Smithsonian Year of Music
Where science meets music: a banjo player listens for the songs of katydids
Abril 17, 2019
What do playing the banjo and recording katydids have in common? We join Sharon Martinson on Barro Colorado Island to find out.
What do playing the banjo and recording katydids have in common? We join Sharon Martinson on Barro Colorado Island to find out.
By taking on characteristics from another, younger stage in its life-cycle, this fossil crab was probably able to adapt to new conditions.
Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs on a spider’s back. This team proposes that by injecting the spider host with the molting hormone, ecdysone, the wasp induces the spider to make a special web for the wasp’s pupa.
Why did some bee species become social, while the majority have remained solitary? On Barro Colorado Island, a bee that adopts both strategies interchangeably, may unlock the evolutionary origins of sociality in insects
Fever may be less effective at repelling infections in cold-blooded creatures
Yves Basset, who heads insect monitoring efforts for the Smithsonian ForestGEO program and Greg Lamarre, from the University of South Bohemia, present immediate, science-based actions that mitigate insect decline.
Bats can find motionless insects on leaves in the dark. This was thought to be impossible, because the acoustic camouflage provided by the leaves should confuse their echolocation system. Inga Geipel and colleagues discovered how they overcome this problem.
As some of the most savvy and sophisticated predators out there, bats eavesdrop on their prey and even on other bats to collect a wide variety of information about their prey.
Imprinting on parental color may be more important than genetics when it comes to the evolution of new species.
Unrelated butterflies may have the same wing patterns. These patterns warn off predators and help suitors find the right mate. But if wing patterns in each species evolved the same way, knocking out an important gene should have the same effect in both. Carolina Concha and her team discovered that knocking out the WntA gene results in different effects in co-mimics, so the two species evolved the same pattern via different pathways.