Macquarie Island isn’t just a windswept rock halfway to Antarctica. It’s a globally unique home to dozens of bird and marine mammal species, hence the government’s plans to give it greater protection.
Harbour porpoises are the most common toothed whale in the turbine-rich North Sea.
Onutancu/Shutterstock
Using urine and signature whistles from other dolphins, a team of scientists has shown that dolphins use signature whistles like names and hold mental representations of other dolphins in their minds.
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) frolicking at the ocean surface.
Tony Wu/WWF
New research combines cutting-edge engineering with animal behaviour to explain the origins of efficient swimming in nature’s underwater acrobats: seals and sea lions.
Female elephant seals take seven-month feeding trips during which they balance danger, starvation and exhaustion.
Dan Costa
By measuring how and when elephant seals sleep, researchers were able to figure out how elephant seals change their risk-taking behavior as they gain weight.
Jaime Bran/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
This newly discovered ancient monk seal is challenging previous theories about how and where monachine seals evolved. It’s the biggest breakthrough in seal evolution research in about 70 years.
The only way to learn about the sensory abilities of dolphins is with the help of trained dolphins.
Dolphin Quest
Wild dolphins are fast, smart and hard to study, but it is important to understand how human actions affect their health. So we are building a drone to sample hormones from the blowholes of dolphins.
A cruise ship leaves Resolute Bay, Nunavut, in the summer of 2014.
(Silviya V. Ivanova)
The long tusk of the male narwhal earned these whales their fanciful nickname. But there’s more to these Arctic mammals than their unique spiral tooth.
We don’t know for sure which one is smarter, because not everyone agrees on what “intelligence” means. Both have their own special behaviours and skills and we can’t say who is more intelligent.