Community ecology is the study of interactions between different species of living things, and lets ecologists examine the effects of predator-prey relationships, parasites, and mutually beneficial interactions. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll examine the myriad interspecies interactions with examples, see how keystone species impact their environment and explore how communities rebuild when they are disrupted, through the lens of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us see the world.
An undead city under siege, soldiers and police ruthlessly shooting down waves of zombies that flood from infected streets, trying to escape and infect more cities. This is what happens when your body fights cancer, more exciting than any movie.
Plato famously described the human psyche as two horses and a charioteer: One horse represented instincts, the other represented emotions, and the charioteer was the rational mind that controlled them.
A biologist’s natural habitat is anywhere questions about life are being asked—whether the subject is a nematode or a narwhal, a single cell, or a whole ecosystem.
The deadliest is probably the funnel-web spider and its relatives. The Sydney funnel web spider (Atrax robustus) can kill a toddler in about 5 minutes and a 5-year-old in about 2 hours.
Could the next wonder drug be somewhere in Canada's snowy north? Take a trip to this beautiful, frigid landscape as chemist Normand Voyer explores the mysterious molecular treasures found in plants thriving in the cold.
When you eat a salad for lunch, you’re digging into a giant pile of plant organs. That’s right—plants are made up of organs, only theirs follow a totally different set of rules from our own.
Somewhere in your body, your immune system just quietly killed one of your own cells, stopping it from becoming cancer, and saving your life. It does that all the time.
The lab mice we use for genetic studies are not only closely related, but live out their whole lives in a sterile environment, so they don’t tell us everything we need to know about actual humans.
In a remote part of Scotland, expert bird handler Lloyd Buck sets up a game of hide and seek for his golden eagle Tilly to test just how good her eyesight is.
The infection from HBO's The Last of Us is actually based on a real parasitic fungus. This fungus turns insects into zombies. The creators of the game and the show were inspired by zombie carpenter ants.
There is this idea floating around that what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. That surviving a disease leaves you better off. And it seems to make sense because we have all experienced this.