Science tips

This story was originally published on The Conversation . It appears here under a Creative Commons license.

During the peak of summer off the coast of Maine, a female lobster approaches the den of a potential mate. Male lobsters are aggressive, so she’s whipped up a love potion to win him over. The persuasive concoction is her own pee, full of seductive and disarming pheromones, which springs from a surprising source. “I hate to tell this to people who love to eat lobster,” says Ellen Prager, marine scientist and author of Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans’ Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter. “Everybody thinks [their bladder] must be under their abdomen, but no, it’s actually between their eyes.”

Not long after the light first burst from the furnace at the heart of the realm, chaos reigned. Cosmic islands were careening into one another, fracturing and shattering, then melding and building. The most colossal orbs emerging from the pandemonium often had companions of rock or ice dancing around them. One stood largely alone, its fiery surface bubbling away, as another, Theia, approached at breathtaking speed. Soon a white-hot, soundless blast sent an eruption of diamantine matter out to the stars. It took an eon to see the outcome of this massive collision. In the end: a world of green and blue, and its pale companion, Selene.

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Bull sharks, says marine biologist Ryan Daly, “like to bite.”

Far from their usual forest hideouts, lynx hunt in fallow fields and fall asleep on asphalt roads. Wolves thrive in abandoned villages, denning and breeding in cemeteries. Throughout the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve (PSRR) in southern Belarus, the density of both species is exceptionally high. And another apex predator visits often: Brown bears pass through almost every summer.

Everyone loves an optical illusion (even if they leave us completely stumped), and they're all around us in the natural world.