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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 Photo right: Tintinnophagus acutus dinospore, with a flagellum.

Of the approximately 2,000 known species of living dinoflagellates, about 150 are parasitic. These organisms can alter the marine food web, in some cases destroying prey that consumers like copepods and larval fish rely upon. Coats first spotted T. acutus in the 1980s, in plankton samples he had collected from the Chesapeake Bay. Through his microscope, he noticed a ciliate being edged out of its lorica (shell) by a dinoflagellate. It looked different from others he had observed.

Describing a species is a serious undertaking. In the case of T. acutus, Coats and his collaborators documented its microscopic life cycle, conducted extensive DNA analysis and unearthed scientific papers dating back to 1873—when parasitic dinoflagellates were first noted by German scientist Ernst Haeckel.

Much of Coats’ work involved understanding, questioning and clarifying various accounts of similar dinoflagellates that have been written over the years. He read studies published in French, German and English. This thorough research resulted in more than the introduction of T. acutus: it provided new understanding of the evolutionary relationships among parasitic dinoflagellates and it better defined their position within the dinoflagellate lineage of the tree of life.

Photo left: The host lorica (shell) contains the host ciliate Tintinnopsis cylindrica (upper part), which is being consumed by the parasitic dinoflagellate Tintinnophagus acutus (bottom, yellow). (Wayne Coats photos)

Protist phylogeny has never been Coats’ primary focus. T. acutus is the second species that he has named and described. This fall Coats will retire from SERC; he says he expects to have time to describe a few more species of parasitic dinoflagellates. –Tina Tennessen

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The star in question is known as a white dwarf. When a sun-like star reaches the end of its life, it swells to form a red giant. Its outer layers then puff off, leaving behind a hot core of carbon and oxygen. This white dwarf is very dense, cramming half a sun’s worth of material into a sphere the size of Earth. A teaspoon of white dwarf would weigh more than a ton.

Image right: This artist’s concept shows a white dwarf star surrounded by the bits and pieces of a disintegrating asteroid. Astronomers have found a white dwarf that shredded and gulped down an object the size of Ceres. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle )

An international team of astronomers examined thousands of white dwarfs to look for ones with unusual chemical compositions. They followed up their strangest target with the MMT Observatory in Arizona. This target is located about 440 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Gemini. (A light-year is 6 trillion miles.)

This white dwarf showed strong signs of chemical elements like silicon, magnesium, calcium, and iron – all of which are abundant in rocky planets like Earth. Since a white dwarf’s gravity is so strong (100 thousand times Earth’s gravity), these heavy elements should have sunk out of sight below the surface. Since we can see them, they must have been deposited there relatively recently (in an astronomical sense).

The most likely source is a rocky planet that wandered too close to the white dwarf and got torn apart by tidal forces. The debris settled into a disk around the white dwarf and is raining down onto the star’s surface. Observations from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii detected this debris disk, confirming the astronomers’ theory.

Judging from the amount of material on the white dwarf and surrounding it, the hapless planet was about the size of Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system.

Photo left: The Multiple Mirror Telescope. (Photo by: Howard Lester)

The team also noted that the amount of hydrogen the white dwarf has swallowed is much less than expected. (In our solar system, Ceres contains a significant amount of ice, which would split into hydrogen and oxygen if consumed by a white dwarf.) This suggests that any water or ice the dwarf planet possessed was boiled off long ago by the red giant’s heat.

“There are now more than 450 extrasolar planets known, all of them bigger than Earth, and we don’t really know much about their compositions. Here we’re seeing the remnants of an extrasolar dwarf planet, which gives us a chance to learn about the chemistry of worlds in distant planetary systems,” said Mukremin Kilic of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

“White dwarf science is telling us that there are many small planets similar to those in our solar system out there. Since it is not possible to detect such small objects in orbit around other stars with our current technology, studies such as this one offer a unique opportunity to learn about other planetary systems,” added lead author Patrick Dufour of the University of Montreal. –Christine Pulliam

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Image right: Asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit, like the one shown in this artist’s conception, threaten to impact our planet. The new Pan-STARRS observatory offers our first line of defense, surveying huge swaths of the sky every night looking for moving objects. (Artwork by David A. Aguilar)

Pan-STARRS is an all-purpose machine,” said Harvard astronomer Edo Berger. “Having a dedicated telescope repeatedly surveying large areas opens up a lot of new opportunities.”

PS1 has been taking science-quality data for six months, but now we are doing it dusk-to-dawn every night,” says Dr. Nick Kaiser (University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, or IfA), the principal investigator of the Pan-STARRS project.

