Life sciences writer Susan Milius has been writing about botany, zoology and ecology for Science News since the last millennium. She worked at diverse publications before breaking into science writing and editing. After stints on the staffs of The Scientist, Science, International Wildlife and United Press International, she joined Science News. Three of Susan's articles have been selected to appear in editions of The Best American Science Writing.

All Stories by Susan Milius

  1. Animals

    How snails breathe through snorkels on land

    Shells with a tube counterintuitively sealed at the end have hidden ways to let Asian snails snorkel while sealed in their shells.

  2. Animals

    How snails breathe through snorkels on land

    Shells with a tube counterintuitively sealed at the end have hidden ways to let Asian snails snorkel while sealed in their shells.

  3. Life

    Hightailing it out of the water, mudskipper style

    A robot and a land-walking fish show how a tail might have made a huge difference for early vertebrates conquering the slippery slopes of terrestrial life.

  4. Life

    Letting parasites fight could help battle drug resistance, too

    Helping one strain of malaria trounce another in lab mice demonstrates a way of avoiding the evolution of drug resistance.

  5. Life

    Cities create accidental experiments in plant, animal evolution

    To look for evolution in human-scale time, pick a city and watch a lizard. Or some clover.

  6. Health & Medicine

    In malaria battle, indoor bug spraying has unintended consequence

    Years of spraying indoors may inadvertently have push malaria-spreading mosquitoes to venture outdoors for a bite.

  7. Animals

    ‘Kermit Sutra’ gets seventh amphibian mating position

    Bombay night frogs’ unusual mating protocol features indirect sperm transfer and female croaks.

  8. Ecosystems

    Ocean plankton held hostage by pirate viruses

    The most abundant photosynthesizers on Earth stop storing carbon when they catch a virus.

  9. Life

    By leaking light, squid hides in plain sight

    Glass squid camouflage their eyes with wonderfully inefficient bioluminescence.

  10. Life

    Fruit fly’s giant sperm is quite an exaggeration

    Giant sperm, about 20 times a male fruit fly’s body length, could make the insects the champs of supersized sexual ornaments.

  11. Animals

    Some animals ‘see’ the world through oddball eyes

    Purple urchins, aka crawling eyeballs, are just one of several bizarre visual systems broadening scientists’ view of what makes an eye.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Scientists wrestle with possibility of second Zika-spreading mosquito

    It’s hard to say yet whether Asian tiger mosquitoes will worsen the ongoing Zika outbreak in the Americas.