A butterfly wing kept in a 100-yen insect fossil museum in Hyogo is the oldest known fossil of a living species. It is not the oldest butterfly, and the same room has yielded three finds in about 18 months.
Divers in Shiretoko have long called it Ikuone. Now Clione ikuoi is the sixth sea angel species, and the third from Japanese waters in 10 years. A misread set of feeding arms had kept it in the wrong genus.
About 1,000 crows roosted on the Asian Games race walk course in Nagoya, and a hospital ruled out firecrackers, so the city hired a falconer. In Japan, scaring off birds is a falconer's everyday job.
Spoon-leaved sundews with cut leaves closed their flowers more tightly when touched, in an indoor test of 15 and 17 plants. What carries that 'memory' is still unknown.
Extinct in Japan's wild in 1971, the Oriental stork now numbers 728, and only 49 were released. Most hatched in the wild, fed by low-pesticide paddies that cost farmers work and yield. Now they nest on power poles.
The Tsugaru Strait separates Japan's brown bears from its black bears. According to a genetic study of 327 frogs, the only amphibian known to live naturally on both sides crossed it 1 to 2.5 million years ago.
A wild fox dropped a mole at a home in Yonago, Japan, and walked away. It has visited about seven times. Japan's internet thought of a school folktale; a mole researcher has a more practical theory.
About 10,400 wakasagi, a cold-water smelt never native to Haizuka Dam, died amid heat and drought in Hiroshima. Nobody knows who brought them, and Japan's invasive species law does not cover fish moved within Japan.
Genji fireflies flash about every 4 seconds in eastern Japan and every 2 in the west. A survey of 164 populations found western and Kyushu lineages in over 70% of Tokyo's, most likely brought in by people.
Japan culled 1,381,700 deer and wild boar in fiscal 2024, and 5.6 percent of that mass became meat. The rest goes to a hole in the ground or an incinerator, and the capacity is not there. Scotland does it differently.
Yamanashi and Riken researchers cut out the whole Y chromosome to make female clones of male mice. Read next to the same university's finding that cloning dies at 58 generations, and Osaka's eggs from male cells.