EcoCircuitos Panama Travel Blog and News
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One of the greatest puzzles of evolutionary biology is the color variation of the strawberry poison-dart frog on the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. Generally a shiny reddish-orange throughout its mainland Central American territory, Dendrobates pumiliocomes in as many as 30 color combinations on the Panamanian Caribbean island chain. Rising seas separated the archipelago from the mainland less than 9,000 years ago – a blip in evolutionary terms. How did such an array arise so quickly?
Given that environmental conditions do not seem to vary greatly between population locations, natural selection might play second fiddle to sexual selection in the D. pumilio riddle. To test that theory, Ph.D. student and STRI fellow Laura Crothers is studying how the frogs – males and females – respond to brightness and color variation.
More fiercely territorial than their size would suggest, the diminutive males regularly pick fights. Yet instead of taking on dimmer competitors – which, in theory, should be easier targets – they appear to attack the more brightly colored ones.
Energy spent calling to or wrestling with other males is energy not spent reproducing. So if dimmer and different-colored males fought less once isolated from the mainland, this could help explain the early in the divergence of color in these populations. For example, if most of the frogs in a population are orange, other males could ignore an unusual blue individual. “That would allow those really rare blue ones to increase slowly in that population because they are not getting beat up all the time,” says Laura. “They can focus all of their time on courting females.
Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
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A new article by Kenneth Feeley from Florida International University, with STRI’s Stuart J. Davies, Rolando Perez and Stephen P. Hubbell and former staff scientist Robin B. Foster (now at the Field Museum, Chicago), was recently published as the cover article of the journal Ecology (April).
The article, entitled “Directional changes in the species composition of a tropical forest”, examines changes in the composition of tree species growing on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, R,P.
Feeley and colleagues show that over the past 25 years there has been a remarkably consistent and directional pattern of increasing abundances of drought-tolerant species at the expense of more drought-insensitive tree species. The cause(s) of this change remains uncertain, but the most likely culprits are either long-term changes in climate leading to reduced water availability (i.e., increasing temperatures and reduced rainfall), or alternatively the compositional changes may be the ongoing legacy of an extreme El Nino drought that occurred in the early 1980’s.
By investigating compositional changes, scientists increase not only their understanding of the ecology of tropical forests and their responses to large-scale disturbances, but also their ability to predict how future global change will impact some of the critical services provided by ecosystems as important as those of the Panama Canal watershed.
You may obtain the article from calderom@si.edu
EcoCircuitos Panama Travel Blog and News 