As Communications Manager at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, Elisabeth King bridges the gap between research scientists and diverse audiences. She writes about science, creates exhibitions and video scripts in English and Spanish, making STRI research available to all audiences from school kids to ambassadors.
Research teams studying bats and birds gather in Panama’s Soberanía National Park to celebrate the launch of a long-term census of bats designed to complement the bird census, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year
Bats are known to chew and spit out leaves, like humans chew and spit out tobacco or coca, but this is the first continuous recording of a bat eating entire leaves
Spix’s disc-winged bats shrieked when they were first shown mealworms, a new food for them. Were they alarmed, or were they communicating their excitement to their fellow bats?
A new initiative will make it easier for regional coffee and chocolate industries in Latin America to join the global movement to produce sustainable food.
An innovative mathematical analysis of global coral reef fisheries offers hope for sustainable management of multispecies and artisanal fishing, especially in the global South
Most ocean life remains to be discovered. Because fish and many other animals that live in the ocean often have larvae or other, microscopic life stages that drift freely in ocean water, counting species by genetic barcoding of plankton samples adds to counts of species recorded as adults and is a highly efficient way to understand what lives in the ocean and how biodiversity changes as we modify the ocean environment
Dedicated to “the Ancestors who stewarded the ocean” an interactive story map created by the Pacific Sea Garden Collective reawakens traditional ways of harvesting food from the sea from Panama to Australia to the Pacific Northwest.
In September, 2017, divers observed a massive 'dead zone' rising to envelop Caribbean coral reefs in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Smithsonian post-docs formed a team to understand why reef animals were fleeing, and the role of humans in the history of hypoxia.
Smithsonian marine biologists and colleagues at Temple University tested predictions about biological invasions, first in Panama and then in an experiment of unprecedented geographic scale.
The Agua Salud Project's new bilingual videos share the results of tropical reforestation experiments at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
The death of these giants would have a major impact on the forest, but because they are few and far between, almost nothing is known about what causes them to die
To find out if hunting and harvesting act as evolutionary forces that "shrink" animals, researchers isolated DNA from tropical shells for the first time
What makes a great leader? Grace Davis and Lucia Torrez lead a team working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to understand leadership in capuchin and spider monkeys.
On Pipeline Road in Panama’s Soberania National Park, birdwatchers on high-end tours rack up two hundred bird species in a day and move on. But Corey Tarwater and Patrick Kelley have made it their life’s work to understand the daily melodramas of black-crowned antshrikes, first as students and now as faculty at the University of Wyoming. Meanwhile, their own family has grown to include not only 2 children, but a whole tribe of intellectual offspring.
When he’s not racing his bike cross-country, Milton Garcia is in demand for his expertise driving drones. In the last month, he monitored mangrove deforestation on Panama’s Pacific coast, mapped a new research station in Coiba National Park and tracked blooming trees on Barro Colorado Island, the first plot in an international network of forest monitoring sites.