At up to about 30 meters long and often more than 150 tonnes, the blue whale outsizes every known dinosaur. Yet it feeds on krill, crustaceans just a few centimeters long, gulping down several tonnes of them a day. Its calf already weighs about 2.5 tonnes at birth and gains nearly 90 kg a day while nursing.
In 2022, a young tagged bar-tailed godwit flew from Alaska to Tasmania in about 11 days of nonstop flight, covering 13,560 km without eating, drinking or landing. Before departure, these birds pile on huge fat reserves and shrink their digestive organs, which are useless during the journey.
To escape rivals, a dung beetle rolls its ball of dung in a straight line. At night, it holds its course using the glowing band of the Milky Way. In a planetarium, researchers showed that beetles rolled straight under a starry sky but wandered aimlessly when the galaxy was switched off. It was the first animal known to navigate this way.