In a quiet summer garden, a caterpillar perches on a branch, munching serenely on leaves. A moment later it freezes. It senses danger—and just in time. From behind, a wasp approaches, sizing up its prey. Tobacco hornworm caterpillars don’t look like they have ears, and yet they’re able to sense predators such as wasps. How
Satellite data shows a browning trend across the planet since around the turn of the century. Credit: ezypix/Getty Around 56 million years ago, a sharp rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led to severe global warming that transformed the planet’s surface. A detailed reconstruction of an ancient ecosystem suggests that this transformation included a
A juvenile female of the mantid species Choeradodis rhomboidea was collected as part of an effort to catalog insects in the Amazon.Credit: Bernardo Ferraz/BioInsecta The Amazon’s lush rainforest harbours a hidden world of tiny creatures, nearly all of them unknown to science. But now hundreds of scientists in Brazil are collaborating on a quest to
Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites Dino Martins Knopf (2026) Togetherness: How Symbiosis Can Change the Way We Understand Our World, Ourselves and Our Future Rowan Hooper Fern (2026) Humans often fancy that we are independent creatures, living sealed off from other species. Yet, that false sense of
we are not even One month into “super” Niño, the Pacific’s natural weather pattern characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures, and fisheries around the world are already turbulent. In Peru, government officials have effectively canceled the anchovy fishing season, one of the country’s most important exports and a leading source of fish oil and animal