“Our guide celebrates the beauty of some of the most attractive inhabitants of Panama’s undersea realm and provides an indispensable, easy-to-use tool for their identification,” say the Littlers. [...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]
Recently, researchers from Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have been taking a closer look at the vibrations that red-eyed treefrog embryos use as cues to trigger early hatching. They discovered that treefrog embryos can evaluate different features of vibrations. [...more]
In a series of ongoing experiments on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal, Kays and other researchers are using camera traps, radio collars and palm nuts with tracking transmitters attached to them to take a closer look at the nut-hoarding strategies of the agouti. [...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]
A new census of tropical sulfur butterflies (Aphrissa statira) migrating across the Panama Canal has revealed the central role that weather plays in determining why populations of these lemon-yellow insects vary from year to year. [...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) |
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