Sable Nakamura
Wildlife CorrespondentFormer field biologist who spent three years tracking wolves and now tracks facts about the animal kingdom. Firm believer that animals are weirder than aliens.
Articles by Sable Nakamura
Fish Are Now Our Quality Control Engineers
Tuskfish don't just use tools—they inspect them, transport them, and test them like they're checking inventory. This 2025 research suggests fish cognition is far stranger than we thought.
Orcas Are Teaching Each Other to Make Tools—And It's Happening Right Now
Southern resident orcas in the Salish Sea have recently invented kelp grooming tools and are actively spreading this behavior to their pods. This is tool manufacturing in real-time.
Your Piano Depends on African Elephants Not Going Extinct
Ebony wood—prized for piano keys and guitar fingerboards—relies entirely on elephant dung for reproduction. Kill the elephants, and the trees follow within a generation.
Octopuses Have Eight Brains—And They're Not Afraid to Use Them Independently
Two-thirds of an octopus's neurons live in its arms, not its head. Each limb can taste, decide, and act without consulting the central brain—a distributed intelligence that rewrites everything we thought we knew about how minds work.
A Wolf Figured Out How to Open a Crab Trap. That Shouldn't Be Possible.
A female wolf in Canada swam down to a submerged crab trap, hauled it ashore, and extracted hidden herring bait—suggesting wolves possess cognitive abilities we thought were reserved for primates and corvids.
Polar Bears Have Figured Out How to Use Rocks as Weapons
Polar bears don't just hunt walruses with teeth and claws. According to Inuit hunters and recent research, they've learned to weaponize rocks and ice as bludgeons—a form of tool use that rewrites what we thought apex predators could do.
Squirrels Are Lying to Your Face—and They Know Exactly What They're Doing
Squirrels deliberately bury empty holes to fool competitors. This calculated deception requires understanding what other minds are thinking—a trick we thought only apes could pull off.
A Cow Named Veronika Just Rewrote What We Know About Bovine Cognition
An Austrian cow uses tools with the same flexibility as chimpanzees, choosing different ends of sticks depending on where she needs to scratch. Scientists are baffled.
Bumble Bees Crack the Chimp Test: A Creature With Fewer Neurons Than a Sesame Seed Invents Novel Solutions
Bumble bees spontaneously solved a complex puzzle that famously stumped most animals—the same insight test chimps use. They did it with fewer neurons than a sesame seed has seeds.
Why Ant Colonies Are Smarter Than They Have Any Right to Be
Individual ants follow simple rules and have no leader. Yet their colonies solve logistics problems that require supercomputers to model.