Sandie Black first saw giant pandas at the Calgary Zoo in 1988 when she applied for a job with the veterinary staff. Fast-forward 30 years, Black is now tasked with caring for a family of the iconic black and white bears who will call the Calgary Zoo home for the next five years.

Jackdaws recognise each other’s voices and respond in greater numbers to warnings from familiar birds than strangers, new research shows.

Swarms of tiny oceanic organisms known collectively as zooplankton may have an outsize influence on their environment. New research at Stanford shows that clusters of centimeter-long individuals, each beating tiny feathered legs, can, in aggregate, create powerful currents that may mix water over hundreds of meters in depth.

What makes obese cats prone to diabetes? That’s one question researchers at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM) and the University of Saskatchewan Western College of Veterinary Medicine want to answer as they work to learn more about feline diabetes.

It’s playtime for piglets at the Prairie Swine Centre (PSC), where Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) researcher Dr. Yolande Seddon hopes to find out whether piglets that play are better able to cope with life’s stresses.

It’s not easy to catch an Egyptian vulture.

Evan Buechley knows. He’s hunkered down near garbage dumps from Ethiopia to Armenia, waiting for the highly intelligent birds to trigger a harmless trap. But no matter how well he and other researchers hid the traps, he says, “somehow the birds could always sense that something was up.”

Last year, University of British Columbia zoologist Wayne Maddison travelled to the highlands of southern Mexico in pursuit of undiscovered species of jumping spiders. He kept a journal of his adventures, documenting his encounters with resplendently beautiful arachnids.

NOAA scientist Carol Stepien will present research results at a public forum this week in Toledo, Ohio, on how local bait shops, anglers and the public can prevent invasive fish from accidentally being released into the Great Lakes.

A population of exotic invasive Cuban treefrogs has been discovered in New Orleans, more than 430 miles (700 kilometers) from the nearest known population in Florida, making this the first known breeding population in the mainland United States outside that state, reports a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

When the rains eventually blanket northwest Costa Rica, ushering in the country’s wet season, a booming chorus of yellow toads will fill the tropical forest.