You don’t need a jet plane to get jet lag – even feathers will do. At least one species of bird gets jet lag, in the sense that its body clock can diverge from local time by more than an hour on fast flights across the Atlantic, as revealed by navigational errors.

“We’ve slightly shied away from using the term jet lag itself, because people associate that with the health impacts of that clock shift, rather than the clock shift itself. But it’s exactly the same process that causes jet lag in people,” says at the University of Oxford. “It’s having these physiological and behavioural effects, where the birds are mistiming their behaviours.”

It is likely that other long-distance fliers, possibly including some insects and bats as well as birds, also get jet lag in the clock-shift sense, says Lewin.

Manx shearwaters are small seabirds that fly vast distances, using a technique called to exploit wind gradients near the sea surface. “They’ve evolved this niche of being really amazing long-distance travellers,” says Lewin.

They breed on islands around the UK and Ireland. While parents are raising a chick, they may fly more than 1000 kilometres westwards to reach rich fishing grounds in the mid-Atlantic. Once they have food, they fly back in a fairly straight line, diverting only to skirt around landmasses such as Ireland.

How do they achieve these navigational feats? While some birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, Manx shearwaters don’t appear to. Lewin’s team has confirmed this by attaching small magnets to the birds that should disrupt geomagnetic navigation. They .

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Daily

Sign up to newsletter

Instead, it appears that shearwaters rely on a sun compass – if you know what time it is, you can maintain a course by adjusting your orientation relative to the sun. Many animals, from insects and fish to turtles and birds, have been shown to do this. If their internal clocks are reset using artificial light and darkness, they head in the wrong direction.

“We realised that there might be a kind of natural experiment where the birds were manipulating their own clocks,” says Lewin.

For instance, at 6am, a Manx shearwater wanting to fly eastwards back to its nest needs to head sunwards. At noon, it needs to fly at right angles to the sun, which will be due south. But if a shearwater travels 15° of longitude eastwards, the local time will be 1pm, while its internal clock will still register the time as noon, so the sun will no longer be due south. This means birds flying rapidly east should veer slightly off course in a clockwise direction over the course of day, in the absence of other cues.

Other researchers have been attaching GPS trackers to Manx shearwaters for decades, so the paths taken on nearly 4000 foraging trips are known. Sure enough, when Lewin and his colleagues analysed these flight tracks, they found birds on rapid return flights tended to deviate clockwise when out of sight of land.

The team considered other potential explanations, from the Coriolis effect to winds. “The one thing that best predicted the observed changes in shearwaters’ orientation was always this sun compass effect,” says Lewin.

The effect is small. After a 1000 km flight, a bird would have to fly only an extra 5 km to reach its colony, which, for such efficient long-distance fliers, is probably negligible, Lewin says. This might explain why Manx shearwaters haven’t evolved some mechanism for avoiding jet lag, he says.

Flight Paths review: Why understanding migration may save bird species

Solving the mysteries of bird migration with technology not only unlocks unexpected secrets but is crucial to conservation efforts, says Rebecca Heisman in her fascinating first book

“What is good about the study is that they analyse a lot of tracks, making for robust data to test different models,” says at Macquarie University in Sydney.

While other species may get this form of jet lag, too, long-distance flights by birds are typically done during migrations, and migrations usually involve mainly north-south travel, says Cheng, so jet lag won’t be much of a problem.

However, near the poles, the travel distance required to cross 15° or more of longitude becomes so short that many animals might be affected, says Lewin, perhaps even including polar bears or Arctic foxes travelling on sea ice.

“Near-polar species may be quite strongly affected,” he says. “Now, it all gets a bit complicated because you have 24-hour daylight and 24-hour darkness in parts of the year, so circadian rhythms break down generally in some species.”

Wind turbines have killed nearly 19 million bats in the US over the past four decades, according to the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date. The problem seems to have worsened in recent years, with more than 1.5 million deaths now occurring annually.

But there may be ways to make this green energy source safer for wildlife without overly affecting energy production. This data can help “advance research to really support effective conservation measures and science-driven decision-making in the future”, says at Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado.

