All Stories by Susan Milius
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Beast Buddies
As researchers muse about the evolutionary origins of friendship, even the social interactions of giraffes are getting a second look.
- Animals
Your Spiral or Mine? Snail gene reverses coil, makes new species
A snail with a shell spiraling to the right can't mate readily with a lefty, so changes in the single gene that controls shell direction have created new snail species.
- Animals
Bad Bubbles: Could sonar give whales the bends?
Odd bubbles of fat and gas have turned up in the bodies of marine mammals, raising the question of whether something about human activity in the oceans could give these deep divers decompression sickness.
- Earth
When Genes Escape
The focus of the debate over transgenic crops has changed from whether genes will escape to what difference it will make when they do.
- Animals
Carnivores in Captivity: Size of range in wild may predict risk in zoo
A survey of zoo reports of troubled animals suggests that the minimum size of a species' range predicts how well it will adapt to captivity.
- Plants
Bean plants punish microbial partners
In a novel test of how partnerships between species can last in nature, researchers have found that soybeans punish cheaters.
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Breathless: Reef fish cope with low oxygen
A coral reef may look like a high-oxygen paradise, but the first respiration tests of fish there show an unexpected tolerance for low oxygen.
- Animals
Leashing the Rattlesnake
Even in the 21st century, there's still room for old-fashioned, do-it-yourself ingenuity in experimental design for studying animal behavior.
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Unfair Trade: Monkeys demand equitable exchanges
Researchers say they have shown for the first time that a nonhuman species—the brown capuchin monkey—has a sense of what's fair and what's not.
- Animals
Risk of egg diseases may rush incubation
Bird eggs can catch infections through their shells, and that risk may be an overlooked factor in the puzzlingly early start of incubation.
- Plants
Glitch splits hermaphrodite flowers
In a newly proposed scenario, polyploidy may trigger perfectly good hermaphrodite plants to evolve gender forms.
- Animals
Skin Chemistry: Poison frogs upgrade toxins from prey
For the first time, scientists have found a poisonous frog that takes up a toxin from its prey and then tweaks the chemical to make it a more deadly weapon.
