When dogs hear their owners speak, they are listening for consonants in words rather than vowels, a new study suggests, apparently mimicking a similar human bias that is found across many languages.

Although dogs don’t have language, they live in a speech-rich environment, says at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.

“We knew from our previous studies that dogs care about what we speak and how we speak, but until now there was no evidence that dogs’ experience with speech can actually shape how their brains function,” says Andics.

To investigate how a life with humans and listening to constant talk has impacted dogs’ brains, Andics and his colleagues recruited 20 adult human Hungarian speakers and 20 companion dogs with Hungarian owners.

Andics says while many Eastern European languages are consonant heavy, Hungarian isn’t.

“There are some studies suggesting that consonant bias during speech segmentation is weaker, or not there, in people who mostly listen to Mandarin or Danish, in which languages consonants are not, or not that much, more informative about word boundaries than vowels,” he says.

During the experiment, the human and dog participants separately listened to continuous, unsegmented speech streams of nonsense words while connected to EEG monitors, measuring the electrical activity of the participants’ brains.

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Consonants and vowels alternated throughout these streams, with no pauses or other acoustic cues separating them, says Andics.

There were three types of nonsense streams. In the first, recurring consonant patterns formed consecutive three-syllable words – such as “mozite”. In the second, stronger vowel patterns formed the skeleton of the words – such as “zobefu”. And in the third, there were no recurring patterns at all, with syllables in a random order – such as “fumoza”.

He says the team made use of a phenomenon called “neural synchronisation”, in which brain activity can take on the rhythm that we detect in the sounds we hear.

“The more reliably we detect that rhythm, the more rhythmic the brain response becomes,” says Andics. “We expected that if a species’ brain has a preference for consonants, it should follow the rhythm of the words more easily when consonants form the structure of those words.”

The difference was substantial, the scientists found. In dogs, the neural response to consonant-based regularities was 42 per cent stronger than the response to vowel-based regularities, and 55 per cent stronger than the response to the random stream.

“So, this is how much more dog brains tracked word rhythm when consonants defined the words,” says Andics.

In humans, the response to consonant-patterned words was nearly 25 per cent higher than to vowel-based regularities and 77 per cent higher than to the random condition.
The team thinks that dogs who weren’t exposed to human speech wouldn’t have this bias, although they haven’t yet tested this idea.

“We argue that the only reason companion dogs have a consonant bias is that human speech, and specifically the characteristics of words, reshaped their brains,” says Andics.

Mother’s voice seems to boost language development in premature babies

Babies born too soon seem to have stronger connections in one of the major brain areas that supports language processing if they regularly heard their mother read them a story while in intensive care

at the University of Sydney, Australia, says the team convincingly shows that these dogs display more sensitivity to statistical patterns in consonants, rather than in vowels.

But with some important caveats – especially that these are Hungarian dogs, living with Hungarian speakers.

“There’s 7000 different languages in the world and some of them rely a lot more on things like tonal distinctions,” says Enfield. But if you do want your dog to pay attention to you, there may be a practical take home, he says.

“The lesson here may be to give your dog a name with more consonants in it than one with more vowels.”

Young orangutans who spend little time working out for themselves how to build a broad diet can partly compensate by watching how other orangutans choose what to eat.

The findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad survival skills, says at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Young orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to find them and how to process them in a rainforest offering hundreds of food options of varying levels of accessibility – from easy-to-access leaves to the more inaccessible but also more nutritious seeds at the heart of a tough, spiny neesia fruit.

Ů��С��Ƶs already know that orangutans can acquire this knowledge both by observing their mothers and other individuals in their social circle – a process known as social learning – and by exploring entirely on their own without any input from others, which is known as individual learning. But how these two forms of learning work together – and how they affect what orangutans learn to eat before becoming independent – hasn’t been clear.

To find out, Thillaikumar and her colleagues analysed nearly 7000 instances of learning recorded during more than 1700 hours of observations of wild Sumatran orangutans at Suaq Balimbing, a research station in Indonesia. The observations, collected over 12 years, tracked 21 youngsters as they closely watched other orangutans who were interacting with foods and other objects.

