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What Singing Lemurs Can Tell Us About the Origin of Music – Mongabay (2025)

February 10, 2025 at 3:41 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Musical Protolanguage Hypothesis, first devised by Charles Darwin, states that in addition to gestures, early humans most probably communicated using musical sounds before developing spoken language. Therefore music can be seen as a prerequisite for language, as an ancestral step to process a linear auditory signal corresponding to a sentence. Darwin noted that birdsong is the nearest analogy to language. However, before birds, perhaps we should pay more attention to our evolutionary relatives (which Darwin would absolutely agree). The endangered […]

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Bacterial Type 4 Secretion System – Gabriel Waksman (2018)

November 18, 2024 at 9:01 am / Featured, Molecular Nature, Video

Gram negative bacteria Type 4 Secretion System (T4SS) by Dr. Gabriel Waksman of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, University College London and Birkbeck. Animations by Cellscape. This playlist consists of three videos illustrating the type 4 secretion system (T4SS) assembly, pilus biosynthesis and transfer of DNA segment into a recipient cell. T4SS are bacterial macromolecule secreting structures. These macromolecules include proteins and DNA. Bacterial cell-to-cell exchange of genetic materials such as plasmids or mobile genetic elements is called […]

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Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin – PBS (2014)

September 24, 2024 at 4:06 pm / Evolution, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Your Inner Fish, is the first installment of a three part PBS series by Neil Shubin. After a quick review of our shared anatomy with the fish and a whirlwind tour along the evolutionary timeline, the program plunges us into the fascinating saga of discovery of the tetrapods that explains how limbs of the terrestrial vertebrates came to be. Watch how the legendary 375 million year old (Devonian) tetrapod fossil Tiktaalik was discovered after a series of adventurous Arctic expeditions. […]

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Mudskippers of the Tidal Mangrove Mudflats at the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, Singapore

August 9, 2024 at 10:23 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Habitats along the land-sea interphase provided the setting for evolution of vertebrate adaptations needed to move onto the land. Mangrove mudflats formed within the intertidal zone provide a fantastic array of habitat qualities that enable selection of amphibious traits. These gently sloping habitats can extend hundreds of meters between the land and the sea and are exposed to air on a regular basis following tides. The extensive root systems of the semi-aquatic mangrove trees stabilize the coasts, providing a dependable […]

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Antifreeze Proteins in Virtual Reality – Nanome (2022)

May 9, 2024 at 2:04 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Dr. Mike Kuiper, a biomodeler at CSIRO’s Data61 explains how antifreeze proteins work in a metaverse compatible virtual reality environment enabled by Nanome. These ice structuring proteins, is a basis of survival for organisms evolved to live in very cold environments with temperatures below the freezing point of water. Essentially, these proteins can bind to the surface of ice crystals and create a surface effect leading to freezing-point depression. Bacteria, insects, fishes and many more organisms from different evolutionary backgrounds […]

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A Yellow-throated Warbler Collecting Nesting Material

May 7, 2024 at 6:41 pm / Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

In this short observation recorded on May 19th 2012 you can watch a a yellow-throated warbler (Setophaga dominica) collecting plant fibers for nest construction. This bird constructs cup-shaped nests very high up in the canopy of mature forests. As can be seen in this recording, it particularly developed a search image for collecting fibers of specific quality used in a two-layered nest architecture. Nest construction in birds is not all instinctive and has a consirable learning component. Urban birds can […]

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Cornell University Hawk Camera

January 27, 2024 at 10:42 am / Natural history, Video, webcams

Everybody is excited for the 2020 breeding season of the famous Cornell University campus hawks Big Red and her new mate Arthur. Unfortunately Big Red’s partner Ezra reportedly has died. Last year Big Red laid her first egg at about 11:38 ET on March 28th. The breeding season 2015 started with a surprise. Big Red and Ezra moved to their nest to the light pole they used in 2012. There were no longer cameras installed at this nest so some […]

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Albatross Nest Live from New Zealand

