For many visiting researchers, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute becomes more than a job. It becomes your home and your primary social circle, so much that you sometime forget there is a world outside of work. But you would be remiss to skip out on all the opportunities beyond the STRI bubble. Here are 14 reasons to get out and go.
Perhaps old species, like some older people, gradually lose their ability to deal with changes in their environment. Aaron O’Dea and colleagues show that when the Caribbean was cut off from the Pacific by the rise of the Panama land bridge, evolutionarily old species took longer to expand into new habitats than evolutionarily younger species did.
Coibita Island, part of a World Heritage Site in Panama’s Pacific, is poised to become a leading research site for tropical marine biology.
Smithsonian scientists who documented massive mortality of corals and reef organisms meticulously studied one of the apparent causes: oxygen deficiency. A Smithsonian paleobiologist asks if the recent fossil record shows signs of similar hypoxia events.
Fossil reefs from around the Caribbean show how biologically rich these ecosystems once were — and provide goalposts for conservationists hoping to restore them.
A new study points directly links healthy coral reefs to healthy populations of these brightly colored fishes.