The young apes varied considerably in how much they relied on different kinds of learning, with some using more social learning, and others exploring independently much more often. This might, in part, reflect personality differences, and might also be influenced by early development – including differences in how mothers care for their young, says Thillaikumar.

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Youngsters who learned by watching others also tended to continue manipulating new objects or trying new foods for about 145 minutes after they had closely observed another orangutan. This activity is reminiscent of the way in which children will spend time imitating an activity they have just seen demonstrated by an adult, says Thillaikumar. “Yeah, it’s practice.”

Next, the researchers drew on about 4700 hours of feeding observations for 13 of the youngsters to estimate the range of foods they had learned to eat by the time they reached independence. Unsurprisingly, the team found that the individuals who had engaged in plenty of social learning and plenty of individual learning had acquired the broadest diets.

But they also found that young orangutans who engaged in very little truly individual learning could partially compensate and develop a reasonably broad diet if they were good social learners.

Orangutan is first non-human seen treating wounds with medicinal plant

A male Sumatran orangutan chewed the leaves of a plant used in Indonesian traditional medicine and placed them on a wound on his face

at Duke University in North Carolina says she’s impressed by the sheer scale of the work, following young orangutans through the rainforest across their entire, lengthy period of dependency on adults. She was particularly intrigued by how often social observation was followed by young orangutans practising the techniques they had observed. “In simpler terms, they show clearly what we see in human children and other apes – that they watch others perform a behaviour and then go try it out on their own.”

The variability in learning styles – even at an individual level – is especially interesting, says , also at Duke University. It suggests that no single form of learning can tell the whole story. “Predicting dietary breadth at maturity requires looking at all types of learning.”

This dramatic shot of a northern gannet diving for prey bested 24,000 other images to win the overall prize in the .

The photo was taken off Shetland, UK, as the bird hunted for fish to feed its offspring. When gannets spot fish, they turn to fly into the wind, stretch out their wings as brakes, precisely adjust their position and then dive-bomb into the water with wings tucked at speeds of up to 86 kilometres per hour.

They have evolved to handle this dramatic moment, with muscles that lock their vertebrae into position, air sacs in the face and chest to protect from impact, and nostrils that prevent jets of water entering.

“The handsome northern gannets lead a dualistic existence,” said Spiers in an announcement about the win. “In the nest, their newborn is carefully nurtured, and a couple’s bond is reinforced by pointing sharp beaks to the sky as they tenderly stroke their white necks together. In flight, hunting mode takes over, and piercing yellow eyes, fringed with blue circles, scour the sea for prey.”

Spiers had been diving in the chilly, 10°C (50°F) waters of Shetland when he realised the sun was visible from his position under the sea. “Even in summer, sunshine is far from guaranteed in this remote British archipelago, so my creative engine started firing when the sunball was visible from underwater. I envisioned the shot of the gannet diving straight through the middle of it, and dedicated my entire dive to capturing that single frame,” he says. “The gannets were diving all around me, but I refused to be distracted and kept my camera pointed at the sun. After a long wait, a gannet finally dived through in the perfect spot and I met the bird as it careened under the sea. The moment was over in a split second.”

A bronze award in the prize’s portrait category was given to David Stowe, who captured this western parotia (Parotia sefilata), below, dancing in the dark rainforest of West Papua, Indonesia, in a dazzling attempt to attract a female.

Donald Chin photographed this protective tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides), shown below, near Perth in Australia. As rain falls in the forest, this fledgling seems to raise a wing to cover its siblings. Chin won a gold award in the “bird behaviour” category of the prize.

The below image by Alex Pansier features hundreds, if not thousands, of guillemots (Uria aalge) in flight over Hornøya, Norway. The repeating shapes have an Escher-like quality. Pansier took a silver award in the “birds in flight” category of the prize.

Luca Eberle from Italy photographed the – unfortunately killed, stuffed and discarded – Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) shown below in Malta. Authorities inspect taxidermy samples to catch illegal hunting of protected species like this one, causing some collectors to dispose of older specimens. Here, a BirdLife Malta officer is shown finding the stuffed vulture, which had been left by the roadside. Eberle won a bronze award in the “conservation, single image” category for this shot.

