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16 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 17, 2026.
'At first sight, I thought it was just two whales resting on the surface.' The study, published Wednesday in Discover Animals, says she never tried to lift the calf, suggesting she knew it was dead soon after birth.
The slow clicks top 200 decibels, come roughly once every 5 to 10 seconds, and are produced by an organ in the whale's head that can weigh more than five tonnes.
One whale holds the carcass. Another lets go at the last second and rams it at speed. Researchers say it is the first documented case of orcas using collision as a butchering technique.
Scientists sifting through two decades of stranding records discovered three never-before-seen strains of Helicobacter in the stomachs of pygmy sperm whales, tied to ulcers and gastric disease.
The bristle worm Perinereis cultrifera builds jaws from proteins and metal ions that behave like an alloy — yet break the rules of ordinary metals, Vienna researchers report.
Cameras captured the pink, blade-snouted 'living fossil' in its natural habitat off Jarvis Island and in the Tonga Trench — the deepest sighting ever of any white shark, extending its known range by 700 meters.
A Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition aboard the research vessel Falkor (too) catalogued dozens of previously undescribed midwater creatures and captured a first-ever 3D image of a living cell at sea.
A 13-year DNA study of more than 600 belugas in Alaska's Bristol Bay found both sexes reproduce with many different partners, a flexible mating system that preserves genetic diversity in a small, isolated population.
In a Dartmouth experiment, octopuses trained on a virtual crab turned 180 degrees to strike the real target behind them, showing they can treat a mirror as a tool — a skill long thought to belong only to vertebrates.
Scientists discover the extinct island reptiles were saltwater crocodiles that drifted thousands of kilometers across the Indian Ocean before being wiped out by settlers.
Researchers using AI-powered fluke-pattern recognition identified the same individuals at sites about 9,300 miles apart and traveling in opposite directions — a feat that beats the previous Colombia-to-Zanzibar record and rewrites textbook accounts of how rigid humpback breeding fidelity is supposed to be.
A Curtin University-led expedition aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor mapped 226 species in two remote submarine canyons off the Ningaloo coast — including six separate environmental DNA hits on the elusive Architeuthis dux.
After more than two years of investigation, researchers identify the strange object found 2 miles deep as remains from a giant sea anemone.
A CSIRO deep-sea expedition used towed camera technology at depths of up to 3,000 meters to catalogue four new elasmobranch species and capture the first footage of a sand tiger shark actively hunting in the wild.
Researchers identify entirely new superfamily of amphipods in Pacific's Clarion-Clipperton Zone, pushing boundaries of known deep-sea life.
A five-year, 160-day-at-sea expedition catalogued 788 species in the abyssal Pacific, while separate Southern Ocean and Argentine Basin surveys added dozens more potential new species.