Fish have no eyelids, yet pufferfish close their eyes. Shimonoseki's Kaikyokan aquarium dissected 51 species and traced the eye-closing muscle to the one that deflates a puffed-up puffer.
A shrine in Iwakuni held a memorial for 281 white snakes that died in one year, the most since records begin in 2009. Only 804 remain in the society's care, and this sacred albino population now breeds as a closed group.
Three lions died at Tokyo's Tama Zoological Park, with dehydration and organ failure. July humidity there was an ordinary 77 percent. Japan's heat index weights air temperature at just 10 percent.
A team from Hokkaido University, Tokai University and Sapporo Maruyama Zoo has bred the slender shrew in captivity for the first time anywhere. Here is how they pulled it off with a mammal that cannot skip a meal, and why it matters for one of the smallest endangered mammals on Earth.
A baby red-shanked douc langur named Mee, from a species called the world's most beautiful monkey, has gone on display at Yokohama Zoorasia. We look at what this critically endangered birth means, and at Japan's habit of naming zoo animals by public vote and following each individual's life story.
After Japan returned its twin pandas Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei to China in January 2026, Tokyo's Ueno Zoo lost its star attraction for the first time in 15 years, and visitor numbers fell two months running. Governor Yuriko Koike is now backing an unlikely successor: the shoebill, a motionless African bird with a fearsome stare that she calls kimo-kawa, creepy-cute. A shoebill-shaped cart began running in May. Here is why the casting works better than it sounds.