Pan-STARRS will map one-sixth of the sky every month. By casting a wide net, it is expected to catch many moving objects within our solar system. Frequent follow-up observations will allow astronomers to track those objects and calculate their orbits, identifying any potential threats to Earth. PS1 also will spot many small, faint bodies in the outer solar system that hid from previous surveys.

“PS1 will discover an unprecedented variety of Centaurs [minor planets between Jupiter and Neptune], trans-Neptunian objects, and comets. The system has the capability to detect planet-size bodies on the outer fringes of our solar system,” said Smithsonian astronomer Matthew Holman.

Pan-STARRS features the world’s largest digital camera–a 1,400-megapixel (1.4 gigapixel) monster. With it, astronomers can photograph an area of the sky as large as 36 full moons in a single exposure. In comparison, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope’s WFC3 camera spans an area only one-hundredth the size of the full moon (albeit at very high resolution).

Photograph left: Pan-STARRS PS1 Observatory just before sunrise on Haleakala, Maui. (Photo by Rob Ratkowski)

Its sensitive digital camera was rated as one of the “20 marvels of modern engineering” by Gizmo Watch in 2008. Inventor Dr. John Tonry (IfA) said, “We played as close to the bleeding edge of technology as you can without getting cut!”

Each image, if printed out as a 300-dpi photograph, would cover half a basketball court, and PS1 takes an image every 30 seconds. The amount of data PS1 produces every night would fill 1,000 DVDs.

“As soon as Pan-STARRS turned on, we felt like we were drinking from a fire hose!” said Berger. He added that they are finding several hundred transient objects a month, which would have taken a couple of years with previous facilities.

Located atop the dormant volcano Haleakala, Pan-STARRS exploits the unique combination of superb observing sites and technical and scientific expertise available in Hawaii. Funding for the development of the observing system was provided by the U.S. Air Force.

The PS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions of the PS1 Science Consortium (PS1SC): IfA; the Pan-STARRS Project Office; the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany; the Johns Hopkins University; the University of Durham; the University of Edinburgh; the Queen’s University Belfast; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; the Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; and the National Central University of Taiwan.Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

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Image right: In this photograph of the sun taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on March 30, 2010, the color red shows emission from ionized helium at a temperature of 140,000 Fahrenheit, while green shows ionized iron at a temperature of 1,800,000 F. Credit: NASA.

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the observatory is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate.

The observatory carries three state-of the-art instruments for conducting solar research: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, and the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. These three instruments observe the sun simultaneously, performing the entire range of measurements necessary to understand solar variations. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is a major partner in the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which is a group of four telescopes that photograph the sun in 10 different wavelength bands, or colors, once every 10 seconds. Its images will help astronomers link changes in the sun’s surface to interior changes. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory built the four telescope assemblies and participates as a full partner in the scientific analysis activities.

This movie of the March 30, 2010 prominence eruption of the sun, starting with a zoomed in view, was taken by the new Solar Dynamics Observatory. (Video courtesy NASA)

“Everything about the AIA images is cleaner and better than anything we’ve had before. The mirrors are better, the cameras are better and the amount of data available is better. It all combines to give us a view of the corona that we’ve never had before,” said Smithsonian astrophysicist Leon Golub, a co-investigator on the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly.

 SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star Program, or LWS, and the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions that study our sun and space environment. The goal of LWS is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the connected sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

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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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Right: Smithsonian Scientific Diving Officer Michael Lang in Florida.

Allowing scientists to stay underwater for extended periods has made scuba equipment an invaluable tool for the study of marine and freshwater environments. Since its development in 1943, scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) has enabled researchers to dive longer and deeper and closely study millions of underwater species and their vibrant ecosystems.

To mark scuba’s important contribution to underwater science, the Smithsonian Institution is convening dozens of scientists on May 24 – 25 at the National Museum of Natural History for a special symposium: “Research and Discoveries: The Revolution of Science through Scuba.” Open to the public, anyone wishing to attend this symposium should register online at the Web site: www.si.edu/sds/

Photo left: Brown elegance coral

“Without scuba our dive times would be restricted to the few minutes we can hold our breath, clearly not long enough to make scientific observations or collect samples,” says Michael Lang, director of the Smithsonian’s Marine Science Network and the Smithsonian’s Science Diving Program. “With thorough entry-level training, scientific scuba is a simple enough tool to enable its effective and safe use at many remote research sites.”

Photo right: A Smithsonian dive team. (Photo by Dan Miller)

Scuba is not a finished product, however. As technological advancements are made, scuba will continue to grow and be an even greater resource to science and discovery. “As our knowledge of decompression sickness increases and engineering solutions for scuba regulators and dive computers evolve, the envelope of our working window in the underwater world will likely expand, opening up new depths and habitats for research and exploration,” Lang says.

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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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