Photo right: One of the three potentially new species appears to be a robber frog, genus Craugastor, shown here. The unique skin folds on its arms and feet distinguish it from other closely related species. Robber frogs are especially susceptible to chytrid. (Photos by Brian Gratwicke, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

“It is disturbing to witness the disappearance of species that some of us only recently described and even more devastating to lose those we know are probably new species,” said Roberto Ibáñez, local director of the project and a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, one of nine project partners, including the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. “Scientists are just starting to investigate the ecological impact of the loss of amphibians, and while we’re aiming to preserve some of these species, we already know it will be impossible to save them all.”

Nearly one-third of all amphibian species globally are at the risk of going extinct. The rescue project aims to save more than 20 species of frogs in Panama, which is one of the world’s last strongholds for amphibian biodiversity. While the global amphibian crisis is the result of habitat loss, climate change and pollution, the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus is likely at least partly responsible for the disappearances of 94 of the 120 frog species that are thought to have gone extinct since 1980.

Photo left: Two of the three potentially new species is a rain frog from the genus Pristimantis. The species pictured here has a bright red stomach that is uncharacteristic for rain frogs, earning it the nickname “red tomato.”

Although it can take years to determine that a species is new to science, project researchers have identified some telltale signs indicating that the three species found in eastern Panama are, indeed, new. The first two are rain frogs from the genus Pristimantis. One of these species has a bright red stomach that is uncharacteristic for rain frogs, earning it the nickname “red tomato.” The second species is much larger than any known Pristimantis in the region. The third frog species appears to be a robber frog, genus Craugastor, but unique skin folds on its arms and feet distinguish it from other closely related species. Robber frogs are especially susceptible to chytrid.

A new study by Andrew Crawford, a STRI research associate, and colleagues reveals that many frog species at a site in western Panama have gone extinct before researchers knew they existed. The project’s three potentially new species are evidence of the same story playing out right now in the mountains of eastern Panama. Researchers have brought a handful of animals of each species back to the Summit Municipal Park in Panama City, Panama, where the project has turned used shipping containers into amphibian rescue pods.

“We are doing our best to salvage what we can, but we are in urgent need of funding to build capacity in Panama to house all of these chytrid refugees,” said Brian Gratwicke, a National Zoo research biologist and the international coordinator for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project. “The species is the basic unit of conservation, so these discoveries are rewarding, but that comes with the daunting responsibility of deciding how we look after them. We already have a huge job, and it just gets bigger with every discovery.”

Now project scientists will use collections of frogs from the same region at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum and elsewhere to determine if these species are genuinely new or if they have already been discovered (or “described”) elsewhere. The project has also collected tissue sample to use DNA testing to map out the animals’ closest genetic relatives.

“Finding a new species is like discovering a new Pablo Picasso,” said Gratwicke. “Each species is a priceless creation painted with the brushstrokes of natural selection on the canvas of DNA and has something of value to offer. We might not know how they’re valuable to us right now, but if they go extinct, we lose the opportunity to learn what secrets they hold.”

The mission of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is to rescue amphibian species that are in extreme danger of extinction throughout Panama. The project’s efforts and expertise are focused on establishing assurance colonies and developing methodologies to reduce the impact of the amphibian chytrid fungus so that one day captive amphibians may be re-introduced to the wild. Project participants include Africam Safari, Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente, Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Defenders of Wildlife, El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, Houston Zoo, Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Summit Municipal Park and Zoo New England.

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“Based on information about the survival of more than 30,000 seedlings of 180 species of tropical trees, we found that seedlings of rare species are much more sensitive to the presence of neighbors of their own species than seedlings of common species are,” said Liza Comita, the primary author on the study and now a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. “Not only does this tell us where to look for the mechanisms that explain why certain species are rare, but it also provides potential clues about how to conserve rare species that are most vulnerable to extinction.”

Photo left: Botanist Liza Comita measures the stem diameter of a seedling on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. (Christian Zieglar photo)

The lowland tropical forest on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island is the site of a huge long-term study focusing on plant diversity: more than 400,000 individual trees and shrubs of more than 300 species have been marked, mapped and measured every five years for the past 30 years. A unique window on climate change and other large-scale processes, the experiment was originally set up because two ecologists, Robin Foster, now at Chicago’s Field Museum, and Stephen Hubbell at UCLA, a co-author on this paper, had an argument about how life organizes itself.

What determines the members of a community? The study site—a patch of forest the size of nearly 100 football fields—is large enough to include individuals of many rare species that would not be present in smaller studies. After realizing that many of the processes that shape diversity happen early in a tree’s life, researchers decided to expand the study to include an annual survey of seedlings growing in the forest understory. This study of seedlings, led by Comita, Hubbell and Panamanian botanist and co-author Salomón Aguilar, has now been going for nearly a decade and has yielded new insights into this diverse forest.

