“Trees are a magnificent example of how a single organism can accumulate mutations over time. The sheer genetic diversity in a single long-lived tree might surprise you."

Chicago has a few thousand coyotes, and because they eat rats, we're very fond of them.

Live fast, die young. Grow slow, live long. True for plants, too, whether big trees or small herbs.

Venus Fly Traps can count.

Before a sapling ever reaches for the canopy, it spends quiet years building strong, tangled roots beneath the surface. Good things take patient groundwork to stand tall. What foundation are you quietly working on right now?

Carnivorous plants are nefarious.

If anything has standing, it's a tree.

The proposed new anthropogenic ecosystem is higher quality than it sounds: Chicago slag barrens.

Last Fridays Poetry open mic Friday, September 25, 7 p.m., at Esquina Event Space, 4602 N. Western Ave., Chicago. See you there!

Check the ID. It might be forged. Never trust plants.

Aliens are captivating, but Semiosis is a first-contact story that skips aliens entirely and gives us a stranger complication.

Opens January 1. Theme: Non-Human Resources. No fee, up to 3500 words. Open to non-professional writers.

There’s the original Swiftiephylus taylorae, along with S. amator (“love”), S. intrepidus (“fearless”), and S. poetorum (“poets”)

Good short story by Ken Liu.

The answer might be a lack of sheep.

Our disasters are nicer than your disasters!