animals

By the early ’90s, ecologists had amassed sufficient time-series information units on species populations and sufficient computing energy to check these concepts. There was only one drawback: The chaos didn’t appear to be there. Solely…

There are three ways to die: of injury, disease, or old age. Over time, humans have gotten better at avoiding the first two, but as we get older, senescence—the gradual deterioration of bodily functions with age—is inevitable. Some…

Historically, Shelta Cave was one of the most diverse cave systems in the eastern United States. Long before Niemiller and other scientists came along, beetles, salamanders, shrimp, crayfish, and other animals lived out their days in the…

But outside the walls of Warm Springs, so much is beyond the recovery team’s control. By nature, salmon transcend borders and boundaries, which exposes them to a gauntlet of threats. In rivers, fish face warmer water, droughts,…

Stewart says public interest in spiders and scorpions has exploded as people realize they are actually low-maintenance pets that don't need walking three times a day and can be kept in apartments or small homes without a backyard.…

Around a hundred miles to the south of Chileno Valley Road, another group of volunteers—the Alma Bridge Newt Patrol—have been painstakingly documenting more than 5,000 newts a year that perish while crossing a 4-mile stretch of road in…

Watching a boa constrictor capture and consume its prey is quite something. First, the snake strikes and latches onto the prey with its teeth, then it coils its body tightly around the poor creature and slowly squeezes the life from it.…