Latest articles by Lucas Lima

Ever wonder what leafcutter ants do with all those leaves? Turns out, they’re not for eating (at least, not directly). The leaves serve as the raw organic material on which to grow the real prize – a crop of delicious fungus.

In Yellowstone National Park, gray wolves have been recorded risking injury and death to help pack mates escape during aggressive attacks by neighboring packs. Why would any wild animal take such a risk? This ability to relate to another’s pain and distress, to feel empathy, is rarely attributed to any creature except for modern humans. While we cannot know the details of the lives of past Homo sapiens such as hunter-gatherers, we can look to gray wolves and think about just how much we had – hopefully still have – in common.

While human and cephalopod evolution diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, their eyes share a remarkable similarity with our own. One of the most intriguing examples of convergent evolution, cephalopod eyes are a window into the evolution of sight – and how the most intelligent invertebrates on the planet perceive the world.