Identifying spider webs by their overall shape is one of the easiest ways to learn more about the spiders living around your home. Web architecture can often point you toward …
Dark, crumbly, earthy, and surprisingly valuable in the garden, worm castings are the finished material produced when composting worms and microorganisms process organic waste. Gardeners sometimes call them “black gold” …
Gardeners spend a surprising amount of time moving organic matter around. We pull plants, carry them to a compost pile, wait for decomposition, then haul the finished compost back to …
An elephant standing quietly on an African savanna may be participating in a conversation that people nearby cannot even hear. Through elephant infrasound communication, these highly social animals produce deep, …
Imagine reaching adulthood and then, instead of continuing toward old age, reorganizing your body and returning to an earlier stage of life. A tiny marine animal called Turritopsis dohrnii can …
In the cold, dark waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic lives an animal whose lifetime may span several human centuries. The extraordinary Greenland shark lifespan has made Somniosus microcephalus …
Fallen leaves are often treated as garden waste, but keeping some fallen leaves for wildlife can support an active community of insects, spiders, decomposers, and ground-feeding birds. Beneath this natural …
A woodpecker’s bill may do the drilling, but reaching food hidden deep inside wood often requires another remarkable tool. Woodpecker tongue anatomy includes a specialized tongue-supporting system that allows some …
For months of the Arctic summer, reindeer can live under almost continuous daylight. Then winter arrives and their visual world shifts toward prolonged darkness and extended blue twilight. Remarkably, reindeer …
A dragonfly hovering over a pond can suddenly accelerate, bank into a tight turn, reverse direction, or intercept a flying insect with extraordinary precision. Behind those maneuvers is an unusual …