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Flowers can bloom inside melting ice. As ice absorbs light, tiny pockets of meltwater can spread into six-petalled shapes called Tyndall flowers. A small vapour cavity forms as melting makes the water take up less space. A snowflake's disappearing act.

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Some weevils build lace nurseries. Hypera larvae spin cocoons so open you can see the pupa inside. The silk comes from Malpighian tubules, organs usually used to handle waste, then is stored in the rectum. An unlikely silk factory, with an exquisite result.

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A slug senses up with tiny stones. Inside two fluid-filled organs, mineral grains press on sensory hairs as gravity pulls them. The signal helps the animal orient itself. Gosse described the little capsules as ears. Today, we recognise their role in balance.

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This worm puts a front door on a borrowed shell. The hermit peanut worm moves into an empty snail shell, then cements sand across the entrance. Its slender front end reaches out through a small opening. A ready-made house, with a doorway built to fit.

A shell's rainbow can be copied into black wax. Brewster found that an impression of mother-of-pearl could also shine with colour. The wax copied tiny surface grooves that redirect light. The shell had passed on a pattern capable of making colour.

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A dead fish's glitter kept dancing. Gosse watched crystals from goldfish scales quiver in a drop of water, even days after the fish had died. As they turned, each flashed bright, then dark. They looked alive. They were tiny reflectors catching the light.

They offered one bird family a basket. Two moved in. An account in Homes Without Hands describes martins nesting inside a basket covered with a board. A second pair built above it, inside the handle's arch. One act of kindness became a two-storey home.

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A naturalist's specimen collectors were cod. Gosse records how Gordon of Elgin obtained rare crustaceans from fish stomachs, helped by Widow Scott and her son John. The fish reached animals people struggled to collect. A fishing family brought them to science.

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The termites ate the picture frames. The glass stayed on the wall. James Forbes reported returning to a closed room to find the wooden frames gone. The insects' own cemented tunnels held the glass in place. The destroyers had become the supports.

He watched an empty cocoon for a year. J. G. Wood found an emperor moth beside a cocoon that looked untouched. He assumed it had come from elsewhere. The moth had already escaped through springy fibres that closed behind it. Nature had hidden the exit.

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