All Stories by Susan Milius
- Animals
Road rage keeps ants moving smoothly
Streams of ants manage to avoid traffic gridlock by a bit of strategic pushing and shoving.
- Animals
Hornbills know which monkey calls to heed
Hornbills can tell the difference between two kinds of alarm calls given by monkeys.
- Animals
New Green Eyes: First butterfly that’s genetically modified
Scientists have genetically engineered a butterfly for the first time, putting a jellyfish protein into a tropical African species so that its eyes fluoresce green.
- Animals
Jungle Genes: First bird genome is decoded
Researchers have unveiled a draft of the first bird genome to be sequenced, a vintage chicken.
- Animals
Fox Selection: Bottleneck survivors show surprising variety
Foxes native to a California island—famous for the least genetic diversity ever reported in a sexually reproducing animal—have some variation after all.
- Ecosystems
Bird Dilemma: More seabirds killed when boats discard fewer fish
A long-term study of great skuas shows that when fishing fleets discard less fish, birds that scavenge for waste make up for the loss by increasing attacks on other seabirds.
- Animals
Flesh Eaters: Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young
A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects carrion from carcasses has an unexpected taste for live, abandoned wasp young.
- Animals
How blind mole rats find their way home
The blind mole rat is the first animal discovered to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a magnetic compass.
- Animals
Where’d I Put That?
Birds that hide and recover thousands of separate caches of seeds have become a model for investigating how animals' minds work.
- Ecosystems
Mangrove Might: Nearby trees boost reef-fish numbers
Coastal mangroves give an unexpectedly important boost to reef fish.
- Animals
Fish in the dark still size up mates
Female cave fish still have their ancestral preference for a large male, even though it's too dark to see him.
- Animals
Vanishing Vultures: Bird deaths linked to vet-drug residues
The recent puzzling crash in vulture populations in Pakistan comes not from some new disease but from exposure to veterinary drug residues in livestock carcasses.