Bats play a vital role in ecosystems, particularly by controlling insects like mosquitoes and moths that produce crop-killing caterpillars. But many species face growing threats from habitat loss, disease and human activities, with some now classified as threatened or endangered.

These human-activity threats include use and the building of . Researchers have also previously found during required monitoring to comply with wildlife protection regulations. But not all wind farms share their results, and monitoring methods vary from site to site, says team member , also at Fort Collins Science Center.

“We know bats are being impacted, but could we change the engineering or sites of a turbine to minimise those impacts?” she asks. “There’s been an increasing interest in this, but we just haven’t had the appropriate data yet.”

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Earth Edition

Sign up to newsletter

Now, Straw, Labuzzetta and their colleagues have analysed 499 reports from wind farms across the 48 adjoining US states to estimate how many bats were killed by turbines from 1981 to 2024, focusing on 10 species. They used a statistical model that considered differences in how wind farms searched for dead bats, the size and design of their turbines, and the surrounding environment.

Their results suggest that wind turbines killed an estimated 18.7 million bats between 1981 and 2024. Annual deaths seem to have exceeded 1.5 million from 2021 onwards, which may be the result of more wind turbines being installed.

Hoary bats (Lasiurus cinereus) had the greatest losses, with an estimated 6.7 million deaths, followed by 5.8 million deaths among eastern red bats (Lasiurus borealis), 3.4 million among silver-haired bats (Lasionycteris noctivagans) and 1.5 million among big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus).

Wind farms near rivers and turbines with longer blades were linked to more deaths among certain species, while having more space between the blades and the ground may reduce the risk.

Don’t forget birds and bats when renovating or building new homes

As newer homes are built or older homes are renovated, empty attic spaces are disappearing – this eliminates a vital refuge for birds and bats during a biodiversity crisis

The researchers aren’t sure why bats fly so close to wind turbines. suggests that migratory bats mistake the structures for trees and approach them in search of food, shelter or mates. A recent European study also found that , potentially attracting females into the path of spinning blades. Differences in species prevalence and behaviours may partly explain why some seem to be more at risk than others.

The researchers hope their findings will help wind farm developers protect bats by choosing safer locations and adjusting turbine designs. For example, research suggests that stripy wind turbines could prevent seabird collisions.

Changing when turbines operate might also help. shows that temporarily shutting them down during periods of high bat activity, particularly in low winds, can substantially reduce fatalities with limited loss of electricity production.

These beautiful photos capture how a remote island community safely shepherds its rare seabirds to the ocean.

The Azores hosts three-quarters of the global population of Cory’s shearwaters, which nest in burrows and clifftops around the Atlantic archipelago. Chicks stay in their nests all spring and summer until they have grown big enough to attempt their first flight, seen in the image above.

Once ready, the young birds take flight by night to avoid predators, using the moon and stars to navigate to the ocean. But it isn’t just predators these birds should be wary of, photographer Andrea Zanenga discovered when he visited Corvo. The tiny Portuguese island has just 430 human inhabitants, but is home to the world’s largest colony of Cory’s shearwaters.

During their fledging window in late October and early November, the young shearwaters are easily confused by artificial lights. The seabirds can’t take off from ground level, so if they crash, they remain stuck on the ground, vulnerable to attack or starvation.

“These are young birds, 3 months old, and most of them are doing their first flight,” says Tânia Pipa, a marine biologist at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds.

“They get lost. If you have a point with light pollution, they see it as guidance and go to that place, and get disorientated.” On the worst nights, Corvo residents might find dozens of stranded birds on the streets of the island’s only settlement, Vila do Corvo.

An Azores-wide campaign known as SOS Cagarro was launched in 1995 to rescue fallen shearwaters. Volunteers join night walks to spot stranded birds and place them in artificial nests (above).

The birds are released the following day from nearby clifftops.

But the residents of Corvo have gone one better. For five nights during the peak fledging season, all public lighting in Vila do Corvo is switched off from 9pm until midnight to help the birds navigate safely out to the ocean.

