The imminent sugarcane expansion into the Amazon
On the day the Brazilian senate almost opened the Amazon region to sugarcane plantation, a letter in Science by Lucas Ferrante and Philip Fearnside alerts to the dangers that this liberation represents for Amazonian ecosystem integrity. Lucas currently works on his doctoral thesis in Ecology at INPA.
Do Amazonian bats have lunar phobia?
For her master’s project in Ecology, Giulliana Appel tested the hypothesis of whether forest-dwelling Amazonian insectivorous bats decrease activity in intense moonlight, as is generally accepted for bats in other regions. Her results were published in Mammalian Biology, and showed that five bat species in central Amazonia behaved differentially in relation to moonlight.
Guess who comes for dinner: other vertebrates in harpy eagle nests
Camera traps recorded several arboreal vertebrate species in or near harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) nests in commensalistic and even aggressive interactions. The findings are part of the doctoral thesis in Ecology of Helena Aguiar-Silva on resource use by harpy eagles, and have recently been published in the Journal of Raptor Research.
