But which fish is it? Photo by Karsten Elmose Vad / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A short while ago, Americans were stunned by research from conservation group Oceana, which showed that at some point between baited line and dinner plate, roughly 30 percent of the country’s fish is mislabeled—a process that’s being recognized increasingly as organized seafood fraud. The motivation? Somewhere along the supply chain, people see the benefit of disguising fish that are cheaper, more abundant, or less desirable as fancier fare. But mislabeling seafood could have impacts not only on people, who might eat fish that they shouldn’t, but on the oceans as well, as lines between legal and illegal catch begin to blur. 

A bee visits a sunflower. Photo by TexasEagle / CC BY-NC 2.0

Turns out wilder is better, at least when it comes to pollinating fruity crops. Research published in Science last week suggests that domesticated honeybees—harvested by beekeepers and then employed to pollinate vast expanses of cropland around the world—are actually less efficient than wild pollinators are. The authors suggest farmers revert to an agricultural system that favors wild pollinators, instead of toying with monoculture and vast genetically modified crops the way we have to produce the food we eat. 

A white stork nest in Portugal. Photo by Isidro Vila Verde/ CC BY-NC 2.0)

In Europe, legend has it that white storks, those long-distance migrants, deliver babies. Turns out, that’s not true—and not just the part about the babies. Large numbers of the birds are sticking closer to their breeding grounds thanks to a plentiful food supply in the form of heaps of garbage.

The southern elephant seal is the largest seal in the world. Males grow to 14.5 feet long and females will reach 11 feet. Photo: Glenn E. Grant/NSF

UPDATE 3/4/2013: We've narrowed down the entries to these three.

Every week we post a funny animal photo that’s begging for a caption. Join in the fun! You’ve got til 11:59 pm (Eastern time) on Sunday to enter your suggestion (click “Read more” below). On Monday we’ll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.

A large blackbird flock pictured in The Starved Rock State Park in Illinois. (Photo: Dan Dzurisin/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

One Kentucky town has been doused with white stuff this winter—but it’s not snow. Millions of blackbirds have descended on Hopkinsville, overwhelming residents with noise and bird excrement since they arrived in November.

The horned puffin is among the numerous bird species that could be affected by an oil spill in Arctic waters. Photo: USFWS via Flickr

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is calling it quits for drilling in the waters off Alaska’s north coast—at least for 2013. The move comes as no surpise, given the series of setbacks the company has encountered.

A male and female zebra finch, with lines suggesting the paths that males use to produce songs for female finches. Photo by Daniel E. Baleckaitis

When a bird sings, what goes on inside its brain to produce those clear, silvery strings of sound? Studies before have suggested that something like a metronome worked independently inside bird brains, ticking away to trigger individual notes. But now new research, published today in Nature by lead author Ana Amador, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, shows that the part of the brain responsible for bird song is far more intricately organized around the exact physical motions that produce a bird’s tunes – possibly hinting at the mechanisms that help to steer our own speech.

Photo: Andrew Siani/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Our feathered friends boast an astonishing variety of beaks, from massive to disproportionately long to deadly. Here are ten of the most astonishing, useful, and just plain weird beaks from around the globe.

Resin leaks from a pine tree trunk. Photo by Robert Verzo / CC BY 2.0

Just as a bold piece of commentary recently published in Nature states in its title that we ought to “Classify Plastic Waste As Hazardous”, one researcher has come up with a unique proposal for making our societal addiction to plastic less harmful. Let’s use tree resin, suggests Chuanbing Tang from the University of South Carolina. That’s right: the impossibly sticky amber ooze that conifer, pine, and fir trees leak when something breaks their bark.

A mother giant petrel watches while her baby is weighed in Antarctica. Photo: Jeff Otten/NSF

Every week we post a funny animal photo that’s begging for a caption. Join in the fun! You’ve got til 11:59 pm (Eastern time) on Sunday to enter your suggestion (click “Read more” below). On Monday we’ll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.