For years, researchers have noticed that individual plants surrounded by neighbors of the same species do not grow and survive as well as individual plants surrounded by other species. Some evidence suggests that this is either because pests and pathogens move more readily among individuals of the same species or because they are competing with each other for the same resources.

“It became clear with this seedling survival survey that even though neighbors can be shaded out by individuals of the same or of other species, there are real differences in the survival of different species depending on how many of their neighbors are the same species,” said Helene Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian and adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. “Some of our colleagues are working on the specific mechanisms that explain these differences, and we look forward to seeing their results, which will be published soon.” –Beth King

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“When people disturb and destroy tropical forest they disrupt pollination systems,” says entomologist David Roubik, senior staff scientist at the Tropical Research Institute. “Now we can track orchid bees to get at the distances and spatial patterns involved in pollination—vital details which have completely eluded us in the past.”

The team trapped 17 iridescent blue-green orchid bees called Exaerete frontalis –a species common in the rainforest. “These bees easily carry a 300-milligram radio transmitter glued onto their backs,” says Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology and a research associate at the Smithsonian. “By following the radio signals with a hand-held antenna, we have discovered that male orchid bees spend most of their time in small core areas, but will take off and visit areas farther away.

One male even crossed over the shipping lanes in the Panama Canal, flew 5 kilometres, and returned to Barro Colorado Island a few days later. Such long distance flights, the researchers say, support the claim that bees are major agents of gene flow, connecting widely-dsipersed orchids or other plants which they alone pollinate, over fragmented landscapes and for an extended time. This study proves that “bees are key evolutionary players in allowing orchids and other tropical plants to evolve into diverse taxa that are each spatially rare and thus require long-distance pollination,” the researchers write.

In the past, researchers have struggled to determine the distances that bees travel by following individuals marked with paint, or using radar, which doesn’t work well when trees are in the way. “Carrying a transmitter may reduce the distance that the bees travel. But even if the flight distances we record are the minimum distances that these orchid bees can fly, they are impressive, long-distance movements,” said Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum and a STRI research associate. “These data help to explain how the orchids these bees pollinate can be so rare.”

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New York State Museum and the National Geographic Society all provided support for this study. Its co-authors are affiliated with the University of Arizona, Tucson, Cornell University, EcolSciences, Inc. and the New York State Museum.

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View Muddy Creek and the Rhode River in a larger map

To survey the animals swimming up and down Muddy Creek, researchers use a fish weir—an expanse of nets, gates and boardwalks—that temporarily blocks aquatic traffic. Once a week, the researchers close the weir, set out the nets and identify and count all the species that get trapped. They began collecting data in 1983.

This type of fine-scale surveying, done on a weekly basis, is rare. It’s even more unique to have such long-term data. Many ecological studies are funded for just a few years at a time. These short time frames make it difficult for scientists to observe changes and patterns in species populations and composition.

In honor of the 2010 U.S. Census, staff at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have created this slide show of a recent spring survey. The salinity on this April day was fairly low and nearly a dozen golden shiners (a freshwater minnow) were caught along with several estuarine-resident and a few diadromous (fish that migrate between fresh and saltwater) species. Among the highlights: a sizeable snapping turtle, many white perch in spawning condition, juvenile American eels and a parasite.

Human activity and environmental conditions can affect which species are swimming in Muddy Creek. The water is brackish and salinity levels change seasonally and from year to year. During winter and early spring, when freshwater flow is usually the highest, researchers will generally catch more freshwater species like bluespotted and banded sunfish–-two protected species in Maryland. During periods of high salinity, researchers can catch many species indicative of the higher saline lower Bay such as red drum, spotted sea trout and Spanish mackerel. –Tina Tennessen

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Photo right: The limosa harlequin frog (Atelopus limosus) is one of 54 species that Amphibian Ark has identified as a priority rescue species for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project. (Click to enlarge)

“Each container provides us with critical space to house animals that may represent the last chance for the survival of their species,” said Brian Gratwicke, a National Zoo research biologist and the international coordinator for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project. “The containers are now self-contained ‘amphibian rescue pods’ that have been specially modified to control the climate and keep diseases out.”

The rescue pods will be part of the project’s Amphibian Rescue Center at Summit Municipal Park, which will also include a lab with a quarantine facility. After frogs are collected in the field, they will be quarantined for 30 days before being moved to the rescue pods that will serve as their new home. In addition to the two containers that are now in Panama, Maersk Line has agreed to donate two containers per year for the next two years to the project, for a total of six. Shipping company APL has also donated one container this year. Each container offers 995 cubic feet of space to house these animals. The seven together will more than double the amount of captive space the project currently has in Panama to safeguard endangered amphibians.

