Page Type: Elementary

It’s not easy to be a baby bird in a rainforest. Monkeys, snakes, and insects all prey on helpless chicks. But scientists believe that one type of hummingbird chick has an amazing way to scare off hungry predators. It pretends to be a caterpillar!

Scientists made this discovery while observing the nest of a hummingbird species called the white-necked jacobin, which lives in the tropical rainforests of Panama. When one of the eggs hatched, the scientists were surprised that the chick was covered in long brown feathers. Most types of hummingbirds are born without their feathers, which grow in as they get older.

The surprises didn’t end there. As scientists watched the tiny chick, they noticed that it was twitching and shaking its head. They had never seen birds move like this. The chick’s appearance and movements reminded the scientists of a caterpillar.

“I started texting a video [of the chick] to people and asking them, ‘What does this look like?’” Scott Taylor, a scientist who specializes in birds, told the University of Colorado Boulder. “And [they all said], ‘That looks like a caterpillar.’ It was very exciting.”

Taylor and the other scientists began researching caterpillars that live in the rainforest. They found some that are covered in brown hairs, similar to the hummingbird chick’s feathers. These rainforest caterpillars fight off predators by stinging them. The venom, or poison, they deliver can be deadly. They also shake their heads when they feel threatened, just like the hummingbird chick.

The day after the chick hatched, a type of wasp that eats chicks approached the nest. It was then that scientists observed something amazing. The mother bird was away, but the chick was able to defend itself. In response to the wasp, the chick began shaking its head, and the wasp flew away. Scientists now believe that white-necked jacobin chicks mimic, or copy, venomous caterpillars in order to scare predators away.

The scientists are excited to learn more.

“We know so little about what nesting birds do in the tropics,” Jay Falk, a bird specialist who was part of the discovery team, said in a statement. “But if we put more effort into observing the natural world, we might discover these kinds of behaviors are very common.”

Ding, dong! Who’s at the door? It’s a fish!

If you’re thinking, “Hold on, fish can’t ring doorbells!” you’re right. Fish can’t ring doorbells without help. But one city has created a clever kind of doorbell to help fish swim safely through a series of waterways called canals.

Utrecht is a city in the Netherlands, a country in Europe that has a lot of canals. People use the canals to ship things between cities. Gates, called locks, run across the canals and help ensure each canal has the same water level for the ships.

The locks are helpful for humans, but they’re a problem for the fish that swim through the canals each spring to reach the places where they lay eggs. When a fish encounters a lock that’s shut, it’s like running into a closed door. Trapped in front of a lock, the fish are in danger. Birds or other fish could eat them. The fish need help opening the door and getting through the lock.

Officials in Utrecht came up with the Fish Doorbell to help the fish get through a lock in the middle of the city.

The Fish Doorbell is a website showing an underwater livestream. When a fish swims up to the camera, it shows up on the website. Viewers watching the livestream can ring the Fish Doorbell. Ding, dong! The doorbell will notify the lock keeper to open the lock so that the fish can swim safely through the canal. In Dutch, the language people speak in the Netherlands, the Fish Doorbell is called the Visdeurbel.

Doing laundry keeps our clothes clean, but it also requires a lot of water. A student from Vancouver, Canada, decided to find out whether laundry water could be reused, and what she learned won her an international science prize!

Tanvir Mundra’s investigation was inspired by a conversation with her grandparents, who live in India. Mundra’s grandparents collect their used laundry water, also called gray water, and use it in their flower and vegetable garden.

“I started posing questions [to my grandparents]: How did that gray water influence [affect] the plants?” Mundra remembered, in an interview with CTV News.

Mundra noted that her grandparents don’t use harsh laundry detergent, which contains chemicals. They use soap nuts, which are the fruits of a tree called Sapindus mukorossi. 

Soap nuts are believed to be effective alternatives to the chemical detergent many people buy in stores. But Mundra wanted to find out what would happen if she used gray water from chemical detergent to water plants.

