When he’s not racing his bike cross-country, Milton Garcia is in demand for his expertise flying drones. In the last month, he monitored mangrove deforestation on Panama’s Pacific coast, mapped a new research station in Coiba National Park and tracked blooming trees on Barro Colorado Island, the first plot in an international network of forest monitoring sites.
An experiment in Panama’s Parque Natural Metropolitano and Gamboa revealed that agoutis were less likely to disperse and pilfer seeds in sites where ferocious felines roam.
Scientists, students and communicators from Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Spain will spend twelve days on the high seas exploring the biodiversity of Panama’s Cordillera de Coiba seamounts.
Most ocean life remains to be discovered. Because fish and many other animals that live in the ocean often have larvae or other, microscopic life stages that drift freely in ocean water, counting species by genetic barcoding of plankton samples adds to counts of species recorded as adults and is a highly efficient way to understand what lives in the ocean and how biodiversity changes as we modify the ocean environment.
From tracking the movements of large felines across the continent to helping rural communities reap the benefits of protecting biodiversity, director of Yaguará Panamá Foundation Ricardo Moreno turned his childhood dream into a mission.
Traditionally, we highlight the richness of the fauna that lives in the forests of Panama. However, the complex Panamanian forests also hide a diversity in the behavior of this fauna. Considering how small Panama is, for these same species, the behavior can vary according to its environment. In this talk we will talk about how camera traps provide us with pieces of the puzzle of the ecology and behavior of the fauna in Panama.
Young entomologist Sol Parra uses gene editing technology to understand how color pattern mimicry evolves in butterflies.
Researcher May Dixon discovered that frog-eating bats could recognize ringtones indicating a food reward up to four years later.
For many tropical biologists, all roads lead to Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, the most-studied piece of tropical real estate in the world. STRI Intern Omayra Meléndez shares her story about arriving on BCI and how the island is transforming her career.
Megalodon could fully consume prey the size of today’s killer whales and then roam the seas without more food for two months.
