Is it illegal to own an axolotl? A recent pet seizure at Chicago's O'Hare Airport illustrates ongoing confusion. Many pet axolotls are crossbred with other salamanders to create their unique coloration. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The axolotl () is a confusing creature, and not simply because it looks like a real-life Pokémon .

Insect venom means nothing to some amphibians. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In hindsight, the North American " murder hornet " () scare of 2020 was probably a overblown (not to mention culturally problematic). Of course, you still want to avoid the venomous sting from a northern giant hornet, as they're now known. According to entomologist Masato Ono, receiving a dose of the insect's potent, neurotoxic venom felt "like a hot nail being driven into my leg."

They're born as tiny'toadlets.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A frog's lifecycle is likely one of the earliest bits of science that many of us remember learning. They start as eggs, hatch into tadpoles, and soon grow into the recognizable adult amphibians. While that remains true for the vast majority of the planet's nearly 8,000 known frog species, a handful of the amphibians have evolved a more streamlined reproductive process.

The elusive'snot otters' can grow up to two feet long. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Eastern hellbender () isn't nearly as fearsome as its name implies. They're actually somewhat cute, if you can get past the salamander's slimy, mucousy skin that's earned it such nicknames, such as "snot otter" and "lasagna lizard." Although hellbenders can grow up to two feet long, the amphibians are notoriously elusive and prefer to reside under large, flat rocks in well-oxygenated waterways that snake through Appalachia and the Ohio River basin.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning abilities but rely primarily on parametric knowledge, limiting factual accuracy. While recent works equip reinforcement learning (RL)-based LRMs with retrieval capabilities, they suffer from overthinking and lack robustness in reasoning, reducing their effectiveness in question answering (QA) tasks. To address this, we propose ReaRAG, a factuality-enhanced reasoning model that explores diverse queries without excessive iterations. Our solution includes a novel data construction framework with an upper bound on the reasoning chain length. Specifically, we first leverage an LRM to generate deliberate thinking, then select an action from a predefined action space (Search and Finish). For Search action, a query is executed against the RAG engine, where the result is returned as observation to guide reasoning steps later. This process iterates until a Finish action is chosen. Benefiting from ReaRAG's strong reasoning capabilities, our approach outperforms existing baselines on multi-hop QA. Further analysis highlights its strong reflective ability to recognize errors and refine its reasoning trajectory. Our study enhances LRMs' factuality while effectively integrating robust reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Poison dart frogs are hard to miss. They're bright, agile, and as their name suggests, toxic. But at least a few of these showy amphibians have gone under the radar, until now. Scientists surveying a difficult to reach area of the Brazilian Amazon report two new species in a set of recent papers. The first, published in April in the journal ZooKeys, describes the teal and black Ranitomeya aquamarina.

