It pays to think out of the box. Tyler Cobb, a forestry graduate from the University of Alberta ventured into the forest one day with a pair of tweezers, a fistful of beetle droppings and a hypothesis. This forestry graduate discovered that beetle droppings are an indispensable part in replenishing soil nutrients to help plants […]

Viruses are spread by all kinds of vectors, or disease transmitting organisms. Examples of vector borne diseases include Malaria, whose parasite is transmitted by a mosquito, and Lyme Disease, which is an infectious bacterial disease that is transmitted by ticks. These and other diseases prove to be quite harmful and sometimes fatal if not treated […]

You would think that after all this time, after all this modern technology and after the hype about global warming and conserving the environment, that all forests have been explored, all rock have been turned and all species identified, if not explored to a certain degree. So it is surprising to find out that scientists […]

The animal world has all sorts of competition, but the most important competition of all is the survival of a species. How does the Bemisia tabaci, a whitefly, become the one of the most invasive pests in the world? Researchers embark on a quest to discover their secrets to success. The Bemisia tabaci species came […]

Arachnids are known to be tender towards one another. In fact, emotional spiders are a downright rarity. The Whip spiders, those scary looking creepy-crawlies are not as anti-social as people originally thought. A Cornell researcher, with the use of binocular zoom stereomicroscopes, was able to visualize the affection that is shared by the two species […]