Mundra did two loads of laundry. She used chemical laundry detergent in the first load. She used soap nuts in the second load. She collected the gray water from each load.

Next, Mundra planted 30 spinach plants in pots and separated them into three groups. The first group received detergent gray water and the second group received soap nut gray water. The third group received tap water (water from the faucet) instead of gray water.

The plants that received detergent water did not grow very well. But the plants that received soap nut water or tap water both grew well. Mundra concluded that soap nut water does not prevent plants from growing healthy and strong.

“There’s zero effect at all [from soap nut water]…in terms of plant height, leaf length, root length,” she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She didn’t eat the spinach to see if the water affected its taste—her parents wouldn’t let her, just in case the soap nut water was unsafe.

In January, Mundra won the top prize at the Taiwan International Science Fair. She says her discovery could help people save water in the future.

“If we can actually start reusing our own household water wastage, such as dirty water from the laundry, then we’re actually saving and conserving a lot of water,” she told the CBC.

In the Pacific Ocean, there’s a snail that uses its pointy teeth to inject venom into its prey. A year or so ago, no one knew this snail species existed. It’s one of 866 species that were recently discovered as part of a project called the Ocean Census.

More than 800 scientists from around the world are working together on the Ocean Census, which began in 2023 and is scheduled to last for 10 years. With help from divers, piloted underwater vehicles, and remote (unpiloted) underwater vehicles, they’re looking for what’s never been found before.

The goal of the census is to help scientists understand more about the world’s oceans. Although we know more than ever about the world and even the universe, the oceans are largely unexplored.

“Probably only 10 percent of marine species have been discovered,” coral expert Michelle Taylor told CNN. Taylor is one of the lead scientists with the Ocean Census. 

Scientists believe that between one and two million marine species are still undiscovered.

Here are just a few of the species that Ocean Census scientists have unearthed so far. 

If anyone ever tells you not to play with your food, tell them about the Vegetable Orchestra. For more than 25 years, audiences around the world have been watching this musical group play instruments made of vegetables.

The Vegetable Orchestra was formed in 1999 in Vienna, Austria, by a group of musicians who were looking for a new sound after signing up to play at a festival.

“It all started as a joke,” musician Matthias Meinharter told the BBC. “We thought, ‘What is the most difficult thing to play music on?’ We were making soup together at the time, and one idea led to another.”

Pretty soon the musicians were carving flutes out of carrots and violins out of leeks. The veggie instruments are used in different ways. Some make percussive (drum-like) sounds, and others make a tone, like a musical note. Working together, and in the hands of the musicians, they produce wonderful music.

Traditional musical instruments are made to last a long time. Musicians treasure them. That’s not possible with vegetables. The members of the Vegetable Orchestra must carve new instruments before every concert because each one rots or softens after about six hours. Unused vegetables don’t go to waste. The musicians add them to soup that is served at that night’s concert.

When a fisherman and his son on an island in the Pacific Ocean found some pieces of wood in a creek, they thought they might be able to build something out of them. But when they started holding the pieces together, a shape began to form—the shape of a boat. It turned out the wood had once been part of a canoe that may have brought the islands some of their very first residents.

The father and son, Vincent and Nikau Dix, live in the Chatham Islands. The islands are about 500 miles (800 kilometers) east of the nation of New Zealand in a part of the world called Polynesia. Beginning thousands of years ago, people set out in large canoes called waka and settled on many Polynesian islands. These include the Chatham Islands, which the Moriori people settled a little over 500 years ago. Pieces of waka have been found in other parts of Polynesia, but the Chatham Islands discovery is turning out to be bigger and more important than the others.

It’s special to be the first to do something. Zara Lachlan should know. Lachlan just became the first woman (and the second person) to row solo on a 4,100-mile (6,600-kilometer) voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, from Europe to South America. At 21 years old, she’s also the youngest person ever to do this.

Lachlan, who is from the United Kingdom, set out from the European nation of Portugal in October in a rowboat with only a tiny indoor area for sleeping. She arrived in French Guiana, a country in South America, on February 1 after 97 days alone at sea.

