Susan Milius

Susan Milius

Life Sciences Writer

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

    Scent of alarm identifies male bed bugs

    When mistaken for females, the guys release an alarming pheromone.

  2. Life

    Spiders love sweet smell of blood perfume

    For on spider species, feeding on blood-gorged mosquitoes adds charm to a mate

  3. A partnership apart

    DNA in hand, scientists dissect and redefine the iconic lichen mutualism.

  4. Life

    Humpback whale alters song if another one sings along

    Acoustical study of male songs shows first evidence of the whales responding musically to each other.

  5. Manatee and whale woes with boat speed limits

    This isn’t a cop convention. These are marine mammal biologists, but they do care about speed limits. At the 18th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Science News reporter Susan Milius blogs about manatee researcher Edmund Gerstein's work on boat speeds and gory collisions with manatees. Gerstein is the guy at this meeting who has been arguing what sounds just backward at first. In circumstances such as murky water, he says, slow boats are more likely to hit manatees than are fast boats: Slow boats don’t make as much noise within the manatee hearing range, he says. So when manatees have to rely on sound to detect boats, the animals don’t pick up the warning until too late. There's also news on how well -- or not well -- speed limits set for boats that frequent the same waters as right whales are being followed.

  6. Sperm whales as a carbon sink

    New estimates suggest the mammals’ feeding habits help take in carbon.

  7. All kinds of tired

    Donkeys sleep about three out of each 24 hours. Certain reef fish spend the night moving their fins as if swimming in their sleep. Some biologists argue that all animals sleep in some form or another. But identifying sleep can get complicated. Insects have brain architecture so different from humans’, for example, that electrophysiological recordings […]

  8. Health & Medicine

    Pigs use mirrors

    After some time to play around with a mirror, pigs figure out what to do when they glimpse a reflection of food.

  9. Animals

    Ants in the pants drive away birds

    Yellow crazy ants can get so annoying that birds don’t eat their normal fruits, a new study finds.

  10. Agriculture

    Potato famine pathogen packs unusual, sneaky genome

    DNA of infamous Phytophthora microbe reveals big, quick-changing zones, possibly the key to the pathogen’s vexing adaptability

  11. Ecosystems

    Google works on a different web

    Page ranking system inspires algorithm for predicting food webs’ vulnerability.

  12. Earth

    Oh, rats — there go the snails

    A food fad among introduced rats has apparently crashed a once-thriving population of Hawaii’s famed endemic tree snails.