Another underwater shot, from Romain Barats, features gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) feeding in Charcot Bay, Antarctica, below. Barats was snorkelling when a raft of gentoo penguins appeared to fish and feed on krill. “These iconic birds are incredibly curious so they went straight to me to evaluate if I could be a threat or not. They spent a while swimming so fast around me,” he said in an announcement about the competition, in which he won a bronze award in the “birds in the environment” category.

A new cat species has been scientifically described – the diminutive, spotted tilcayo from Bolivia.

Several species of small cat in the Leopardus genus live in South America, including the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy’s cat and the tiger cat or oncilla. The similar appearance of these nocturnal and hard-to-spot cats has made separating them into distinct species difficult.

This is particularly true of tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat, and are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus.

Genetic studies have since divided the species into four, resurrecting three of the species names that scientists once used before they were all lumped together under the name L. tigrinus. This process saw the official recognition of the in 2013, in 2017 and the in 2024.

Now, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range.

The genomics revealed a fifth distinct species living in the Bolivian Yungas forests on the east slopes of the Andes mountains. The researchers describe it under a completely new name: Leopardus tilcayo, naming it after the local term used for this cat.

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“We’ve discovered a new species of cat that had not been scientifically named before,” says Eizirik, adding that this is the first time this has happened for a century.

“There are more cat species. Who can’t love that?” says at the University of Missouri. “They’re hard to find and see, so it’s not surprising that some of the early taxonomy needs to be modified now we have more data.”

L. tilcayo has a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.

Origin story of domestic cats rewritten by genetic analysis

Domestic cats originated in North Africa and spread to Europe in the past 2000 years, according to DNA evidence, while in China a different species of cat lived alongside people much earlier

Telling the new species apart visually is not easy. “The five tiger cat species are all cryptic species. They’re morphologically very similar,” says team member at University of Antwerp in Belgium.

The researchers also found that in the Peruvian Yungas forests, on the west side of the Andes, there is a distinct group of cats in the L. tigrinus lineage that they describe as a novel subspecies, L. tigrinus antisuyo.

There are so many barriers in South America that can geographically isolate animal populations from each other, including mountains and rivers, that more cat species may be waiting to be found, says Lyons. “It’d be rather cool if we could find another species out there.”

L. tigrinus is by the IUCN Red List, but the new species and subspecies will have to be evaluated and protected as distinct units, says Eizirik, especially as the forests they live in are shrinking as agriculture expands.

A humpback whale has been observed for the first time shortly after birthing a stillborn calf, showing apparent signs of grief similar to those seen in other large mammals such as elephants.

The encounter began at around 8am on 17 July 2025, when Andrew Mulville at the Sea World Foundation, an Australian charity, was aboard a boat a kilometre offshore from the Gold Coast in Queensland.

He noticed two adult whales milling in the same location, occasionally diving, vocalising and rolling on the surface. By 8.30am, Mulville saw and recorded an amniotic membrane floating on the surface, indicating a birth had occurred but, concerningly, no blood or placenta was visible.

He then placed a camera underwater and saw a stillborn calf, less than 4 metres long, that had sunk to the sandy seabed. The mother repeatedly approached the calf, looked at it eye to eye, and touched it with her head and pectoral fin.

While such behaviour has been recorded in toothed whales with dead calves, it is extremely rare in baleen whales such as humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae).

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With a live newborn, humpback mothers typically try to push the calf to the surface to help it breathe, but in this case she didn’t, perhaps suggesting she knew it wasn’t alive.

Meanwhile, the second adult stayed nearby, apparently supporting both the mother and dead calf.

Although stillbirth in mammals is common, it is extremely rare to observe the event in whales, says at Griffith University in Australia, who co-wrote a paper with Mulville on the observation. To his knowledge, it has never before been witnessed in humpback whales.

“It’s really important to not humanise an encounter like this,” says Meynecke. “But then also to understand that it’s a mammal, and we have evidence of, not necessarily grief, but the really dramatic change of behaviour that we see in other mammals such as elephants when they lose a member of their group or when they lose their calves.”

