All Stories by Susan Milius
- Life
Long genital spines on male wasps can save their lives
A male wasp’s genital spines can save his life in an encounter with a scary tree frog, a new study shows.
- Life
Certain young fruit flies’ eyes literally pop out of their head
The first published photo sequence of developing Pelmatops flies shows how their eyes rise on gangly stalks in the first hour of adulthood.
- Life
Video reveals that springtails are tiny acrobats
Poppy seed–sized cousins of insects, famed for wild escape leaping, right themselves in mid-falls faster than cats.
- Animals
Video captures young mosquitoes launching their heads to eat other mosquitoes
New high-speed filming gives a first glimpse of mosquito hunting too fast for humans to see.
- Animals
After eons of isolation, these desert fish flub social cues
Pahrump poolfish flunked a fear test, but maybe they’re scared of other things.
- Animals
‘Murder hornets’ have a new common name: Northern giant hornet
Anti-Asian hate crimes helped push U.S. entomologists to give a colorful insect initially dubbed the Asian giant hornet a less inflammatory name.
- Animals
These huntsman spiders do something weird: live together as a big, happy family
Five unusual species of spider moms let youngsters live at home way past the cute waddling baby phase.
- Animals
An ‘acoustic camera’ shows joining the right boy band boosts a frog’s sex appeal
Serenading with like voices may help male wood frogs woo females into their pools, analysis of individual voices in a frog choir shows.
- Plants
These flowers lure pollinators to their deaths. There’s a new twist on how
Some jack-in-the-pulpit plants may use sex to lure pollinators. That's confusing for male fungus gnats — and deadly.
- Animals
Invasive jorō spiders get huge and flashy — if they’re female
Taking the pulse (literally) of female jorō spiders hints that the arachnid might push farther north than a relative that has stayed put in the South.
- Animals
Genetically modified mosquitoes could be tested in California soon
The EPA also OK’d more trials in Key West, Fla. Both states now get their say in whether to release free-flying Aedes aegypti to sabotage their own kind.
- Animals
Mirror beetles’ shiny bodies may not act as camouflage after all
Hundreds of handmade clay nubbins test the notion that a beetle’s metallic high gloss could confound predators. Birds pecked the lovely idea to death.
