All Stories by Susan Milius
- Plants
Animals’ jaundice pigment found in plants
Bilirubin, a compound well known in animals, gives seed fuzz its intense orange.
- Ecosystems
Marine census: Surprising number of creatures bipolar
Census of Marine Life offers a preview of massive international census gives fuller count, shows some sea species at both poles.
- Climate
Winter birds shift north
More than 170 common North American species are wintering farther north than they did in the past.
- Life
Caterpillar noise tricks ants into service
Sneaky interlopers mimic the “voice” of an ant queen to get royal treatment from the colony. (Audio included.)
- Life
Nemo could get lost again as seawater approaches acidity
Reef fish raised at a seawater pH expected for the year 2100 don't smell their way around normally.
- Life
Serotonin turns shy locusts into cereal killers
Serotonin can turn solitary locusts into swarming biblical-scale crop destroyers.
- Life
A honeybee tells two from three
Honeybees can generalize about numbers, at least up to three, a new study reports.
- Life
Carlsbad’s 8 million ‘lost’ bats likely never existed
Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate of extreme bat number.
- Life
Everyday tree deaths have doubled
In past 50 years, apparently healthy forests have started losing trees faster, possibly because of climate change.
- Life
Three deep-sea fish families now one
Male and young whalefish look so different from females that scientists had mistakenly put them all in different families.
- Life
A Most Private Evolution
The most dramatic examples of the power of evolutionary theory may come from the strange and ugly stuff — biology too dumb to have been designed.
- Life
Superloud moth jams bat sonar
Newly recorded moth could be the first demonstrated case of natural sonar-jamming.
