Animals

A large population of snow crabs in the eastern Bering Sea collapsed after a marine heat wave in 2018 and 2019 that multiplied the crabs' caloric needs and drove them to starvation.

The severely decayed remains of a marine creature recently washed up on a beach in Papua New Guinea. Experts can't agree on what the ghostly white lump is, but it is most likely the remains of a marine mammal.

Horsehair worms flood their hosts' minds with proteins made from copied chunks of their own genomes.

Orcas have been feasting on sharks' livers off the coast of South Africa for several years and could now be doing the same in Australia, the carcass of a great white suggests.

Irukandji jellyfish, which are around the same size as a dime, have a venom-filled sting that can trigger an extremely painful and occasionally deadly syndrome.

A tooth unearthed in Spain and dating to the Pliocene is the latest evidence of a crocodile ever found in Europe and supports the idea crocs crossed over from Africa about 6.2 million years ago.

Paleontologists have discovered the first molecular evidence of pheomelanin, a pigment that causes red hair, in the fossil record.

A crocodile in Kenya's Mara River was filmed thrashing around with the corpse of a baby hippo in its jaws in unusual sighting. It is unclear if the crocodile killed the calf or if it snatched a stillborn.

Three mass mortality events have struck a population of gray whales off the west coast of North America since the 1980s, and scientists have linked them to changing conditions in the Arctic.

Killer whales are surprisingly gentle in the wild when interacting with humans — though it's sometimes a different story with orcas in captivity.