Notebook

In Los Cabos, Mexico, a panga boat captain and a deep sea fishing enthusiast support researchers working to explain declines in Pacific fish populations.

Animal cells cannot produce 9 of the 20 amino acids they need to function. Some researchers are looking to change that.

The winding trail of environmental microplastics leads researchers to the human digestive ecosystem.

New techniques to quantify what lived in and on preserved animals throw light on how parasite abundance has changed over time.

Recording the pH within decaying organs for the first time, researchers come closer to understanding why some soft tissues are more likely to be preserved as fossils than others.

Researchers race to find ecological data kept on outdated media or in dusty backroom boxes—before they’re lost forever.

A decade-long, multicontinent study suggests that acoustic defense strategies are more common among moths than previously imagined.

Meet the grasshopper that has reproduced asexually for a quarter of a million years—without acquiring undue numbers of harmful mutations.

Finding a creature in the wild that had been considered long gone brings hope—and quite a bit of uncertainty.

The broken-wing display, in which birds fake being wounded to protect their nests from predators, is found across the avian phylogenetic tree, a study finds.

A survey of more than 200 whale skulls has unveiled bursts of evolution over the past 50 million years.

Meet the team trying to restore mollusk populations with the help of underwater speakers.

A strange layer in the fossil record contains evidence that fern populations exploded following the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous period. Scientists want to know why.

The compounds responsible for the earthy smell of recent rain are produced by a wide variety of bacteria and fungi. Recent research sheds light on why microbes bother.

Female fruit flies assess the physical symmetry of male suitors through the songs they sing, a study claims.

A study traces the effects of a mite outbreak from the earth to the heavens.

The fish use their stomach to swell up to three times their size. Is this why they can’t use the organ to digest proteins?

The fish species is separated from mammals by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, yet its seemingly primitive brain can handle many of the same elaborate visual tasks.

Once thought to be silent, fish turn out to produce a range of vocalizations—so polluting the oceans with noise could pose a danger to them.