In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo, a volcanic peak on the Philippine Island of Luzon, literally blew its top. It was the second-most powerful volcanic eruption of the 20th century, ten times stronger than Mount Saint Helens, and its effects were devastating. Lava and ash spewed into the surrounding environment in the Zambales Mountains, pooling in layers up to 600 feet thick in the valleys. Following the eruption, powerful typhoons and monsoon rains triggered landslides and ash flows that continued […]

It's early 2019, and biologist Jay Storz is struggling to breathe. He has just made it to the top of Llullaillaco, a Chilean volcano about three-quarters the height of Mount Everest, in search of a rumor.

Rodents such as house mice (Mus musculus) aren't just pests at home, they can cause serious damage to native ecosystems.

Ninety-three years ago, a scientist trapped a mouse in a stream in Ethiopia. Of all the mice, rats, and gerbils in Africa, it stood out as the one most adapted for living in water, with water-resistant fur and long, broad feet. That specimen, housed at Chicago's Field Museum, is the only one of its genus ever collected, and scientists think it may now be extinct. But in a new study in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers have verified this semi-aquatic mouse's closest […]

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Tuesday that seeks to protect mountain lions and other wildlife from being poisoned by a popular form of pesticide.

Experts who study animal pheromones have traced the evolutionary origins of genes that allow mice, rats and other rodents to communicate through smell. The discovery is a clear example of how new genes can evolve through the random chance of molecular tinkering and may make identifying new pheromones easier in future studies. The results, representing a genealogy for the exocrine-gland secreting peptide (ESP) gene family, were published by researchers at the University of Tokyo in the journal […]

Good news for Western Australian wildlife with a recent study suggesting that mice numbers could be controlled with much smaller doses of poison.

Maureen Murray, V03, director of Tufts Wildlife Clinic and clinical associate professor at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, has been studying rodenticide exposure in birds of prey for over a decade. Exposure to rodenticides occurs when people use these chemicals to kill unwanted pests. Mice and rats, or possibly other animals, eat the poison, and then the birds eat the poisoned prey.

Australian rodents skulls all correspond to one simple, size-dependent shape that is more than ten million years old but it turns out this lack of change is the secret behind their survivor reputation.

I looked through the microscope at the insides of a dead smoky mouse, and could barely believe my eyes. Thousands of tiny smoke particles lined its lungs. But the mouse had been kept more than 50 kilometers from the nearest bushfires. How could this be?