A column of army ants races across the forest floor when suddenly the trail reaches a gap between branches. There is no engineer directing traffic and no leader ordering workers …
Across a tropical forest floor, thousands of ants march in organized trails, each carrying a freshly cut piece of leaf overhead. It looks as though the insects are hauling dinner …
A shark closes its jaws around what looks like an easy meal: a soft-bodied, eel-shaped hagfish. Then, almost instantly, the predator’s mouth fills with a strange fibrous slime. The material …
A red-eyed tree frog sleeping beneath a rainforest leaf hardly looks like one of nature’s most spectacularly colored amphibians. Its green body disappears against the foliage, its orange feet are …
Across parts of Africa, the dry season can transform a green landscape into a dusty expanse of brittle grass and leafless vegetation. Yet rising above that parched scenery is one …
A pack of African wild dogs has been resting in the shade. Suddenly, the animals rise, crowd together, wag their tails, touch noses, and burst into an energetic social ceremony. …
Imagine walking up to one apple tree and picking a green apple from one branch, a red apple from another, and a completely different cultivar from a third. That sounds …
When the last tomatoes are harvested and the vegetable garden begins to empty, leaving the beds bare until spring can seem perfectly reasonable. But bare soil is not resting. Rain …
A Komodo dragon walking across a dry Indonesian landscape repeatedly does something that looks almost snake-like. Its long yellow tongue shoots from its mouth, splits into two narrow tips, then …
A fruit tree does not have to spread into a broad, rounded canopy. With careful pruning and training, you can persuade its branches to grow in an almost two-dimensional pattern …