Insects: tiny, alien. We tend to treat them like little machines, little nuisances, little scurrying things we call “It.†Swat It! Catch It! Don't let the dog eat It! But we really should cry, Swat Him, Swat Her! – because insects, just like other animals, are biologically and genetically gendered as males or females. Insect
In the womb, a fetus's digestive system is squeaky clean. After birth, a baby is exposed to microbes which quickly colonize its gut. After only one year of age, a baby has already attained a complex community of intestinal flora comparable to that of a full-grown adult. A long-standing relationship Research in recent years has
I was always dimly aware of elephant poaching for ivory, but it didn't alarm me until I spent a year working as a tropical ecology research assistant in central Africa. I was in Gabon, a heavily forested small country in the heart of the Congo basin on Africa's west coast. Gabon is home to roughly
