An academic prides herself in her powers of observation, but finds herself unable to change the fate of those suffering around her—whether it be a microscopic rotifer in biology lab, a long-dead boy whose letters she reads from the 1800s, or her twenty-one-year old cousin.

While he pens an excuse to withdraw from a community project, a biology professor reflects on other times he avoided confrontation and ruminates on unresolved dilemmas in his life.

Two female biologists spend a few months in a hotel in the Northeastern United States to research shore life, and whereas one pursues romance with men, the other feels spurned by unrequited love.

When an out-of-work anthropologist’s toxically masculine, aquarist father falls ill with breast cancer, the son must take care of his father by covering his work at the Detroit Zoo. In doing so, he learns to care for his father’s best friends, the amphibians in his exhibit.

A man and his wife visit their daughter and her newborn at a cottage in a tropical forrest. Though the daughter never told them she was pregnant, the parents vow to take care of their grandchild when illness strikes their family.

An aging man is taking care of his dementia-effected wife when his long-absent son—who has transformed into a silver-skinned, red-eyed creature—returns to Earth from his job as an outer space exobiologist.

A man intently studies extinct mammals to escape his wife and mistress, who often vent to him about their daily worries and give him anxiety.

A scientist travels across North America in search of a rare beetle, collecting stories along the way.

A married geneticist and pediatrician live across the world from each other. Their daughter watches her father's affair with a woman only seven years her elder in Oxford.

After a mysterious plague causes humans and animals to give birth to mutated creatures, a zookeeper and his mutated daughter struggle to keep their traveling zoo show in business.