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.
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All Stories by Susan Milius
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Animals
What really changes when a male vole settles down
Bachelor prairie voles can’t tell one female from another, but saying “I do” means more than just settling down.
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Animals
Lights at night trick wild wallabies into breeding late
Artificial lighting is driving wild tammar wallabies to breed out of sync with peak season for food
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Animals
Alpine bee tongues shorten as climate warms
Pollinators’ match with certain alpine flowers erodes as climate change pushes fast evolution.
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Animals
These fish would rather walk
Slowpokes of the sea, frogfish and handfish creep along the ocean bottom.
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Animals
Dogs flub problem-solving test
Confronting a tough task, dogs are more likely than wolves to give up and gaze at a human
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Animals
Loss of vision meant energy savings for cavefish
Novel measurement feeds idea that tight energy budgets favored vision loss in cavefish.
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Animals
Invading Argentine ants carry virus that attacks bees
The first survey of viruses in the globally invasive Argentine ant brings both potentially bad and good news.
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Animals
Invading Argentine ant hordes carry a virus that attacks bees
Invasive Argentine ants may be reservoirs for a virus menacing honeybees — and for previously unknown virus.
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Animals
When octopuses dance beak to beak
The larger Pacific striped octopus does sex, motherhood and shrimp pranks like nobody else.
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Animals
Same math describes relationship between diverse predators and prey
From lions to plankton, predators have about the same relationship to the amount of prey, a big-scale ecology study predicts.
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Animals
Long-tongued fly sips from afar
Long-tongued flies can dabble in shallow blossoms or reach into flowers with roomier nectar tubes.
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Animals
Seeing humans as superpredators
People have become a unique predator, hunting mostly adults of other species.