Susan Milius

United States, Washington, D.C.

Biodiversity enthusiast. Writer for Science News magazine. (Tweets my own opinion.) Awed fan of invertebrates, fungi and pretty much all of the tangled bank.

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Articles

Frog ribbits erupt via an extravagant variety of vocal sacs

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

Here’s a great case of real life turning out to be stranger than fiction. From baby’s first storybook to sly adult graphic novels, the story we’re told is the same: Male frogs croak with the bottom of their mouths ballooning out in one fat, rounded bubble. Yet “that’s actually only half the species of frogs,” says herpetologist Agustín Elías-Costa of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Science Museum in Buenos Aires. The diversity of body parts for ribbitting is astounding.
Bats wearing tiny mics reveal how the fliers avoid rush hour collisions

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

The first bat-wearable microphone is helping biologists study the bats’ good safety record at avoiding collisions in rush hour air. On summer evenings, in around a minute, some 2,000 greater mouse-tailed bats can crowd out of a cave opening only about three meters square in Israel’s Hula Valley, says neuroecologist Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University. From a distance, their emergence looks like “a plume of smoke,” he says.
Is that shark ticking? In a first, a shark is recorded making noise

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

Sharks may not be the sharp-toothed silent type after all. The clicking of flattened teeth, discovered by accident, could be “the first documented case of deliberate sound production in sharks,” evolutionary biologist Carolin Nieder, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and colleagues propose March 26 in Royal Society Open Science.
A nearly century-old dead date palm tree helped solve an ancestry mystery

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

What the island nation of Cape Verde cherishes as its own distinctive kind of date palm is getting an ancestry reveal. The Cape Verde date palm (Phoenix atlantica), native to the island nation it’s nicknamed for, is one of three trees there that don’t grow in the wild anywhere else. The islands, scattered off western Africa’s big bulge, have six known species of native trees all together.
How fish biologists discovered birds of paradise have fluorescent feathers

Feb 24, 2025 | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

With flashy feathers and fancy moves, birds of paradise are already known for extravagant looks. But a trick that boosts that zing has been overlooked by science, until now. In the right light, natural biofluorescence can intensify the birds’ colors — an insight that, believe it or not, comes from a trio of fish biologists. Thirty-seven of the 45 known species of the bird family Paradisaeidae naturally fluoresce, the researchers report February 12 in Royal Society Open Science.
How a mushroom coral goes for a walk without legs

Feb 14, 2025 | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

A coral walks into a (sand) bar. This may sound like a joke. But new time-lapse photography shows new details of how a squishy, loner coral polyp without legs manages to “walk.”Instead of banding together to build coral reefs, mushroom corals typically live alone. From the outside, these corals (within the family Fungiidae) look like shaggy round mushroom caps that fell into the ocean.
Eating poop is surprisingly common among animals

Feb 12, 2025 | snexplores.org | Susan Milius

B12: Also known as cobalamin, it’s a vitamin that plays a role in the proper function and development of blood cells and many types of tissues. These include the brain and nerves. bat: A type of winged mammal comprising more than 1,400 separate species — or one in every four known species of mammal. biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things. biology: The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.
Extinct moa ate purple trufflelike fungi, fossil bird droppings reveal

Feb 6, 2025 | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

For the first time, ancient DNA from droppings left by New Zealand’s flightless moa identifies actual species of fungi the doomed birds ate. The snacks, including purple lumps of a trufflelike fungus, might have been berry mimics, says paleoecologist Alex Boast of Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research in Lincoln, New Zealand.
Mole or marsupial? This subterranean critter with a backward pouch is both

Jan 23, 2025 | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

Evolving a dig-in-the-dark mole lifestyle comes with radical anatomical changes, making it hard even to guess the animal’s closest relatives. That’s why the true identity of Australia’s most enigmatic and cryptic mammal, the marsupial mole, has been called into question for decades. The two fit-in-your-hand Notoryctes species are elusive.
Poop is on the menu for a surprising number of animals

Jan 8, 2025 | sciencenews.org | Susan Milius

Feces don’t get enough credit as food. The stinky stuff is not just an end product after food gets eaten, digested and finally discarded by animal guts. Poop can also be something nutritious, useful and actually eaten (again) in its own right, three researchers point out in the December issue of Animal Behaviour. Tallying just the examples from vertebrates reported in scientific journals, the authors document coprophagy in more than 150 species, from adult black bears to baby koalas.