“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.” [...more]
Only some Indian artifacts and other ethnological exhibits were ready when some 1,600 curious guests made their way through the bronze doors of the Natural History Building on March 17, 1910. The star attraction was the Smithsonian’s art collection, installed in one of the building’s central galleries where it was to remain for almost 60 years.
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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]
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