All Stories by Susan Milius
- Animals
Baited camera snaps first live giant squid
For the first time, researchers have photographed a living giant squid in the wild.
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Dutch elm fungus turns tree into lure
The fungus that causes Dutch elm disease makes an infected tree strengthen its odors, attracting beetles that carry the fungus on to the next tree.
- Animals
Balls of Fire: Bees carefully cook invaders to death
Honeybees that defend their colonies by killing wasps with body heat come within 5 degrees C of cooking themselves in the process.
- Plants
Day-Glo Flowers: Some bright blooms naturally fluoresce
Some common flowers fluoresce but the glow most likely has little effect on pollinators.
- Animals
Perfect Match: Tied contest gives fish no hormone rush
A male fish produces a burst of hormones as he fights off an intruder, but this surge isn't triggered simply by fighting.
- Animals
Bumblebee 007: Bees can spy on others’ flower choices
Bumblebees that watched their neighbors feast on unusual flowers often later checked out the same kinds of blossoms themselves, a behavior that amounts to social learning.
- Animals
What’s That Knocking? Sound evidence offered for long-lost woodpecker
Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology has released recordings from the woods of eastern Arkansas that researchers say could be the distinctive drumming and calls of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
- Animals
Hey, kids, it’s time for drool
A researcher has for the first time decoded a vibrational signal used by paper wasps.
- Animals
When a chipmunk teases a rattlesnake
Several of the Northeast's least ferocious forest creatures taunt rattlesnakes.
- Animals
Faithful voles have hidden infidelities
Prairie voles, used for studying the biological basis of monogamy, do form social bonds but they also have more out-of-pair sexual encounters than most biologists had expected.
- Animals
Coati version of spoiled brats
A biologist reports that ring-tailed coatis in Argentina have a kind of dominance structure never before documented in animals, with adolescents as a group outranking their moms and older half-sibs.
- Animals
Getting the Gull: Baiting trick spreads among killer whales
A young male orca that spits up fish and then ambushes gulls attracted to the mess seems to have started a wave of cultural transmission.
