Celebrate Thanksgiving with some of the animal kingdom’s greatest cooks, including marshmallow-roasting apes and salt-sprinkling monkeys Jack Tamisiea In the tropical forests of Central and South ...

HOUSTON -- (May 9, 2018) -- A complex genetic analysis has biologists re-evaluating some long-held beliefs about the way societies evolved following the invention of agriculture -- by six-legged ...

We have all been in that situation: the moving boxes are large and heavy, but we are determined to carry them all in one trip, even if that means we can’t see where we’re going. In the tropics, some ...

The Butterfly Pavilion welcomed a new species of critter this month, and it’s already making itself at home. The new leafcutter ant exhibit showcases the lives of these invertebrates, who are known ...

Leaf-cutter ant nests are biogeochemical hot spots where ants live and import vegetation to grow fungus. Metabolic activity and (in wet tropical forests) soil gas flux to the nest may result in high ...

Leafcutter ants of the American tropics exemplify animals that exhibit superorganism status, advanced social organization and symbiosis. As you walk through the jungle you become aware of these ...

Long before humans discovered agriculture 10,000 years ago, leafcutter ants started to farm fungi—55 to 60 million years ago. The leafcutter ants don't consume the leaves they collect. Their food does ...

The fact that cows produce a ton of greenhouse gas in the form of methane is science factoid that people tend to pull out in casual climate discussions (you have those, don’t you?). As it turns out, ...

From the bright lights of cities that don't sleep—where people hustle and bustle through the night to keep subways, servers, and supply chains alive—to the whisper-dark understory of tropical forests ...

It's a quandary – leafcutter ants cause a great deal of damage to tropical crops, but applying pesticides to those crops harms the environment. Scientists have developed a possible solution, in the ...

Tropical forests are one of the largest natural sources of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), and a tiny insect may play a big role in how those emissions are spread out across the landscape.

Scientists probing one of the mysteries of the insect world have identified a powerful chemical weapon used in the arms race between fungus-farming leafcutter ants and the parasites that plague them.