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 …
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 …
The recovery of forest ecosystems relies on mutualistic interactions, particularly pollinators and seed-dispersers, or plant defenses by ants. A new modelling study on the succession and assembly of these interactions revealed an important role of non-obligate animal mutualists. Timo Metz performed computer simulations based on trait matching between mutualists, now …
Theory predicts that environmental filtering determines species assemblages – and their reassembly dynamics in a changing habitat such as a recovering rainforest. This prediction can be tested by studying trajectories of functional trait and phylogenetic composition. Phil Hoenle and coauthors examined 13 morphological traits from a total of 284 ant …
Species differ in their shape, morphology and function. But individuals within a species can be highly variable, too. Such variation likely results from responses to different environmetal conditions. Diego Marín-Armijos, Adolfo Chamba-Carrillo and Karen Pedersen (SP6) studied variation between individuals within a species, an Ecuadorian dung beetle. They compared individuals …
