of the stirrup, transforming large but faint air-borne vibrations into small but strong fluid-borne ones.
These vibrations enter the inner ear, which looks like a French whisk poking out of a snail shell. Ignore the whisk for now – the shell is the cochlea, a rolled-up tube that’s filled with fluid and lined with sensitive hair cells. These perform the third step: frequency analysis. Each cell responds to different frequencies, and are neatly aligned so that the low-frequency ones are at one end of the tube and the high-frequency ones at another. They’re like a reverse piano keyboard that senses rather than plays. The signals from these cells are passed to the auditory nerve and decoded in the brain. And voila – we hear something.
All mammal ears work in the same way: capture sound; convert and amplify; and analyse frequencies. But good adaptation are rarely wasted on just one part of the tree of life. Different branches often evolve similar solutions to life’s problems. And that’s why, in the rainforests of South America, a katydid—a relative of crickets—hears using the same three-step method that we use, but with ears that are found on its knees.
For corals, gardening’s a matter of life and death. Corals compete with algal seaweeds for space, and many types of seaweed release chemicals that are toxic to corals, act as carriers for coral diseases and boost the growth of dangerous microbes. These dangers require close contact—the seaweed poisons won’t diffuse through the water, so they need to be applied to the corals directly. And that gives the corals an opportunity to save themselves. When they sense encroaching seaweed, they call for help.
Danielle Dixson and Mark Hay from the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that when Acropora corals detect the chemical signatures of seaweed, they release an odour that summons two gardeners – the broad-barred goby and redhead goby. These small fish save the corals by eating the toxic competitors. In return, one of them stores the seaweed poisons in its own flesh, becoming better defended against its own enemies.
The thing in the photo above, I’m sad to say, is a penis. It belongs to the male seed beetle. And just in case you’re holding out hope that appearances are deceiving, I can assure you they are not. Those spikes are hard and sharp, and they inflict heavy injuries upon the female beetles during sex. Why would such a hellish organ evolve?
This isn’t just about beetles. The animal kingdom is full of bafflingly-shaped penises adorned with spines, spikes, and convoluted twists and turns. In some animal groups, like certain flies, penis shape is the only clue that allows scientists to distinguish between closely related species.
For a male, sex isn’t just about penetration. After he ejaculates inside a female, his sperm still have to make their way to her eggs to fertilise them and pass on his genes. If she mates with many suitors, her body becomes a battleground where the sperm of different males duke it out. Females can influence this competition by being choosy over mates, storing sperm in special pouches, or evolving their own convoluted genital passages. Males, meanwhile, have evolved their own tricks, including: guarding behaviour; self-castration; barbed sperm; chemical weapons in their sperm; mating plugs; ‘traumatic insemination’; and having lots of sperm.
And spiky penises. That too.
The dung beetle, Scarabaeus nigroaeneus, as its name suggests, eats the faeces of large grazing mammals. When it finds a fresh pat, it fashions the dung into a ball and rolls it home, head down and walking backwards. That’s hard work. The balls can be 50 times heavier than the beetle, whose body heats up as it pushes around its weighty cargo.
Heating up is something that an insect can’t afford to do in the South African desert, where the ground can reach a scorching 60 degrees Celsius in the middle of the day. But the beetle’s dung-rolling antics provide it with a constantly accessible way of beating the heat. By filming dung beetles with a heat-sensitive camera, Jochen Smolka from 