Animals
- Animals
Mother deer can’t ID their fawns by call
Fawns can distinguish their mom's voice from another deer's, but a mom can't pick out her fawn's call.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Crickets on Mute: Hush falls as killer fly stalks singers
Within just 5 years, singing has nearly died out among a population of cricket on a Hawaiian island.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Sexually Deceptive Chemistry: Beetle larvae fake the scent of female bees
Trick chemistry lets a bunch of writhing caterpillars attract a male bee that they then use as a flying taxi on their way to find food.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Family Tree: An arboreal genome is sequenced
Researchers have sequenced the genome of a tree for the first time.
- Animals
Battle of the Hermaphrodites
A biologist argues that combining the sexes can actually make gender wars worse.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Hey, Roach Babe: Male cockroaches give fancy courting whistles
Some male cockroaches whistle at females with surprisingly complex, almost birdlike whistles.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Flea treatment shows downside of social life
The flealike parasites that build up in a shared burrow take an unexpectedly large toll on the ground squirrel's reproductive success.
By Susan Milius - Animals
How do female lemurs get so tough?
Female ring-tailed lemurs may get masculinized by well-timed little rises of prenatal hormones.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Female moths join pheromone choruses
Female rattlebox moths can detect each other's male-luring pheromones and tend to gather in what may be a scent version of male frogs' chorusing around the pond.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Underage Spiders: Males show unexpected interest in young mates
Male Australian redback spiders mate readily with females too young to have external openings to their reproductive tracts, a tactic that reduces the male's risk of getting cannibalized.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Seabirds take record summer vacations
Sooty shearwaters that breed in New Zealand have set a new record for off-season travel, covering 64,000 kilometers between visits to their mating ground.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Crouching Scientist, Hidden Dragonfly
Although dragonflies are among the most familiar of insects, science is just beginning to unravel their complex life stories.
By Susan Milius