Mulville observed the whales for the next 2 hours, as they stayed in the immediate vicinity of the dead calf and continuously dived down to it. On the next two days, members of the public on shore reported seeing the two adult whales in the same location.

The incident has raised concerns about why the calf was stillborn, especially because seven deceased humpback whale neonates and one deceased young whale of unconfirmed age were also observed in July 2025 in the same region. None of these appeared to be the stillborn whale observed by the scientists.

Also, while it has become increasingly common for humpbacks to calve in southern Queensland as their population has grown, no one is sure why so many female whales are now giving birth hundreds of kilometres south of their traditional breeding grounds in the Great Barrier Reef.

It was also extremely unusual that the mother didn’t deliver her placenta, and this may have also placed her at risk, says Meynecke.

Photos of her distinctive fluke have been uploaded to a database of 16,000 individuals, so the researchers hope she will be recognised if she re-appears in coming seasons.

at the University of Queensland says descriptive case study reports such as this one “run the risk of anthropomorphising observed behaviours”.

“However, the study does present a balanced argument of how the observed behaviour could be interpreted and notes that the terms ‘grief’, ‘emotion’ and ‘distress’ must be used with caution since we cannot definitively assign these terms to the observed behaviour,” says Dunlop.

She says only with “more data and more occurrences” would it be possible to test the hypothesis that what was observed was emotional or grieving behaviour.  

Wild adult chimpanzees have been seen passing tools to youngsters to help them learn and then coaching them, supporting the idea that teaching helps immature chimps acquire technological skills.

“To actually catch it on film is important and was very surprising for us,” says at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Chimpanzees are known to make and use a variety of tools, from leaf or moss sponges that soak up water to sticks used to fish for or , and even crafting simple spears for hunting. But how chimpanzees learn such skills is debated.

It is clear that the knowledge does get passed on. For example, one study showed an increase in the number of chimps in Uganda using moss as a sponge to soak up water from a pond. Work with captive chimps has also shown that the animals can pass on knowledge to others. The big question is whether individuals copy behaviour after observation, actively teach each other or independently come up with the same solutions to a task.

To see if they could answer that, Hernandez-Aguilar and her colleagues analysed 15 hours of footage from camera traps at the ’s biological station in Dindefelo, Senegal, taken between 2017 and 2025. The cameras were placed near 14 sites in the area where wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) had previously been recorded using tools, including fishing for algae, army ants and termites.

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In total, the camera traps recorded 33 instances of tool transfer from one chimp to another: 19 when they were dipping for ants to eat, 10 during fishing for algae and four when fishing for termites. Generally, a chimp handed the key object to a close relative, and in 30 per cent of cases, this was from a mother to her offspring.

In one video, a mother, Soukki, inserted a dipping stick into an ant nest, then grabbed her baby daughter, Saïsaï, and led her to the tool. Saïsaï pulled the stick out and ate the ants clinging to it.

“We found support for the idea that tool transfers are a form of teaching that experienced chimpanzees may use to facilitate the learning of young individuals,” says team member , also at the University of Barcelona.

The team also gathered 30 minutes of footage from cameras at 11 sites where chimpanzees to crack them open. This is considered proto-tool use rather than tool use, because the stones are being used as an anvil rather than being directly held and manipulated.

In an example of this, a mother called Féré collected three baobab fruits and placed them near her infant son Fotti. A juvenile male – probably an older sibling – picked up a fruit and pounded it against some rocks while Fotti watched, then guided Fotti’s hand to a fruit. Fotti had a go himself, eventually managing to open up a fruit.  

The videos support the idea that other social mechanisms such as observation and supervised practice help youngsters learn to use tools, says Sánchez-Megías.

“Teaching events are quite rare and difficult to study because only so many learning attempts are needed until an individual learns a behaviour,” says at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “Showing across many forms of tool use that these tool transfers are indicative of a very simple form of teaching is very cool and nice.”

During the observed interactions, the researchers noted that the teacher was forgoing food for the learning youngster’s benefit.

“This is an important observation because it fits the criteria for teaching used in animal behaviour research – that the behaviour benefits the pupil’s opportunities to learn, and is done despite having a cost to the teacher,” says at the University of St Andrews, UK.

