It's twenty past seven on a winter morning. Our research vessel drifts off Seal Island, South Africa. A lone Cape fur seal pup porpoises through the gently rolling swells toward the island. Suddenly, a ton of white shark launches from the water like Read more...

Some people think that plants respond to talking, the playing of music, and other forms of human attention. And although plants more than likely do not process human language, they are nonetheless highly aware of their surroundings and are very capable Read more...

It’s 3 a.m. in mid-November of a recent year, well past the witching hour on Virginia’s side of the Delmarva Peninsula. The loblolly pine woods smell of decay; fallen leaves are a slippery mulch. Briars tangle in my hair as I trip down a narrow, root-lined Read more...

"The dugout canoe does not know the depth of the water” (Umubindi ushira uvimye). So say the Hangaza, a group of more than 150,000 people who live along Lake Victoria, west of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. The proverb rings true: floating on Read more...

A year ago, January 2011: Norman Smith steers his truck over a washboard bridge that crosses from the Massachusetts mainland onto Duxbury Beach, a slender barrier peninsula thirty miles southeast of Boston. Jagged ice floes push up and over the road that Read more...

Skunks have an unfavorable reputation because the overpowering spray from their anal glands strikes our primal sense of smell. In his journal on the Beagle voyage, while passing the night in Punta Alta, Argentina, Charles Darwin noted: We saw also Read more...

Bacteria have adapted to a huge range of environments on earth, surviving and multiplying in and on plants and animals, in rock layers deep beneath the surface, in searing desert soils, under polar ice, and under extremely high temperatures and pressures Read more...

A full-grown chapil palm tree can reach 110 feet tall, its corona of forty-foot fronds stretching skyward above the surrounding canopy. Competition for space and light can be intense among rain forest trees, and every mature, fruit-producing chapil that Read more...

I’ve been obsessed with cormorants for several years now, ever since I wrote my interdisciplinary master’s thesis on the seabirds. My studies took me all over North America, to four other continents, and almost to bankruptcy court trying to fund all Read more...

Every day, I and my undergraduate assistant Kim Brockmann fed a Snapple bottle full of cow’s blood to our captive vampire bats. Our colony consisted of twenty-two animals—eleven common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) and eleven white-winged vampires Read more...