All Stories by Susan Milius
- Animals
To Bee He or She: Honeybees use novel sex-setting switch
After more than a decade of work, an international team has found the main gene that separates the girls from the boys among honeybees.
- Animals
Snapping shrimp whip up a riot of bubbles
High-speed video and fancy math demonstrate that snapping shrimp make so much noise by popping bubbles.
- Animals
Musical Pairs: Egg-deploying bird species divide for a song
A new genetic analysis bolsters the idea that musical taste, rather than geography, split Africa's indigobirds into multiple species.
- Ecosystems
Risky High Life: Mountain creatures prove extra-vulnerable
Some of the species hardest hit by climate change will be those living in particular mountain highlands.
- Plants
Next loosestrife is already loose
A Florida botanist warns against Nymphoides cristata and Rotala rotundifolia, very troublesome escapees from aquariums and water gardens.
- Plants
Misunderstood stripes confuse individuality
In the debate over how many fungi make up one lichen body, a researcher argues for two unrelated fungal species in the same lichen.
- Plants
Everglades plant is he, then she, then he
Sawgrass, the signature plant of the Everglades, switches genders twice during its week of blooming and thus reduces the chances of self- fertilization.
- Ecosystems
Shark Serengeti: Ocean predators have diversity hot spots
The first search for oceanic spots of exceptional diversity in predators has turned up marine versions of the teeming Serengeti plains.
- Earth
Bt corn pollen can hurt monarchs
A second test of a strain of corn genetically engineered to make its own insecticide finds potential for harm to monarch butterfly caterpillars.
- Ecosystems
Virtual skylarks suffer weed shortfall
A new mathematical model raises the concern that switching to transgenic herbicide-tolerant crops could deprive birds of weed seeds.
- Animals
Sexual conflict pushes species making
A novel comparison of 25 pairs of insect lineages finds that sexual conflict plays more of a role in making new species than scientists had realized.
- Plants
Emergency Gardening
High-tech tissue culture is helping some ultrarare plants finally have sprouts of their own.
