Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Scientists often divide predator species into two camps: ...

Predator-prey models have been shown to exhibit resonance-like behaviour, in which random fluctuations in the number of organisms (demographic noise) are amplified when their frequency is close to the ...

The number of lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) in the mountains can fluctuate sharply from one year to the next. Years when populations explode are called lemming years. These population explosions are ...

Predators are typically larger, faster, and more powerful than the animals they hunt. Yet in nature, most attacks fail. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by ...

By Ruth Kamnitzer Open any ecology textbook and you’ll find the Canada lynx, the snowshoe hare, and their wildly oscillating population cycles offered as a classic example of the intimate relationship ...

Imagine a cell more than three billion years ago. Consider that most local nutrients that might fuel the cell’s growth are already sequestered within nearby living cells. Imagine further that the cell ...