Deep Look

Original Title: Crickets Use Their Wings To Sing Male crickets have a different song for every occasion: to advertise their fitness, woo a mate or keep their rivals away. So how do they make all those different chirps? One word: stridulation.

Mammalian moms, you're not alone! A female tsetse fly pushes out a single squiggly larva almost as big as herself, which she nourished with her own milk.

Not all roaches are filthy. The Madagascar hissing cockroach actually makes a pretty sweet pet, thanks to the hungry mites that serve as its cleaning crew.

Kangaroo rats use their exceptional hearing and powerful hind legs to jump clear of rattlesnakes — or even deliver a stunning kick in the face.

Before they can bite your cat or dog, these little "itch hikers" make an amazing leap 100 times faster than the blink of an eye. So how do they do it?

Indian walking sticks are more than just twig impersonators. They even clone themselves into a surprising variety of colors to stay hidden in plain sight from predators.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can transmit dengue fever and Zika, makes a meal of us around our homes. And her eggs are hardy. They can dry out, but remain alive for months, waiting for a little water so they can hatch into squiggly larvae.

The California floater mussel does a surprising amount of travel - for a bivalve. First it gets ejected from its parent's shell into the wide watery wilderness. Then it leads a nomad's life clamped on the fins or gills of a fish. Once it's all grown up, the mussel goes to work filtering the water, keeping it clean for all the life that depends on it.

The new coronavirus packs a devastating punch. It penetrates deep into your lungs, causing our immune cells to go haywire and damage tiny air sacs – the alveoli – where oxygen normally flows into our blood.

Sharpshooter insects are beautiful, but they transmit a devastating disease that kills grapevines. When it's time to mate, they shake their abdomens to make strange calls that – when amplified in a lab – sound like a clucking chicken, a howling monkey or a motorcycle revving up. Now scientists have found a way to use their songs against them.

Ever wanted to be invisible? The elusive glasswing butterfly knows just how to do it. Its transparent wings, covered in an anti-glare nano-coating, help it hide from its predators in the rainforest.

Ensatinas are a sprawling group of colorful salamanders, each one with different strategies for avoiding predators, from bold warning colors to confusing camouflage. Their diverse family tree offers us a rare snapshot of millions of years of evolution – how one species becomes many.

Cape sundews are carnivorous plants that grow in bogs, where they don't have access to many nutrients. So they exude sweet, shimmering droplets from their tentacles to lure in unsuspecting insects. Once their prey is hopelessly stuck, they wrap it up and dissolve it for a tasty meal.

Ducks and geese spend *a lot* of time preening their all-weather feathers. This obsessive grooming – and a little styling wax from a hidden spot on their back side – maintains the microscopic feather structure that keeps them warm and dry in frigid waters.

Not every yellow bloom ― or fluffy white globe ― taking over your backyard is a dandelion. Some of them are close relatives called catsears. But both of them have a little secret. To tell them apart and discover why they’re so successful you need to peek under their petals.

Orb weaver spiders build exquisite spiral webs not only to catch insects, but to extend their senses. Once they shrink-wrap their prey with silk, the nearly blind spiders can store them for later, and read their web's strands as a kind of memory map to guide them back.

High up in their 300-foot tower penthouse, falcon stars Annie and Grinnell's romance quickly gets real, as they face the tough demands of raising a family. They furiously guard their eggs from invaders, then stuff their screaming newborn chicks with meat. Will these kids ever leave the nest?

OG Title: Starfish Gallop With Hundreds of Tubular Feet They may look cute and colorful, but starfish are actually voracious predators. To sniff out and capture their prey, they rely on hundreds of water-propelled tube feet, each with a fiercely independent streak.

Eelgrass sea hares may look like lazy, zebra-striped spoonfuls of jello, but these sea slugs are actually environmental heroes. Their voracious appetite for algae helps keep underwater meadow ecosystems in balance–which is great news for sea otters.

A fly has a pair of tiny, dumbbell-shaped limbs called halteres that were once a second pair of wings. They wield them to make razor-sharp turns and land out of reach on your ceiling. But don't despair – there *is* a trick to smacking these infuriating insects.