Brandon Keim

Ecologists argue balance is maintained by predators on the prowl.

Craig Foster reflects on a relationship that changed his connection to the natural world.

Animals are teaming up to adapt to a changing world.

Witnessing wildlife carry on is not just an escape. It’s reassuring.

Everyone knows forests are alive, but Suzanne Simard, who studies complex, symbiotic networks, helps us see that life anew. Even dying, for a tree, is not what it seems.Photograph by Tomasz Wrzesien / Shutterstock Talk of “Mother Trees,” from a scientist studying plant life, can sound fanciful, like something out of a fairy tale. Suzanne […]

Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed.

One spring day in 1984, Joyce Longcore got a phone call from Joan Brooks, a biologist at the University of Maine. Brooks had received a National Science Foundation grant to study the interactions of fungi and bacteria in peat bogs. She needed a hand, and she heard through the grapevine that Longcore knew a bit […]

Nearly three years ago, George Boorujy took a trip to Wolfe’s Pond Park, on the southeastern edge of Staten Island in New York City, and threw a bottle into the ocean.On a cold, sunny day this February, artist Brigitte Barthelemy, her husband, and their schnauzer, Elton, went for a walk on a beach in Royan, […]

Few creatures can boast of devotions so deep as greylag geese. Most are monogamous; many spend their decade-long adult lives with the same goose, side-by-side in constant communication, taking another partner only if the first should die. It’s a remarkable degree of fidelity, and it includes relationships of a sort that some humans consider unnatural.Quite […]

The sweet, avian romance of Harold and Maude.