Caught red handed
The mystery of an unusual Panamanian plant’s dispersal
March 25, 2022
Camera traps in the forest canopy document a nocturnal mammal that may help Zamia pseudoparasitica survive up in the air.
Camera traps in the forest canopy document a nocturnal mammal that may help Zamia pseudoparasitica survive up in the air.
Tiny, fruit-eating bats take over the roost of larger, carnivorous bats at the edge of Panama’s Soberanía National Park.
Non-native species have the potential to cause deleterious ecological and economic impacts on the areas where they are introduced. Shipping canals are crucial in shortening modern-world maritime transportation routes but are also major passageways for non-native species. The Panama Canal is the...
Fungi shape the diversity of life. Characterizing the evolution of fungi is critical to understanding symbiotic associations across kingdoms. In this study, we investigate the genomic and metabolomic diversity of the genus Escovopsis, a specialized parasite of fungus-growing ant gardens. Based...
Understanding how a genome can produce phenotypes like patterns, morphologies and behaviors is one of the core goals of biology. The wing patterns of butterflies are an excellent system for studying how genotypes produce phenotypes: they are a developmentally tractable phenotype, produced by...
Most tropical trees form root associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. However, extensive patches of montane and premontane forest in Panama contain a small number of tree species in the oak and walnut families that instead associate with ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. Many of these...
Concern for the state of the marine environment is particularly acute among coral reefs that have been impacted by widespread fishing, pollution, and global warming. Yet coral reef ecology as a discipline is barely 50 years old, meaning the majority of data collected to understand levels of reef...
Plant leaves show us the species that exist in a forest, and the ecological conditions in which they live. These attributes can also be observed in fossil leaves, which allows us to reconstruct forests that existed millions of years ago and understand how they have changed over time. In this...