We cannot live without soil. It provides us with building materials, most of our antibiotics and 95 per cent of our food.

In, photographer and soil ecologist Frank Ashwood urges us to better appreciate and protect the soil we rely on. He does so with stunning images of the creatures that call soil home.

The adorable velvet worm in the main image was found under a log in a misty beech forest on the South Island of New Zealand. “They look like little worms rolled in sequins,” says Ashwood. But looks can be deceiving: “They crawl around and shoot glue out of special organs on their heads to immobilise their pray, which they’ll then go and eat while alive.”

A droplet of sperm deposited by a male springtail, a tiny insect-like creature, sits atop a delicate stem made of protein-rich secretions in the image below. “It’s like a lollipop, basically, with a bit of sperm-rich fluid on the top, which the males leave for the females to come and find,” says Ashwood.

But beware any marauding rivals. “If a male finds another springtail’s spermatophore, they will actually eat it to destroy it,” he says.

Below, a beautiful woodlouse spider stares straight down the lens of Ashwood’s camera. Its large fangs have evolved to better hunt woodlice. “They’ll come at a woodlouse from the top or the side, grasp it, then reach underneath with those sharp bits of the fangs and pierce into the soft underbelly,” he says.

A bright yellow slime mould stretches across a decaying log in the shot below. “It’s a big, sprawling mass of a single cell, essentially; they branch out looking for food,” says Ashwood. The mould’s efficient networks have been used to map road networks, the fastest way out of an IKEA showroom and dark matter throughout the universe, he says.

This gorgeous giant springtail, below, was found in a forest in New Zealand. Its orange spines help it camouflage against logs. “Because they’re rare, when you do see one, it’s a moment of pure exhilaration,” says Ashwood. “They’re an indicator of the forest being in really good condition.”

Ashwood, who is based at Lincoln University in New Zealand, snapped the silvery springtail below while in the UK. During the Victorian period in the 1800s, their iridescent scales were used to test microscopes. “They’ve got really ornate, tiny sculpturing on them, so the better detail you could see, the better your microscope,” he says.

Ashwood hopes his book will encourage people to protect soil, for instance by reducing deforestation and farming more sustainably. “Over half of the world’s biodiversity is in soil, and we’re losing it at a rate that is not sustainable,” he says.

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Young pygmy raccoons on a Mexican island have been seen teaching each other to make toy balls out of rubbish, in a rare example of animals crafting objects purely to play with.

“My first reaction was, oh my gosh, that’s absolutely adorable!” says at Miami University in Ohio, who is researching the impact of tourism on the critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) of Cozumel Island.

O’Neil filmed as one of the younger raccoons fished paper out of a rubbish bin, dipped it in a bowl of water and rolled it in sand, making a ball.

Over days of observation, she recorded the animals as they made more balls and used them to play “football” with other raccoons and dwarf coatis (Nasua narica nelsoni), another raccoon-like animal. Siblings taught each other the ball-making procedure, and even tried to get their mother involved, though she couldn’t quite figure it out – her coordination seemed to have been impaired after drinking a margarita she found at a beach bar earlier that day.

O’Neil’s colleague at Miami University, was impressed by the footage. While others have watched animals like chimps or tigers at play, researchers have seldom seen animals custom-making toys for later use. “It shouldn’t be surprising that raccoons are where we’re seeing this, just because they’re so tactile, they see with their hands,” says Szydlowski.

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“The observations show how complex animal play behaviour can be,” says at the Institute of Animal Science in the Czech Republic. “It will be intriguing to see whether the behaviour will get a hold in the population as a new cultural trait or will disappear.”

The observations may also help with conservation efforts. There are fewer than 200 pygmy raccoons on Cozumel, the only place the species is found. Understanding how they learn from each other might help conservationists discourage unhealthy behaviours like stealing margaritas and begging for snacks, and reacquaint them with foraging in the wild. And O’Neil hopes increased awareness of the animals will bring more support. “I really just want people to know that they are out there, and they need people to care,” she says. “And please don’t feed them!”