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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Social bees are important pollinators worldwide, including honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees, the latter being particularly important in the tropics. Stingless bees do not only depend on pollen and nectar, but also intensively collect the sticky and potentially toxic resin from tree wounds. Obviously not for nutrition, but for nest …
The diversity of life histories among amphibians and reptiles is astonishing. While some thrive and feed on fish in streams, others choose to conceal themselves in the hollows of tree canopies. In 2023, Reassembly’s herpetological team undertook several side projects. During their visit to Canandé, a team from MO Rödel’s lab …
Sound recorders can successfully capture the remarkable diversity of vocalizing birds, frogs and mammals – much more effectively than other sampling techniques or classical observational methods. Jörg Müller and his team implemented sound recorders in 43 of our plots, then asked skilled experts to identify hundreds of species from selected …
REASSEMBLY actively contributed to the 6th European Conference of Tropical Ecology (GTOE2023) in the beautiful České Budějovice (Budweis) in Czech Republik. Nico Blüthgen presented the framework of the Research Unit and some first results in the session “Traits, interactions and functioning across environmental gradients” hosted by Nina Farwig & Eike …
