All Stories by Susan Milius
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After West Nile Virus
As biologists try to estimate the impact of West Nile virus on wildlife, it's not the famously susceptible crows that are causing alarm but much rarer species.
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- Animals
Techno Crow: Do birds build up better tool designs?
Researchers surveying tool use by New Caledonian crows propose that the birds may be the first animals besides people shown to ratchet up the sophistication of their technology by sharing design improvements.
- Animals
Ants lurk for bees, but bees see ambush
A tropical ant has perfected the un-antlike behavior of hunting by ambush, but its prey, a sweat bee, has developed some tricks of its own.
- Animals
Fish That Decorate: Females prefer nests with pizzazz
If scientists give foil strips to male stickleback fish, the fellows carry them back to their nests for decoration, and it turns out that females seem to like guys with lots of shiny stuff.
- Animals
Vampire bats don’t learn from bad lunch
For the first time, a mammal has flunked a controlled test for developing a food aversion after getting sick just once, and that unusual creature is the common vampire bat.
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Wasps: Mom doesn’t like you best
Female wasps that found a colony together show no favoritism toward their own offspring when the adults feed larvae.
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Excuse me, dear, which octopus are you?
Male blue-ringed octopuses get pretty far along in their courtship before they determine whether their partner is a female.
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How butterflies can eat cyanide
Some newly recognized chemical wizardry lets some Heliconius caterpillars thrive on leaves that defend themselves with cyanide.
- Health & Medicine
Scarce-Banana Scare—But don’t kiss that banana good-bye yet
Headlines have been blaring that the banana will be extinct within 10 years but crop specialists say that’s not likely. The furor has called attention, however, to a problem of worldwide banana supply and to the possibility that we’ll be peeling things a little different in 2013. The fuss started with the Jan. 18 New […]
- Animals
Flowers, not flirting, make sexes differ
Thanks to lucky circumstances, bird researchers find rare evidence that food, not sex appeal, makes some male and female hummingbirds look different.
- Ecosystems
After Invasions: Can an ant takeover change the rules?
A rare before-and-after study of a takeover by an invasive ant species shows the interloper quickly disassembling the basic rules of the invaded community.
