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For an animal with such a humble name, market squid have a spectacularly hypnotic appearance. Streaks and waves of color flicker and radiate across their skin. Other creatures may posses the ability to change color, but squid and their relatives are without equal when it comes to controlling their appearance and new research may illuminate how they do it.

A really interesting video that can be used to teach natural selection. Discusses many of the behaviors of plants that help them to survive, thrive and reproduce.

Discover one of the most unique hunters of the plant kingdom, and witness how the cobra lily (Darlingtonia californica) uses deception and patience to trick unsuspecting insect prey into its highly specialized pitcher traps.

Cane toads in Australia have evolved to hop straighter and farther than ever before, Australia's ABC News reports. That means they're spreading faster than ever through Australia, sparking worries that they'll harm native species in places where they've never lived before. Twenty-six years after the debut of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, it seems scientists are still struggling to control the large, poisonous toad.
Sugar growers released cane toads, which are native to Brazil, in Australia in 1935. They wanted the toads to eat cane beetles, a sugarcane pest. However, cane toads didn't eat cane beetles; instead they began killing off native species such as lizards and crocodiles, which would die after eating the toads. Sometime in the 1990s, a quirky documentary reporting on the cane toads' effects in Australia became popular-and made the chubby amphibians into the international poster children for what can go wrong with introduced species.

There are more than 140,000 species of butterflies and moths in the world, fluttering on every continent except Antarctica. Their wings contain countless patterns and colors, providing critical tools for camouflage, finding mates and scaring off predators.

A Bay Area professor is trying to learn more about how those colors develop and evolve - by going very, very small.

Nipam Patel, a professor in the Molecular & Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the thousands of tiny cells, known as scales, on butterflies' wings.

From a distance, the rows and rows of scales look like vivid patterns that decorate a butterfly's wings. But up close, each scale is like a dab of paint in a Pointillist painting or a tile in a mosaic; they represent an individual unit of color.

An article on how mimicing the structures of animals can be useful in product development.

Evolution has produced some masterful solutions for animals to avoid predation. Look no further than the camouflage abilities of the dead leaf butterfly, the flower mantis, or the freaky vanishing octopus for proof.

But, a new study takes trickery to a whole new level. Researchers have discovered that the tropical harlequin filefish camouflages its scent by eating the coral it lives on, so as to blend into the olfactory background. It's the first time a vertebrate animal has been found to practice such smell-deception.