A new study by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the National University of Singapore and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts have unlocked the secret to mate binding in orb web spiders, and revealed just how it calms the cannibalistic female spider. [...more]
Invertebrates make up more than 80 percent of all known species and provide humans with a myriad of valuable services—from crop pollination to their use as food—yet they are overlooked and underrepresented in conservation decisions and on priority lists of threatened and endangered species. [...more]
Several research teams that include Smithsonian scientists in Panama, have discovered that Heliconius butterflies mimic each other's red wing patterns through changes in the same gene. [...more]
One of the most challenging aspects of this research is simply studying these insects as they are falling, says Yanoviak, a tropical arthropod ecologist at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Small body size, rapid descent, and the long distances that they can fall, make accurate data taking a challenge. [...more]
Filmed in Madagascar by Matjaz Gregoric, this video shows a Darwin's bark spider subduing a dragonfly on her web. Females of this newly named (2010) species, "Caerostris darwini," cast giant webs across streams, rivers and lakes, suspending the web's orb above water and attaching it to plants on each riverbank. Bridgelines of these water-spanning webs have been measured as long as 25 meters. Studies of the silk of these spiders by Matjaz Kuntner and Ingi Agnarsson, research collaborators of the Smithsonian Institution, and University of Akron collaborator Todd Blackledge, have revealed it is among the toughest of all known spider silks. [...more]
Can a tendency to get distracted lead to a career in science? It did for paleoecologist Conrad Labandeira. Working on his family's farm, he would find himself falling into a study of insect life in the fields. "If you go after what interests you," he says, "the rest will always fall into place." [...more]
"I'm getting paid to do what I like doing," says entomologist David Roubik. He loved nature and being outdoors when he was a kid, and now he does fieldwork in the tropical forests of Panama. He loves to travel, and his research takes him around the world. Can his work, then, be called a job? [...more]
Paleoecologist Conrad Labandeira travels to the Karoo Basin of South Africa to find leaf fossils from the Permian-Triassic boundary, the time of the Earth's largest mass extinction. What can bug bites on leaves tell us about our own uncertain times? [...more]
Scientists from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center have found that fledgling catbirds living in the suburbs are extremely vulnerable. Almost 80 percent are killed by predators before they reach adulthood. Nearly half of the deaths are connected to domestic cats. The team studied catbird nests in 3 suburban neighborhoods in Maryland: Spring Park, Opal Daniels Park, and Bethesda. Learn more about this 2011 study by clicking here. (Catbird photo by Gerhard Hofmann)
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