“[It] feels very strange to be back on land,” she told the BBC.

An ocean isn’t an easy thing to cross, especially in a rowboat. Lachlan had to row for up to 21 hours a day, which was especially hard when she was rowing the boat against the wind. During her journey, she encountered unforgiving weather that caused her boat to roll upside down. She also broke her finger, as well as some of her equipment.

“Every day for the first month I wanted to go home, and I thought this was a silly idea and it was so hard,” Lachlan told the BBC. “But I know for a fact that if someone came up to me on a boat and said they would tow me in and I could fly home, I would tell them to go away.”

In February, hundreds of people gathered in Uonuma, Japan, to take part in one of the world’s biggest snowball fights. The annual Koide International Snowball Fight is an epic battle, and the last team standing wins.

The rules of the event are simple. Two teams of five people throw snowballs at each other for two minutes. Whenever someone is hit, points are awarded to the opposing team. Then the next pair of teams has their fight, and so on. In the end, the team with the most points wins. The prize is a bag of rice, a specialty in Uonuma.

“Put simply, you make snowballs, throw them, score hits and the (team with the) most points wins,” head judge Takuya Kitsu told Reuters.

Participants take their snowballs seriously, but the event is mostly just fun. In fact, teams must dress in matching colors or even costumes—and according to the rules, the sillier or more original, the better. 

In Japan, snowball fighting is a sport that’s regularly played in the country’s colder regions. There’s even a movement to add the sport to the Winter Olympics. Kitsu says snowball fighting is a great way to get through a time of year that can get gloomy, especially for adults.

“The snow can be a nuisance. It’s a hassle,” Kitsu told Reuters. “So we hoped we could turn it into something fun by starting these snowball fights.”

Plants need sunlight to grow—or do they? Scientists say they’re working on a way to grow plants in the dark, using electricity!

Most plants normally use a process called photosynthesis to make the nutrients they need to grow. In photosynthesis, the plant absorbs energy from sunlight. It then uses that energy to change water and a gas called carbon dioxide into nutrients called sugars.

Photosynthesis allows us to grow much of the food we need through farming. But farming uses a lot of land and requires a reliable climate. As climate change makes it more difficult to grow food, scientists are trying to find new farming methods.

That’s where the new plant-growing method, called electro-agriculture, comes in. Electro-agriculture doesn’t require land or direct sunlight. The method makes it possible to grow plants inside a building.

Kynlee Rogers and her dog, Tennessee (“Tennee” for short), have a lot in common. They’re both sweet, they have the same birthday, and they were both born with a cleft lip. And now, they’re each other’s best friend.

Before Tennee came into Kynlee’s life, Kynlee used to ask her mom, Kimberly, why she was different from other kids. A cleft lip is an opening in the upper lip that some people are born with. Kimberly wanted to help Kynlee feel better about her difference. When Kynlee asked if some dogs have cleft lips, her mom told her they do—and then got an idea.

Kimberly found an organization called Cleft Rescue Unit, which places dogs with cleft lips in homes where a family member also has a cleft lip.

“Our mission is to combine the two different cleft communities: the human community and the canine community,” Cleft Rescue Unit founder Lindsay Weisman told the Washington Post.

Cleft Rescue Unit doesn’t just adopt dogs out—it also rescues them by making sure they grow healthy and strong. A puppy with a cleft lip cannot nurse, so it can’t get the milk it needs unless it’s fed with special veterinary equipment. Once a puppy is old enough to eat solid food, Cleft Rescue Unit works on matching it with a home.

In March 2024, Kynlee and her mom attended a Cleft Rescue Unit Event at the Nashville Zoo in Nashville, Tennessee. There, Kynlee met 5-week-old Tennee.

Kynlee’s family adopted Tennee in September. Kynlee has a new pal to love, and being different no longer bothers her.

“Since we have gotten Tennee, [Kynlee] has not asked one question about why she’s different,” Kimberly told the Washington Post. “There’s a bond. Tennee is her comforter.”