The Week in Wildlife

Fallow Deer Arpingstone

Horse "handedness," elephant nose fish romance, and dancing squid, in today's link menagerie.

• If you've spent a lot of time at a racetrack, you've got to believe that the trainers who know their horses better than their human families were already clued in to the connection between the direction of facial cowlicks and being "right- or left-hoofed." Still -- this study is fascinating.
• Just like the yuppie wooing a girl with a Tiffany's box, or a southerner proffering tickets to Nascar, male elephant nose fish lure females by sending out electrical signals that are attractive to only their own kind.
• Remember those butterflies and spiders that went up into space? They've been spinning spooky black-and-white webs, or at least that's how they look in these pictures.
• And speaking of spooky, an oil company's remotely operated vehicle picked up video of a creature from the deep a mile and a half below the surface of the ocean.
• Fallow deer does -- like primates -- pick a mate based on the bucks' groans, which indicate their social rank. (Evidently, the noise attracts dogs, too -- or at least the ones who make the very same noise when they belch after dinner.)