Photo left: Shipping company Maersk Line has agreed to donate up to six used shipping containers similar to this one to the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project. The containers will serve as rescue pods for endangered amphibians.

“Maersk Line’s support of the amphibian rescue project is aligned with our long-term focus on sustainability,” said Mike White, head of Maersk Line’s North American organization. “Although we are pleased to donate these containers, the more valuable contribution is our expertise and resources. Our team’s assistance with documentation and transportation allows Brian’s group to concentrate on the overall effort.”

Amphibian Ark, an organization that mobilizes support for ex-situ (“out-of-the-wild”) conservation, has identified 54 amphibian species as rescue species for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project. At least 198 amphibian species live in Panama, of which 70 are listed as “critically endangered,” “endangered” or “data deficient” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Amphibian Ark estimates that about 500 amphibian rescue pods are needed to save the world’s 500 critically endangered amphibian species. Buying, outfitting and installing a single container costs about $50,000.

Photo right: Each shipping container offers 995 cubic feet of space to safeguard endangered species. (Photos by Brian Gratwicke)

“This requires an amount of resources that is insurmountable for the amphibian rescue community,” said Kevin Zippel, Amphibian Ark’s program director. “With a relatively small investment, the shipping industry has made a huge impact on one of the greatest conservation challenges that humanity has ever faced. We are currently seeking additional contributions of this kind.”

The mission of the Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is to rescue amphibian species that are in extreme danger of extinction from amphibian chytrid disease sweeping through Panama. The project’s focus is on developing appropriate technologies to control the amphibian chytrid fungus, so that one day captive amphibians may be reintroduced to the wild. Project participants include Africam Safari, ANAM (Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente), Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Defenders of Wildlife, Houston Zoo, Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Summit Municipal Park and Zoo New England.

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Image right: A pre-Columbian raised field in French Guiana filled with small, round mounds for growing crops.

Centuries ago these natives grew maize, manioc and squash upon a matrix of raised beds in flat, regularly flooded coastal marshes. Scooping slices of topsoil from the marsh they flipped them together and upside down, creating mounds which they topped with soil from other areas. Crops were planted, tended and harvested on this matrix of small islands.

Using aerial photographs, researchers have recently located a number of long abandoned “fossil” agricultural fields used by the Arauquinoid in coastal French Guiana. Follow-up examination of the soil and associated fragments from cooking implements, done in part by scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, have revealed microscopic starch grains from corn and manioc.  Squash phytoliths also were recovered from soil analysis.

Image left: The aerial photograph at top shows different types of raised fields in a complex in French Guiana. The bottom image is an interpretation of  these earthworks based on stereoscopic ananlysis and field studies.

This new research has revealed that in areas considered unsuitable for farming today, “pre-Columbian farmers constructed thousands of raised fields in the seasonally flooded coastal savannas of the Guianas,” scientists write in a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ”They built conspiciuous earthworks, including raised fields, canals and ponds, that enabled them to practice intensive permanent agriculture in this low-lying region with highly seasonal rainfall.”  The study combined archeology, archeobotany, paleoecology, soil science, ecology and aerial imagery and was carried out by scientists from a number of organization, including the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the University of Montpellier II and Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive in France, the University of Exeter, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Image right: A matrix of raised mounds in an abandon field in a part of French Guiana named Savane Grande Macoua. Only the mounds are above water level.

In a region that receives on average four meters of rain each year, scientists were puzzled why the mounds have not eroded into obscurity over the centuries. They discovered that ants and termites, living in the raised mounds since before they were abandoned by the Arauquinoid, have continually rebuilt them with large quantities of new organic matter. Earthworms, attracted to this rich soil, kept the mounds porous, allowing rain to percolate through without washing them away. Grasses and other plants keep the mounds stable. A survey of the ants and termites in these former agricultural swamps, revealed that their nests occur entirely on the mounds, with none in the low, often submerged, areas surround them.

Researchers now speculate that as the fertility of the mounds decreased with continued crop growing, these ancient farmers may have let their mound-matrix fields lay fallow, allowing ants, termites and worms to replenish the soil’s nutrients. This largely forgotten practice of growing crops in marshes and allowing ecological engineers such as ants and termites to replenish nutrients is a technique that may have practical uses in modern sustainable farms, the researchers write.

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Recently, scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama discovered that the brain region responsible for learning and memory is larger in the social queens than in the solitary queens of this species. Their study is the first comparison of the brain sizes of social and non-social individuals of the same species.

Image right: A tropical sweat bee, Megalopta genalisa, in her nest.

“The idea is that to maintain power and control in groups you need more information, so the bigger the group, the bigger individuals’ brains need to be.” says William Wcislo, Smithsonian staff scientist.

