New Species - katydid

A jabbing spiny-legged katydid, new species of plants and animals discovered during just two months of deep rainforest exploration in a small portion of Papua New Guinea's remote forest-cloaked mountains last year.

In the Nakanai Mountains on the large western Pacific island of New Britain, CI scientists worked with local communities to assess new, endemic, and previously un described species at three different sites ranging from lowlands to high elevations in the rugged rain forest-covered mountains.

emerald-green katydid, a brilliantly pink-eyed katydid that lives in the forest canopy (Caedicia), and a sharp-legged katydid with an especially interesting defense mechanism that, when threatened, prompts it to hold its unusually large and spiny legs vertically above its head to jab at predators, a behavior which RAP scientist Piotr Naskrecki described from firsthand experience as "very painful".

New Species of Bee-like Bat

Like most of the Lost World's mammals, this new species of blossom bat is nocturnal. Unlike most other New Guinean bats of the supersize flying fox family, the new bat is only about as big as an average North American bat.

The blossom bat is also "kind of like the hummingbird of the bat world," said biologist Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

"It uses a really long tongue to lap up nectar and of course gets pollen on it as it moves from flower to flower, so it's also a pollinator—a bit like a bumblebee," Helgen added.

Birds that nest in boxes

Flicker Bird

Snow Bunting

Mountain Bluebird

Bufflehead Bird

Eastern Bluebird

Birds Songs Vary on their Habitat

After vegetation improved in some empty lands in California, Oregon and Washington, during the last three decades, a scientist named Derryberry noticed a lowered pitch in male white-crowned sparrows. She also discovered that the birds slowed down their singing.
This is the first time that anyone has shown that bird songs can shift with rapid changes in habitat. Derryberry performed a comparative analysis of recordings of individual birds, which were made in 15 different regions, and some old recordings that were made in the same places back in the 1970s.
She discovered that both the musical pitch and the warble of the sparrows' short songs significantly lowered. She also include that she was surprised to find that songs had changed in a similar way in so many different populations. She found that in the areas where the foliage did not change, the songs of white-crowned sparrows hadn't slowed down. This means that with the alterations in the foliage songs will become slower and have a drop in pitch.
Derryberry's research adds more evidence to the belief that animals change their acoustic and visual communication depending on the habitat.