Male Wrinkle-faced bats lower a flap of skin resembling a face mask when they are ready to mate according to a rare sighting of a lek of bats in Costa Rica.
Male Fringe-Lipped bats smear a sticky, odorous substance on their forearms. When this was discovered, researchers guessed that it might play a role in mating. Post-doctoral fellow Mariana Muñoz-Romo has confirmed that the presence and size of the forearm "crust" is, indeed correlated with other reproductive traits.
The seminar series via Zoom titled How did I get here? Scientific Stories is carried out thanks to the support of the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB). For the 6th seminar on January 2021, Smithsonian invited Ricardo Moreno, Director of the Yaguará Panama Foundation, STRI Associate Researcher and National Geographic Emerging Explorer with the talk entitled, Advances in scientific research and jaguar conservation in Panama.
The strong relationship formed between two female adult vampire bats may have motivated one of the bats to adopt the other’s baby.
At the Smithsonian’s Bocas del Toro Research Station, in Panama, marine biologist Rachel Collin runs an educational program that recruits international experts to teach and create videos about how to collect, preserve and observe marine invertebrates, passing down their very specific knowledge to aspiring taxonomists.
How does whale watching affect whale behavior? Who watches whales in Panama’s Las Perlas Archipelago? Researchers from STRI and ASU hope to recommend innovative data-based conservation strategies.
“Her unification of developmental plasticity and genetics is a huge advance in our understanding of evolution. Her decades-long work with tropical social wasps focusing on careful field observation is testimony to what a careful observer of natural history can contribute to evolutionary biology.”-the Linnean Society
Sweat bees navigate through dark tropical forests guided by canopy patterns.
During three years, local scientist Dumas Gálvez drove along a road parallel to a rainforest looking out for dead vertebrates.
Picture this: What to do at a party when you try to carry on a conversation, but the music is too loud? A Panamanian doctoral student is trying to figure out how dolphins communicate underwater during heavy boat traffic in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago.
