What’s in a name? The curious case of a nameless grasshopper will tell you that there is more to a name than meets the eye. To declare a species as new to science, scientists name and describe the plant, animal or other organism in a journal. But researchers say photographs were not enough for the […]
Credit: Christian J. Schwarz
It isn t only myriads of currently unknown species that await discovery in the Amazon rainforests. As a new study by German scientists at the Ruhr-University (Bochum) and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (Munich), published in the open-access peer-reviewed scientific
Journal of Orthoptera Research, concludes, it seems that so do plenty of unusual behaviours. When I saw the maggot-like structures peeking out from the back of the praying mantis and then withdrew, I immediately thought of parasites that eat the animal from the inside, because that is not really uncommon in insects, says Frank Glaw, a reptile and amphibian expert from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, who discovered the unusual phenomenon.