Biology

Deep in a maze of tunnels, a single female runs the whole operation. She is the only naked mole-rat in her colony who breeds. The dozens of other females around her, her daughters and sisters, live…

Watch a group of apes just before the food arrives, and you can feel the room tighten. Bananas or sugarcane are about to land in the middle of a hierarchy, and everyone knows it. In those loaded…

In the Brazilian savanna a capuchin monkey climbs onto a flat block of stone with a palm nut in one hand. It sets the nut down, picks up a second stone, raises it above its head with both arms, and…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…