National Geographic Magazine

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

A CHICKEN “IS NOT JUST an animal that gives us eggs,” says Alex ten Napel, who’s been roaming his home country of the Netherlands in search of farm fowl since 2014. Taking inspiration from Melchior d’Hondecoeter, a 17th-century Dutch artist known for his work with birds, ten Napel uses lighting, backdrops, and an elevated, catwalk-like stage to bring chickens out of the coop and into an entirely new context. “What I hope you see in the photos is that chickens can be proud beings or funny beings,” he says. “They can be like gymnasts or ballerinas. Not what most people think of when you talk about chickens.” While each animal has different characteristics, ten Napel has noticed the emergence of some patterns throughout his travels. Roosters, or male chickens, tend to be…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY THE SIX-POUND BOX arrived on a steamy June day, hot from its ride in the delivery van. The label said Boot Barn in capital letters, and when I opened the package, the oaky scent of leather enveloped me. The lower half of the boots had a distinct wrinkly pattern that was rough to the touch. Stamped inside the boots’ shaft: “genuine elephant leather.” At a list price of $799.99, they’d been advertised online as El Dorado Men’s Brass Indian Elephant Exotic Boots. That is, boots purportedly made from an endangered Asian elephant. After four years as a reporter for Wildlife Watch, an investigative project funded by the National Geographic Society, I knew there was a market for just about any exotic species, from leeches to…

At biologist Sam Wasser’s University of Washington lab, researchers had successfully identified elephant ivory origins using DNA analysis. To attempt the same with leather from Boot Barn’s boots, they cut small samples and ripped them into shreds with a razor blade—a low-tech way to get as much surface area as possible, which increases the chances of finding DNA. They put the samples into chemicals that break cell walls apart, basically turning the shreds into a brown sludge that wildlife genetics lab manager Zofia Kaliszewska described as “gross and pulpy.” They spent about a week incubating the sample, adding chemicals, trying to find any usable DNA. But eventually, their computer spit out DNA results for only their control samples—none for the Boot Barn samples. PHOTOS: REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF…

Special jawbones on sarcastic fringeheads (Neoclinus blanchardi) let the fish open their maws and flare their giant jaws in a wide gape, to show their mouths’ psychedelic colors. It hadn’t been clear why the species developed such wild yaps: “They might have evolved to have some special function,” says Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp, a biologist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and a National Geographic Explorer. Because males sport bigger, more colorful mouths than females, Hongjamrassilp’s team wondered if males gape to dazzle females, or perhaps to compete or communicate with other males. So the team staged fish showdowns, as reported in the journal Ecology. When two males were placed in a tank where only one could occupy a shell as shelter, the shell dweller went full-on gape at the other fish’s approach…

In 1862, when Charles Darwin beheld a Madagascan orchid with a nectar tube nearly a foot long, he deduced that a compatible pollinator must exist. Four decades later, scientists found it—Xanthopan praedicta, a hawk moth with the longest recorded tongue of any insect. Now a study by National Geographic Explorer Juliette Rubin has found another adaptation: When Rubin played bat echolocation calls near captive male moths, they rubbed their genitalia against their abdomen, creating ultrasonic noise that would likely jam bat sonar.…