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Elisabeth King

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.

Stories from this author

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Birds by Day, Bats by Night: Paired Long-Term Census of Bats and Birds Starts in Panama

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

Carollia perspicillata

Bat Salad: First Record of Bats Eating Entire Leaves and Not Spitting Them Out

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 disk-winged bats inside their leaf tube

Listen Up! Hungry Bats Emit Food Calls to Family and Friends

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?

Dr. Ruth Bennett holding Summer Tanager

Drink Coffee, Eat Chocolate, Save Birds!

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.

boat in Panama's Montijo Bay

First global assessment of the sustainability of coral reef fisheries

An innovative mathematical analysis of global coral reef fisheries offers hope for sustainable management of multispecies and artisanal fishing, especially in the global South

Baby biodiversity in the ocean

'Python of the Sea' Study Highlights How Marine Biodiversity Can Be Dramatically Underestimated

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

El Coral beach fish trap in Saboga Island, Panama

See a New Interactive Map of Indigenous Fishing Practices Around the Pacific Rim

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.

From the surface, the havoc caused on a coral reef by a layer of low-oxygen water was barely evident.

Watch What Happens When A Coral Reef Can't Get Enough Oxygen

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.

From Refuge Cove in Alaska to San Francisco Bay to Baja California and at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, a team from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Temple University deployed panels to find out what limits marine invertebrate invasions. Here, Laura Jurgens and Carmen Schloeder, celebrate a successful deployment in Mexico (Laura Jurgens)

Invasion Dynamics

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.

In her lab at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Annette Aiello usually rears caterpillars to find out which butterflies they become as adults, but in this case, she focused her attention on cicadas emerging from a houseplant on her porch in Arraijan, Panama. (J. Aleman/STRI)

A Smithsonian Researcher Caged and Reared Cicadas From Nymphs to Adulthood

An observation of an insect exoskeleton on a potted plant may lead to the identification of a new insect species

Happy Earth Day 2021! Hillary Hughes, Panamanian actress, visits the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Agua Salud Project during the filming of videos in Spanish and English to share hope for the success of tropical forest reforestation informed by the largest experiment of its kind in the tropics. (video still)

Watch These Two Videos and You Will Feel More Hopeful About the Future of Tropical Forests

The Agua Salud Project's new bilingual videos share the results of tropical reforestation experiments at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The purple-flowered crown of Dipteryx oleifera, one of the biggest trees on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, towers above the forest. Big trees may be most exposed to the effects of climate change: more frequent and severe drought, and the high winds and lightning of monster storms. (Evan Gora)

How Will the Biggest Tropical Trees Respond to Climate Change?

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

Foster mother, BD, feeds her adopted vampire bat pup in a captive bat colony at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama (surveillance camera image from Gerry Carter lab)

Baby Vampire Bat Adopted by Mom's Best Friend

The strong relationship formed between two female adult vampire bats may have motivated one of the bats to adopt the other’s baby.

Fighting conch with lime as prepared in Bocas del Toro, Panama. (Felix Rodriguez, STRI)

The Genetics of Shrinking

To find out if hunting and harvesting act as evolutionary forces that "shrink" animals, researchers isolated DNA from tropical shells for the first time

When STRI staff scientist Annette Aiello first arrived in Panama to study butterflies in 1976, she lived and worked at the Smithsonian research station on Barro Colorado Island. Credit: STRI Archives.

Females in Flatland

STRI butterfly researcher, Annette Aiello’s remarkable calendar (1976-present) is an accurate catalog of natural history events in Panama.

Lucia Torrez and Grace Davis identify fruit that monkeys on Barro Colorado Island in Panama have been eating. Do primate leaders know where the best fruiting trees are to be found? Credit: Sean Mattson, STRI

Here's the Scoop on Monkey Leadership

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.

Because her research group knows a bird's age based on its song, a tropical soap opera unfolds as ornithology graduate student Laura Gómez records interactions between antshrikes in Panama.

How to Tell a Bird's Age By Its Song

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.

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Milton Garcia’s Bird’s-Eye-View

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.

Sanchocho

Chicken Soup with Yams: where Old and New Worlds Meet

Sanchocho recipe