Birds show a strong change in species composition when open vegetation grows back into a dense forest. And this change is matched by the species’ traits: seed-feeding species are replaced by fruit-feeding species, species with long wings and tails by those that have shorter ones. Many birds in open habitats …
Tenemos el placer de presentar el segundo boletín de Reassembly. Este año reflexionamos sobre nuestro segundo año de trabajo de campo, las pequeñas victorias en el trabajo, así como los nuevos amigos que conocimos en el camino. También presentamos con gran alegría nuestros primeros hallazgos sobre la recuperación del bosque. Les invitamos a …
Dead wood is an important habitat for a large diversity of forest insects and fungi and plays a relevant role in carbon pools and fluxes. Ana Falconí‑López and Nina Grella quantified the amount of woody debris in all sites along the chronosequence. Dead wood densities showed high variation across sites. …
Neotropical army ants are among the most specialized predators: each ant species is hunting on a narrowly selected number of ant species as their main prey, and some other arthropods are also included in their diet. Phil Hoenle and Chris von Beeren studied food webs between army ants and their …
How specialized are dung beetles for different dung types? A few years ago, dung beetle preferences were mostly studied with baited pitfall traps using easily available feces from livestock or zoo animals. Now we can unravel the “real” dung-beetle networks by looking into the beetles’ guts to identify DNA from …
As a biologist, I have always been interested in community ecology, and what is more incredible than ecology in the Tropics? So, I have spent the last years of my career working on understanding forest recovery after human disturbances, from the perspective of tree communities in the tropical forests of …
Tropical Ecology – University of Ulm (Germany) / Museo de Zoología – Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE – Ecuador). Among my main research interests is the ecology of communities and the study of their structure, diversity as well as their taxonomic and functional composition, which allow understanding the assemblages …
MONGABAY is a nonprofit news platform that provides very important articles on environmental science and conservation, often from tropical countries across the globe. Highly recommended reading! Here’s a compilation of some recent articles that include Jocotoco, the Chocó or the reserve in Canandé, with links:Jocotoco’s story Endemic Magnolias in Canande …
A very lively video summarizes the key questions and methods in our subproject about predator-prey interactions, featuring Karla Neira, Mark-Oliver Rödel and countless colorful or brownish frogs as the main actors. Well worth watching! And… an exciting podcast about their work is also available in the Museum’s “Beats and bones” …
In order to understand why particular species occur only in a primary rainforest or are able to persist in a degraded habitat, it is necessary to know about their biology. Unfortunately for most tropical species we simply know that and where they exist. This is also true for most species …
