In the 1960s, a solitary man stood in the waters of Makah Bay in Washington state, throwing starfish out into the waves. From this simple act grew a monumental ecological insight with the potential to ...

Ecologists have long understood that the diversity of an ecosystem is at the heart of its stability. A groundbreaking discovery in the 1960s took it a step further and changed the way scientists ...

More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems Lesley Evans Ogden, Quanta Magazine In the late 1960s, Bob Paine ...

More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning? Anne ...