Corvo is the only island in the Azores to operate such a self-imposed blackout, leaving it free of light pollution. “When you see this sky with a lot of stars, you feel a little bit smaller,” says Zanenga.

An association between certain sounds and spiky or round shapes, which is common to humans from cultures all over the world, appears to be shared by dogs.

Since 2001, many studies have reported that people are much more likely to give the made-up name “bouba” to a curved shape and “kiki” to a spiky shape. The effect has recently been shown in chicks and possibly , too.

at the University of Parma, Italy, and her colleagues decided to test whether pet dogs have the same tendency.

In the first experiment, 51 owners sat with their adult dogs, holding them during the experiment. They were shown a rounded shape on a panel on one side of the room and a spiky shape on the other. When they heard the word “bouba” 56 per cent of the dogs lingered on the round shape. When they heard “kiki”, 63 per cent concentrated their gaze on the spiky shape.

To make sure the dogs weren’t influenced by their owners, the team repeated the experiment with the owners wearing headphones playing music so they couldn’t hear the words. The outcome was the same, with a slightly stronger bias towards round shapes for the word “bouba”.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Earth Edition

Sign up to newsletter

“If animals without human-like language also spontaneously associate sounds with shapes, this suggests that at least some of the mechanisms underlying sound symbolism may not be specific to language,” says Biffi. “Instead, they may reflect more general principles of how the brain integrates information from different senses.”

However, it is unclear to what extent the effect depends on dogs having experience of listening to human speech, or the fact that dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years. To investigate this, Biffi says the team is now collecting data on puppies and wild canids, including foxes, and also wants to see if the effect exists in cats.

“If cats also show the bouba–kiki effect, this would provide further evidence that sound symbolism may reflect general perceptual mechanisms, rather than adaptations specifically related to dogs’ long history of cooperation and communication with humans,” says Biffi.

at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary says the study suggests the matching of speech sounds to shapes relies on general mechanisms rather than complex linguistic representations. “An exciting next question is to what extent [these links] in dogs arise through statistical learning or more hardwired expectations,” he says.

The world’s oldest known land animal – Jonathan the giant tortoise – has had his genome probed for the first time. This has revealed that parts of his genome to do with mitochondrial function are as efficient as those of a 5-year-old member of his species. Efficient mitochondria may give his DNA repair systems more energy to fight off the effects of ageing, enabling him to live to an estimated age of 194.

What’s more, some of his genetic changes seem similar to those of supercentenarians. “This study adds to the body of evidence that the mechanisms of ageing may be conserved across species,” says at the Kallel Foundation, a non-profit organisation focused on interventions to extend human healthspan, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jonathan, an Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea), and Napoleon Bonaparte are the two most famous residents of St Helena island in the South Atlantic. Napoleon arrived at the remote British territory after he was exiled in 1815, while Jonathan is thought to have been shipped there, possibly from Aldabra Atoll, in 1882. Jonathan arrived as a fully grown adult that was thought to already have half a century under his belt, putting him at around 194 years old today.

The researchers calculated that Aldabra tortoises have an average lifespan of around 80 years, but they can live much longer. To understand the mechanisms behind Jonathan’s extraordinary longevity, Clark and his colleagues have studied his genome.

“I firmly believe we can learn about the global mechanisms of ageing by looking at the exceptions,” says at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, who led a study into a 117-year-old woman, once officially the world’s oldest person.

Free newsletter

Sign up to 91ɫ��Ƭ Check

Sign up to newsletter

Esteller and his team found that the woman had exceptionally efficient mitochondrial function, which led Clark and his colleagues to suspect Jonathan similarly had “very efficient and very young” mitochondria, says Clark.

They had to study his genome via saliva samples and cheek swabs. This was because St Helena authorities refused their requests to draw Jonathan’s blood, given his fame and the risk of infection.

This was a major limitation, because it meant the researchers were unable to isolate large pieces of DNA, which are more stable in blood. Instead, they had to assemble fragments from Jonathan’s saliva, where DNA is more prone to bacterial contamination, and fill in the gaps using DNA from another Aldabra tortoise.

