Leafcutter ants—first in agiculture and antibiotics
Leafcutter Ants—an amazing species that has been employing agriculture and antibiotics for some 50 million years. [...more]
Leafcutter Ants—an amazing species that has been employing agriculture and antibiotics for some 50 million years. [...more]
Birds do it. Bees do it. And in a laboratory in northern California, scientists using bumblebees recently figured out the best way to measure it--vertical lift! [...more]
In their laboratory, scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Southampton and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, observed as a number of adult locusts walked along a horizontal ladder. After covering the right or left eye of an insect, the scientists observed a significant increase in the error rate of rungs missed by the front leg on the side of the covered eye. [...more]
“Spinning under the influence” is one way to describe recent activities in the Costa Rican laboratory of Smithsonian scientist William Eberhard. An entomologist at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute, Eberhard recently carried out a series of experiments in which he observed the web-building behavior of dozens of spiders under the influence of drugs—specifically, a chemical injected into their bodies by parasitic wasps. [...more]
Smithsonian scientists and colleagues, however, have recently found evidence that gymnosperm plants shared an intricate pollination relationship with scorpionfly insects 62 million years before flowering plants appear in fossil records. [...more]
The spread of Africanized honey bees across Central America has had a much smaller impact on native tropical bee species than scientists previously predicted... [...more]
Caught on camera!This short video of an ocelot was taken by Smithsonian scientists during a recent camera-trap survey of these animals in the Peruvian Amazon. [...more] |
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(Courtesy of Joseph Kolowski) |