Ocelots, jaguars, tayras, peccaries or armadillos may be surprisingly common in a tropical forest, but are very shy and hard to observe systematically. Only wildlife cameras reveal their often nocturnal activities and distribution. A team of researchers implemented such cameras across all sites and analysed the community composition and abundance. …
Noisy cicada calls often shape the sound of tropical forests each day from dawn to dusk, with a reproducible temporal pattern. But a new study revealed that these song patterns are strongly reduced, less common and simplified when forests are converted to agriculture, and when agricultural sites or forest fragments …
The Ecuadorian Chocó forests are highly diverse and therefore have attracted the attention of many researchers, including those working on amphibians. However, new species may still be discovered as a new study shows, now published in the Joournal Salamandra by researchers from the Reassembly unit and their colleagues from the …
Niche differentiation is one of the key drivers of the biodiversity of coexisting species. Trees can provide very heterogeneous conditions from the bottom of the trunk to the upper twigs that can be used by a large variety of taxa. In two large Research Units, the lowland forest of Reassembly …
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 …
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 …
