animals

The tropical waters of Sri Lanka, an island off the coast of India, are home to a population of blue whales unlike any other. These whales stay put, while every other known population migrates. That discovery was made by budding scientist Asha de Vos more than 20 years ago—it made a splash, and so did she. She later became the first Sri Lankan to earn a PhD studying marine mammals, charting a new scientific path in her country.

Host Flora Lichtman talks with de Vos about her path into science, what it means to be the first Sri Lankan in her field, and how she built a marine biology program from the ground up.

Guest: Dr. Asha de Vos is a marine biologist and the founder and executive director of the non-profit Oceanswell. She’s based in Sri Lanka.

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The overall state of birds can seem rather grim. Almost a third of North American bird species are in decline, and in the last five decades, more than 100 species have lost over half of their populations. This is primarily due to lack of food—fewer insects to eat—and habitat loss, like the development of grasslands. 

But there’s a bright spot: Some birds that were once rare are now abundant, like the merlin, sandhill crane, and pileated woodpecker. 

Host Ira Flatow talks with biologist Tom Langen, who explains these birds’ remarkable comebacks, and discusses his conservation work to bring threatened fish species back from the brink. 

Guest: Dr. Tom Langen is a professor of biology at Clarkson University.

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Codependency between humans gets a bad rap. But in nature, species often rely on each other for survival. While humans think they’re in control of relationships between other species, like dogs and even the yeast for our breads, the opposite is often true.

Host Flora Lichtman speaks with ecologist Rob Dunn, whose new book, The Call of the Honeyguide, argues that mutualisms are the story of life itself.

Read an excerpt of The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life.

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Put on your party hat and wet suit because it is Cephalopod Week, Science Friday’s annual celebration of all things, octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. To kick things off, we’re bringing you an ode to the octopus arm. You may have heard that octopuses can use their arms to “taste” their surroundings, which they use for finding food. Now, researchers have unlocked a key mechanism in the octopus sensory system. Octopuses use their suckers to detect harmful microbes on the surface of crab shells or even their own eggs.  

Host Flora Lichtman talks with molecular biologist Nicholas Bellono about the latest in octopus sensory science. 

Guest: Dr. Nicholas Bellono is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University.

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The animal shelters in New York are full. There are feral cat colonies around the city. So what do we do? Will Zweigart, executive director of Flatbush Cats, a nonprofit cat rescue group, explains how we got to this point and makes some suggestions for what New York can do about all the cats.

If you were a miner in California during the Gold Rush, you might have dined on a California red-legged frog.

The largest native frog in the western United States, this Golden State denizen used to be found as far inland as the Sierra Nevada mountains and south, into Baja California. But overharvesting, predation by invasive bullfrogs and habitat loss took their toll on the frogs: Today, they're listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Over the past five years, a team of conservationists carefully translocated a population of these red-legged frogs, moving them from northwestern Mexico to two sites in California. Once they got there, though, they were stuck with another problem: how to monitor that population's growth.

Luckily, the California red-legged frog has a distinctive mating call that scientists can look out for. It's low-pitched and creaky, like the noise you get when you rub your finger on a balloon. But listening for them every night — and picking those calls out of the turkey calls and coyote howls and car horns of a night in Southern California — is a huge task, even for the most enthusiastic amphibian expert.

That's where AI comes in. Scientists can use special machine learning models to sort through thousands of hours of recordings, identifying the places where California red-legged frogs were heard and surveying their success. It's saving the conservation team time and money, so that they can focus on translocating more frogs in the future.

Want to hear more stories about critters or conservation? Let us know at [email protected].

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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Nathan Rott and Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Copyright 2025 NPR

While there are a lot of dinosaur fossils, and a lot of plant fossils, the precise connection between the two has been something of a mystery. Now, researchers report that they’ve found what’s called a cololite, fossilized gut contents, in the remains of a sauropod—a massive, long-necked plant-eater. The dino’s last meal dates back 95 to 100 million years. Paleontologist Stephen Poropat joins Host Flora Lichtman to dig into the mysteries of a dinosaur’s tummy.

And, for prairie dogs, communication is key. The rodents’ yips and barks can warn when danger is near—and not just to other prairie dogs. A new study suggests that birds called long-billed curlews are eavesdropping on this chatter to learn when a predator is lurking nearby. Using speakers and a taxidermied badger on wheels, ornithologists are untangling the social dynamics of black-tailed prairie dogs. Host Flora Lichtman talks with study author Andrew Dreelin about this eavesdropping behavior and what it means for conservation.

Guests:Dr. Stephen Poropat is a paleontologist and deputy director of the Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.Andrew Dreelin is a research fellow with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and a PhD candidate at Northern Illinois University.

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Listeners try their hand at a quiz about the critters that live in the city.

The lesser prairie chicken was granted endangered species status in 2023. Now the Department of the Interior is moving to revoke those protections. What can this bird known for its flamboyant courtship rituals tell us about the Trump administration’s approach to environmental policy and protections for endangered species? 

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by Producer Shoshannah Buxbaum and Vox environmental reporter Benji Jones to talk about his reporting on the lesser prairie chicken and other science stories of the week including, Trump supporters in the wind energy sector, at-home cervical cancer screening, a new fossil from an ancient bird ancestor, the latest brood of cicadas emerging, and how flamingos eat with their heads upside down underwater. 

Guests:Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at VoxShoshannah Buxbaum, producer at Science Friday

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Millions of years ago, iguanas somehow got from North America to Fiji. Scientists think they made the trip on a raft of fallen vegetation. Also, the marine reptile’s fossilized fetus is cluing paleontologists into the lives of ancient sea creatures.

If you picture iguanas, you might imagine them sunbathing on hot sand in the Caribbean or skittering around the Mojave Desert. But far, far away from where these iguanas are found is another group of iguanas living on the islands of Fiji and Tonga in the South Pacific—closer to New Zealand than the Americas. And it raises the question: How in the world did these iguanas end up all alone, on the other side of the ocean? In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March, scientists suggest that millions of years ago, iguanas hitched a ride on a raft and accidentally sailed all the way across the ocean before washing ashore and starting a new life. Host Flora Lichtman discusses the iguanas’ intrepid adventure with lead author Dr. Simon Scarpetta, evolutionary biologist and assistant professor at the University of San Francisco in California.

In the Patagonia region of Chile, Torres del Paine National Park is a graveyard of ichthyosaurs—ancient, dolphin-like reptiles that roamed the oceans when dinosaurs dominated the land. Nearly 90 of these giant reptiles’ fossils have been found amongst the glaciers. But the standout in the bone heap is Fiona, an ichthyosaur that lived 131 million years ago. She’s in pristine condition, the only fully preserved ichthyosaur in Chile. And, she died pregnant. She’s teaching paleontologists about the evolution of her species. And some of those findings were recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Host Flora Lichtman talks with lead author Dr. Judith Pardo-Pérez, paleontologist at the University of Magallanes in Chile.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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