“It was surprising to us that even though the social queens don’t have bigger brains overall, the fact that the area associated with learning and memory–the mushroom body–was more developed in the social queens than in the solitary bees suggesting that social interactions are cognitively challenging, as predicted by the social brain hypothesis,” said Adam Smith, postdoctoral fellow at STRI.  “It’s interesting to see that a characteristic like brain development changes so immediately, even with this simple mother-daughter division of labor.”

This study was done in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s new insect neurobiology laboratory, built to take advantage of diverse tropical insect groups with a variety of brain sizes to understand how brain size and behavior are related

These results were published recently online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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The Stephen L. Wood collection brings the collection of bark beetles held in the Natural History Museum’s Department of Entomology to an impressive 180,000 specimens, making it one of the most extensive collections in world.

Image right: Bark beetle galleries or tunnels excavated in wood beneath the bark of an American elm. (Photo by Deborah Bell)

“The Smithsonian’s collection is arguably the most important bark beetle collection in the world,” says David Furth, entomology collections manager at the Natural History Museum. “We are proud to have the S. L. Wood beetles join our collection.”

Bark beetles, named for the fact that they live and reproduce in the inner bark of trees, are common pests of conifers, such as pine. Different species of bark beetles attack different species of trees, causing damage and spreading disease. Most bark beetle species are dark red, brown, or black, and about the size of a grain of rice. When viewed under magnification, their antennae are visibly elbowed with the outer segments enlarged and club-like. The antennae contain receptors that may detect tree resin odors, thus functioning as the beetle’s nose and enabling their ravenous appetites.

Image left: Entomologists Natalia Vandenburg and Dave Furth at the National Museum of Natural History with dozens of wooden drawers containing bark beetle specimens donated by Stephen L. Wood.

With more than 2,000 known species—some 200 are found in California alone—bark beetles are both ecologically and economically significant. Outbreak species of these tree-damaging beetles kill large areas of forests in western USA and may spread tree diseases like Dutch elm disease.

Dave Furth and other Entomology Department staff set out on a cross-country expedition, rental truck in tow, to bring Wood’s bark-beetle collection home to the Smithsonian. Consisting of some 181-specimen drawers, the collection was carefully transported from Provo, Utah to the Smithsonian in 2009.

Since that time, the Smithsonian’s entomology staff have brought the Wood’s bark beetles into the museum’s collection area and transferred and archived his massive library and correspondence records into the museum’s research library.

“We are pleased the S. L. Wood acquisition has joined the Smithsonian’s collection, and will contribute to the future study of the bark beetle,” Furth says. –Jessica Porter

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Danish researchers who have studied ants at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama since 1992 recently discovered that in both ant and bee species in which queens have multiple mates, a male’s seminal fluid favors the survival of its own sperm over the other males’ sperm. However, once sperm has been stored, leafcutter ant queens neutralize male-male sperm competition with glandular secretions in their sperm-storage organ.

“Two things appear to be going on here,” explains Jacobus Boomsma, professor at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at STRI. “Right after mating there is competition between sperm from different males. Sperm is expendable.  Later, sperm becomes very precious to the female who will continue to use it for many years to fertilize her own eggs, producing the millions of workers it takes to maintain her colony.”

Image right: Leafcutter ant queen

With post-doctoral researchers Susanne den Boer in Copenhagen and Boris Baer at the University of Western Australia, professor Boomsma studied sperm competition in sister species of ants and bees that mate singly—each queen with just one male—or multiply—with several males.

Their results, published this week in the prestigious journal, Science, show that the ability of a male’s seminal fluid to harm the sperm of other males only occurs in species that mate multiply, and that their own seminal fluid does not protect sperm against these antagonistic effects.

Image left: A leafcutter ant carries a leaf fragment back to its nest. (USDA photo)

“Females belonging to many species—from vertebrates to insects– have multiple male partners. Seminal products evolve rapidly, probably in response to the intense male-male competition that continues even after courtship and mating have taken place,” said William Eberhard, Smithsonian staff scientist. “This study continues the STRI tradition of looking at post-copulatory selection in a very biodiverse range of organisms, following in the footsteps of people like Bob Silberglied, who asked why butterflies and moths have two kinds of sperm in the 1970’s.”

Similar sperm competition systems appear to have evolved independently in ants and in bees. Researchers now aim to discover how genes that control sperm recognition in bees and ants may differ, thus continuing to elucidate the details of a process key to reproduction and evolution.

A grant from the Danish National Research Foundation and an Australian Research Council Fellowship supported this work.  Permits for ant collection and export were issued by Panama’s Autoridad Nacional de Ambiente (ANAM).

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. www.stri.org --Beth King

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