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
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.
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Animals
Hummingbird tongues may work like micropumps
Hummingbird tongues work as elastic micropumps instead of simple thin tubes, researchers say in latest round of a scientific debate.
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Animals
Light pollution may disrupt firefly sex
Females of a common big dipper firefly weren’t as flashy when forced to flirt in LED light pollution.
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Animals
Biologists aflutter over just where monarchs are declining
Citizen science data fuel debate over whether weed control ruined monarch habitat and whether the butterflies are failing to reach their Mexican winter refuge.
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Animals
Boa suffocation is merely myth
Boa constrictors don’t suffocate prey; they block blood flow, says a new study that shatters a common myth about the snakes.
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Animals
First known venomous frogs stab with toxin-dripping lip spikes
Two Brazilian frogs jab foes with venoms more deadly than pit vipers'.