Biodiversity

A small mammal that likes to feast on a soybean pest in Brazil's Cerrado illustrates how preserving this savanna landscape is good for farms as well as biodiversity

Editor's Note: "The Richest Reef" follows members of a scientific dive team as they attempt to pinpoint the center of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystem in the world.

It must be the Year of the Sponge here at The Artful Amoeba, because I can’t seem to write enough posts about sponges and their amazing micro-scale architecture.

The exhibit displays organisms at the extreme ends of normal evolutionary distributions

Higashijima Island doesn't look like much from the sky. This tiny, uninhabited scrap of land 1,000 kilometers south of the coast of Japan is only a few hectares in size.

Author's note: This is the latest post in the Wonderful Things series. You can read more about this series here. There is a fungus on our planet which is capable of not one, but two audacious and duplicitous acts: it pretends, on separate occasions, to be both to be a flower and a pollen grain, [...]

How do you transport two young orangutans to a zoo thousands of kilometers away from their native lands? Here's the simple answer: FedEx. Here's the less simple answer: It's a lot of work.

Thimmayya, a Jenu Kuruba tribesman who lives in the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve is leading the way. Following him is Killivalavan Rayar, a senior research associate working with WCS India Program.

The delta smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus) may be all but extinct in the wild, but it turns out that hope is not quite lost for this controversial California fish.

An unassuming little fern has left scientists scratching their heads at the feat of reproductive hijinks it apparently represents. The fern, xCystocarpium roskamianum(the prefix ‘x’ indicates it is a hybrid), collected in the French Pyrenees, appeared to be a blend of two ferns they know well.

A hungry polar bear (Ursus maritimus) will eat just about anything. Oh sure, they prefer to dine on nice fatty seals (I mean, what Arctic creature wouldn't?), but when push comes to shove they'll eat caribou, walruses, nuts, birds, and even stinky, rotten whale carcasses.

If ever there was a face that read, "Goddamn it, they found me," this is it. That small, downturned mouth, ever-so-slightly ajar in a moment of panicked contemplation, it really just says it all.