NATURE IS LIKE the mechanism in an enormous clock. Everything is neatly arranged and interconnected. Every entity has its place and its function.

Ravens have a role to play here: they spot bears from afar and help wolves by alerting the pack to approaching danger. In return, wolves allow ravens to help themselves to a share of the booty—something the birds wouldn’t be able to do without the wolves’ permission. Wolves would have no difficulty making a meal of ravens, but they teach their

It’s important for us to realize that even small interventions can have huge consequences, and we’d do better to keep our hands off everything in nature that we do not absolutely have to touch.

Insects exploit laws of nature to protect themselves against freezing. They use sugars they produce naturally to create a kind of antifreeze, and they empty their gut to minimize their water content, because tiny amounts of water don’t freeze until temperatures fall far below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Five microliters of water (which is a vanishingly

There are two forces at work here. Sick or weak animals separate themselves from others of their kind to hide in the undergrowth, or on hot summer days they wander near or into small streams to cool any wounds they might have. Here, they wait for death. That makes sense, because this way they don’t endanger their kin—weak animals attract the

Lightning plays its part by using its energy to combine atmospheric nitrogen with oxygen to create compounds plants can break down and absorb, and some trees and other plants have developed the ability to transform atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available compounds with the help of bacteria that live in special nodules on their roots. Alders, for

TREES CAN ACHIEVE great things together without meaning to, even when their achievements have nothing to do with survival.

This was the year wolves caught in Canada were released in Yellowstone to restore the park’s ecological balance. What happened in the years that followed, and continues to this day, is what scientists call a trophic cascade. Basically, this means a change in the entire ecosystem via the food chain, starting at the top. The wolf was now at the top

Trees have only two strategies to survive this roller coaster. First, most can survive in a wide range of climates. You can find beeches from Sicily to southern Sweden and birches from Lapland to Spain. Second, the genetic bandwidth within a species is very wide, so in a forest you can always find individual trees that can deal with the new