January 26, 2024 at 9:57 am / Natural history, Video, webcams

If you see a dark screen, bear in mind that it might be night time in New Zealand. Breeding season 2019 has ended happily. See y’all in 2020! We have previously relayed broadcast from Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) nest from the island of Kauai, geologically the oldest island of the Hawaiian archipelago. The webcam is operated by the Bird Lab of Cornell University. The Laysan Albatross gets its name from its Laysan breeding colony in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where […]

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Decorah Eagle Cam – Nesting Season 2024

January 24, 2024 at 1:23 am / Natural history, Video, webcams

Live feed has begun from the new nest named N2 for Decorah bald eagles. Decorah Eagles 1-28-24 HM perches on the Y, visits N1. The pair known as “Mom” and “Dad” are visiting and maintaining the nest occasionally. Established by the Raptor Resource Project in 2007 this breeding pair of Bald Eagles in Decorah, Iowa has been under intense observation. The pair became famous after the PBS Nature Documentary “American Eagle” in 2008. At one point in 2012 the viewer […]

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Eyed Click Bug (Alaus oculatus) Ovipositing

January 20, 2024 at 10:01 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

On May 26th 2012, this click beetle began laying her eggs on a log along the Orange trail of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia in Athens, GA. These beetles are quite noticeable due to their large size and distinctive eye patterns on their pronotum. At the beginning of the video (while she is stationary), you can see some very tiny red mites walking across her body. She wondered around on a downed tree and assessed possible egg laying sites. […]

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Chase Tag Championship and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Predator Prey Interaction

November 4, 2023 at 11:10 am / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Playing chase is arguably one of the oldest in the game repertoire of human and non-human mammals. Chase Tag Championship is a sport event that has its roots in the parkour movement. Here, we see a fantastically beautiful demonstration of performance and human agility with fairly clear rules. Of course, biologically speaking there’s also a quite interesting story in terms of evolution of the predator-prey dynamics in the game. In the anatomy of a hunt researchers have shown that predators […]

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Can Money Stop Deforestation? – The Economist (2023)

September 29, 2023 at 12:08 pm / Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

In the 1980’s due to governmental policies favoring agriculture, the landcover of tropical rainforests decreased from 75 % (in the 1940s) down to 21 % in Costa Rica. Many tropical countries followed suit. The world’s largest rainforest the Amazon also experienced decades of deforestation. Money clearly drives deforestation. But can it also help save the forests? The promise of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is fairly straightforward: Forest owners keep their standing vegetation intact and in return […]

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From rainforest to charcoal | DW Documentary (2019)

September 28, 2023 at 8:21 am / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Video

Charcoal production takes a heavy toll on African forests. For instance in Mozambic, the economical drive is so intense that even valuable food trees providing monetary income such as the cashew trees (Anacardium occidentale) are harvested. In 2019 an investigative journalism revealed that Europe has been burning American trees as biomass for power generation. Something similar is sinisterly happening in European charcoal market as the investigative journalism of Deutsche Welle finds out. Europeans consume approximately 800,000 tons of charcoal for […]

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Cannonball Tree – Couroupita guianensis (Lecythidaceae) – Singapore Botanical Gardens

June 28, 2023 at 9:59 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Filmed on location at the Singapore Botanical Gardens on Nov 22nd 2016. The cannonball tree (Couroupita guianensis) from the Lecythidaceae (Brazil nut family) family is native to Neotropical forests. Its flowers are adapted for bat pollination possibly from an ancestral state of euglossine bee pollination. Here far away from its natural home, the flowers are being visited by stingless Meliponini bees. The flowers produce impressive levels of fragrance but yield no nectar. Therefore the reward for its visitors comes in […]

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How El Niño and La Niña Cause Extreme Weather – The Economist (2023)

June 1, 2023 at 4:47 pm / Global Patterns, Video

El Niño and La Niña are opposite states of one of Earth’s most important climate processes together constituting the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It can lead to devastating weather events all over the world. But how does it work, what kinds of extreme weather does it cause and how is global warming affecting it? The ENSO observed during the 1997/1998 period was a legendary one. It appears 2023/2024 could be another significant ENSO event. Since 1950 the amplitudes […]

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