David B. Wake, a pioneer in the fields of evolutionary morphology, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), and organismal diversification, died on 29 April. He was 84. Wake was a career-long visionary in organismal biology who led evolutionary biologists to examine not only how organisms are different but also how they become different. As a graduate student, he set the framework for his career by detailing the evolutionary relationships and morphological diversity of salamanders. He then delved into functional morphology (how organismal structures work), evolutionary development (how developmental pathways influence diversification of form), and speciation (how species come to be). One of the most influential and integrative biodiversity scientists of his era, Dave was boundlessly curious about all aspects of evolution and unusually open-minded about new techniques and analyses. Dave was born on 8 June 1936 and raised in South Dakota. He attended Pacific Lutheran College in Tacoma, Washington, where he became fascinated by salamanders after uncovering some while looking for insects for an entomology course. After receiving his BA in biology in 1958, he joined the lab of herpetologist Jay Savage at the University of Southern California (USC). At USC, he met Marvalee Hendricks, a fellow graduate student and scholar of caecilians, another understudied group of amphibians. Dave and Marvalee married in 1962 and became collaborators in life and in science. Dave completed his MS in 1960 and his PhD in 1964, both in biology at USC. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago for 5 years and then moved to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he was director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1971 to 1998 and professor of integrative biology until his retirement in 2003. Marvalee joined the faculty at UC Berkeley as a tenure-track professor soon after Dave. From the time I first heard of them, they were known as “the Wakes,” and for many of us, they were an early model for successful dual careers in academia. An unapologetic organismal biologist, Dave used salamanders as a model taxon (as opposed to a model organism) to ask questions, answer some, and rework others, creating a cycle of ever-deepening inquiry into their evolution. Rather than focusing on a single model organism or particular evolutionary mechanisms, Dave developed extensive knowledge of many salamander species, enough to use the whole taxon as a model platform to inform his many research foci. In doing so, Dave achieved an unprecedented level of integration across approaches to address evolutionary mechanisms and their consequences for diversification. His exemplary integration inspired a series of papers by James Griesemer in the field of history and philosophy of science. Dave's salamander research transcended boundaries of methodologies, specialties, lines of inquiry, and disciplines. He developed a distinctive form of scientific problem-solving and iterative questioning that synergistically increased our general understanding of evolution. Dave developed expertise in phylogenetics, morphology, development, ecology, neurobiology, behavior, and physiology, and his discoveries were groundbreaking in many fields. Coupling knowledge of adult morphology, ontogeny, embryology, function, and selection, he developed predictions about the retention and/or loss of morphological structures during development and became one of the first to frame these findings as part of the nascent field of evo-devo. By combining detailed spatial knowledge of morphological variation, biogeography, behavior, and genomics, he contributed a classic example of speciation in action with his exploration of the salamander ring species Ensatina . These discoveries, none of which could have been made without integrating approaches, span micro- to macroevolution and are now classics in evolutionary biology. His accomplishments led to many accolades, including election to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. In the late 1980s, Dave was an early proponent of action in response to the alarming global decline in amphibians. He chaired the first Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force and raised awareness of the predicament posed to amphibians by anthropogenic changes in climate and landscapes. As with his own research, he promoted diverse approaches in finding the causes of this large-scale biodiversity loss, to the benefit of both the scientific community and amphibians. I joined the Wake lab in 1996 as a postdoc. It was an exciting time, with many field trips and countless discussions of species concepts, salamander tongues, and amphibian declines. Dave had a work ethic that amazed everyone and often left us challenging our expectations of ourselves. His leadership style emphasized showing, not telling. That work ethic resulted in some humorous “Wakeisms”—when lab members took vacations that he perceived as just a bit long, he began lab meetings by naming those who were absent and stating that “they must be gallivanting around the world.” To this day, former Wake lab members refer to vacationing as doing just that. Dave set high standards for research and expected us to meet them. He was honest in his delivery of criticism but somehow made it feel like it was for our own good. He was an unwavering supporter of those who worked with him and incredibly loyal to his students and colleagues. No matter how busy, he eagerly welcomed visiting students and early-career scientists, always showing interest in their stories and offering advice about their research and professional development. Nearly 15 years ago, at a symposium organized around the potential of new genomic approaches in herpetology, Dave regaled the audience with what he saw as the biggest questions still to be answered by integrating this new approach. He genuinely reveled in witnessing the advancement of science, not only through his own work but also through that of his lab members and anyone else who stepped up to the plate. He concluded with a typically positive outlook on science: “I only wish I had another 50 years to live, just to see what you are all going to discover!”

Wild animals are experts at staying out of sight, but a new partnership between Google and the conservation organization Wildlife Insights will try to help scientists capture and analyze pictures of them in their natural habitat. The program will use an artificial intelligence program to sort through photographs taken by small sensor driven camera installations placed in wilderness areas around the world. Google's AI and Cloud services will help researchers analyse and archive the enormous volume of images captured through the program as part of an effort to improve animal conservation strategies all around the world. The camera traps were originally developed in 1990 and in the intervening years have been placed everywhere from Mexico to Madagascar. To date, 4.553 million pictures have been taken from 8,209 camera deployments.

New genetic and anatomical techniques have revealed the bizarre face of cow observed by Charles Darwin 180 years ago in Argentina. The unusual short-faced bovine known as the niata appears very much to be the cross between a cow and a bulldog, though researchers say it did not suffer the breathing or eating problems that might be expected. While the animal has since become extinct, scientists were able to use skeletons collected around the world to better understand its anatomy and evolution. The unusual short-faced bovine known as the niata appears very much to be the cross between a cow and a bulldog, though researchers say it did not suffer the breathing or eating problems that might be expected. 'Very few people know that hundreds of years ago a cow with a face similar to the shape of a bulldog's existed, called the niata cow,' says Dr Laura Wilson, from the University of New South Wales.

The firing of every neuron in an animal's body has been recorded, live. The breakthrough in imaging the nervous system of a hydra – a tiny, transparent creature related to jellyfish – as it twitches and moves has provided insights into how such simple animals control their behaviour. Similar techniques might one day help us get a deeper understanding of how our own brains work. "This could be important not just for the human brain but for neuroscience in general," says Rafael Yuste at Columbia University in New York City. Instead of a brain, hydra have the most basic nervous system in nature, a nerve net in which neurons spread throughout its body.