Over hundreds of million years of evolution, ants have come up with some pretty smart solutions to problems of agriculture, navigation and architecture. People could learn a thing or two.
Honey bees, wild and native bees face threats from parasites, pesticides and habitat loss. Shorter winters, more extreme weather and more habitat destruction won’t help.
Published in 1962, ‘Silent Spring’ called attention to collateral damage from widespread use of synthetic pesticides. Many problems the book anticipated persist today in new forms.
Climate change is exposing animals to temperatures outside of their normal limits – a new study has found that insects have a particularly weak ability to adjust.
Invertebrates are “the little things that run the world”. So researchers decided to count all the ants on Earth, to help monitor how they’re coping with environmental challenges.
Eating insects can carry a much lower environmental footprint than conventional meat. Should western cultures be incorporating more of them into their diets?
Ant feet are equipped with an array of tools – from retractable sticky pads to claws to special spines and hairs – enabling them to defy gravity and grip virtually any surface.
The son of a formerly enslaved mother, Charles Henry Turner was the first to discover that bees and other insects have the ability to modify their behavior based on experience.
Studying bee sperm is difficult because of the way it coils, but fluorescent light illuminates the head of the sperm. Sperm quality may indicate stress levels in the bee colony.
The iconic monarch butterfly has been added to the Red List of endangered species, but hasn’t received protection in the US yet. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.