from submersibles before, but never by divers - partly because you’ve got to go deep to find these fish. Around 150m, 500ft, in this case. And best of all, it was in an area - the Maluku Islands - where their presence had never previously been confirmed.
The researchers encountered a single coelacanth on two occasions - the same individual, which they could confirm because the colour and spotting patterns are evidently unique.
Great photos in the free-to-read description linked above, for which the full reference is: Chappuis, A., Hendrawan, I.G., Achmad, M.J. et al. First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia. Sci Rep 15, 14074 (2025).
2. Are Lyrebirds ‘farming’ their invertebrate prey?
I’ve put a question mark in the subtitle here because for various reasons I’m not totally sure what the significance of this is. But it’s interesting anyway, so ...
Lyrebirds are spectacular Australians, known for elaborate courtship and crazy vocal mimicry abilities (everyone’s seen the famous video of one doing car alarms, chainsaws etc., right? Essential viewing if not).
This is not about any of that, though. Researchers looked into the effects of lyrebird feeding behaviour - scratching around in the dirt, basically - and found that it had a significant impact on the biomass and type of invertebrates occurring in the soil. Basically, the proposal is that the physical act of foraging increases the amount of preferred invertebrate prey available over time. The birds change the environment in a way that favours the bugs they like to eat.
Which the researchers interpret as a kind of ‘farming’. I’d need to think and read about it more to have much of an opinion on that, but it’s intriguing, and does seem to at the very least suggest that lyrebirds count as ‘ecosystem engineers’.
3. Contagious yawning. Fish do it too!
We’re all familiar with the idea and experience of contagious yawning. You yawn, so I yawn too. As far as I know, nobody’s got a definitive explanation for it, though there’s lots of theories. (To be honest, I think the same thing could be said of yawning itself).
Yawning is very widespread, in mammals, reptiles, fish and so on - but specifically contagious yawning is more limited: it’s seen in a bunch of animals, but by no means all the yawners. Not a single fish, for example. Until now …
The Zebra Danio, or just zebrafish.
It’s provided the first evidence for contagious yawning in fish. Which might seem a very niche discovery, but it does raise some interesting evolutionary questions about how far back contagious yawning goes in the animal family tree, whether it’s independently evolved in different lineages for some social function etc.
And over to the paying subscribers for more goodies: what have dormice got to do with invertebrate decline, carnivorous caterpillars, a re-appearing bird …