Once they had made the best possible composite of his genome, they compared it to the DNA of four other Aldabra tortoises. “We found 287 genes that had changes in them that were unique to him,” says Clark.

Is stem cell therapy about to transform medicine and reverse ageing?

A clinical trial to reverse age-related vision conditions using stem cell treatment could finally deliver on the promise of a major discovery in ageing and regeneration made 20 years ago, says columnist Graham Lawton

Of these genes, 41 are though to be functionally significant, meaning they actively contribute to an organism’s biology, survival and regulation. A dozen of them were also found in ageing databases of the genes of other long-lived animal species.

Parts of Jonathan’s genome to do with mitochondrial function were as young as a 5-year-old Aldabra, says Clark. “This, in turn, has helped him manage the effects of ageing by giving the DNA repair systems more energy from the mitochondria to fight off the effects of ageing.”

at the University of Osaka, Japan, says the work is “fascinating”, but notes that Jonathan’s genome was compared against that of only a few other tortoises, which may have unique genetic changes themselves.

Elephants appear to harmonise their vocal rumbles when they join together to form choruses, tuning their voices to sound more alike as the chorus unfolds.

The findings come from a machine learning study, which also reveals that this convergence is particularly likely to occur during specific kinds of choruses – such as when elephants reconnect with one another or organise group activities – and that the calls themselves may contain information about what the animals are doing. 

The findings could offer new insights into how elephants communicate and navigate life within their complex societies, says  at Earth Species Project, a US non-profit organisation that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to attempt to decode non-human animal communication.

“It’s sort of like what humans do in conversation, where you almost start to adopt the speaking patterns or accents of whoever you’re interacting with,” says Keen. 

Elephants communicate using a , but also a wide range of sounds. These include their iconic trumpet call, and also throatier roars. The most common call is the rumble – so low-pitched it is often undetectable by humans – which can travel up to 10 kilometres, transmitting long-distance information that can potentially include the identity of the caller and what’s happening at the time.

 at Elephant Voices, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, that promotes the study and protection of elephants, says scientists have long been intrigued by the way elephants will rumble together in choruses. Studying those complex sounds, however, has proved extremely difficult because it is hard to pick out any given rumbling elephant in the chorus – what researchers call “the cocktail party problem”.

With significant developments in machine learning, however, Poole, Keen and their colleagues have found that computers are up to the task. They used a collection of 902 recordings of rumbles collected across four decades, emitted by wild female African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) from dozens of family groups in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. The calls were grouped according to six distinct social situations: staying in contact while separated; preparing to move; coordinating what to do next; comforting or reassuring calves; greeting close family members; and participating in large family reunions. 

Machine analyses revealed that elephant choruses carry multiple layers of information at once, and vary in a way that suggests they encode information about what a family is doing together and what happens next, says Keen. Tracking rumbles of individual elephants in the same chorus, the data showed that in some cases, the calls became more acoustically alike as the chorus progressed. Specifically, this convergence occurred when elephants were staying in contact while separated, coordinating what to do next, and greeting after a separation. This suggests that vocal convergence may play a role in helping elephant families build a plan of action, says Keen.

Earlier research that Poole and her colleagues published in 2005 showed that elephants can  when they are calling more generally: the new work shows that this imitation involves the rumbles, too. 

Camera trap spots endangered elephant mother and calf on the move

A weatherproof box and motion-trigger camera help photographer Will Burrard-Lucas capture images of rarely seen African elephants

Combined with other communication tools, including body language, the rumbling calls seem to help facilitate complex social interactions. “They appear able to negotiate, agree and disagree – and make a plan of action,” says Poole.

The findings not only shed light on elephant communication and cognition, but they could also eventually aid conservation by helping researchers track their behaviour and movements remotely, the team says.

Because rumbles allow for long-distance communication, elephants’ ability to unite through their voices is an exciting reflection of their advanced cognition and evolution in their environment, says Andrew McLean, a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s . “Evolving and elaborating this for social cohesion, group survival and foraging efficiency is very adaptive,” he says. “This is a fascinating finding – although it’s not really surprising, given how intensely social elephants are.”