Koepcke's hermit
Koepcke's hermit, ermite de Koepcke, or ermitaño de Koepcke is a species of hummingbird in the family Trochilidae. It is found only in Peru, its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and subtropical or tropical moist montane forest. It is threatened by habitat loss
Saw-billed hermit
The saw-billed hermit is a hummingbird from southeastern Brazil, the only member of the genus Ramphodon. It is around 14–16 cm long and is one of the heaviest of the hermits, it lives in humid forests, where it aggressively defends feeding routes from individuals of its own species as well as other hummingbirds. It is considered near-threatened, since it has a restricted range in threatened Atlantic forests; the saw-billed hermit is placed in the hermit subfamily Phaethornithinae, but among these birds, it is the species most similar to the typical hummingbirds, Trochilinae. This, coupled with the considerable number of autapomorphies such as the unusual bill, suggest it is the most primitive species of the hermit lineage. Hinkelmann, C.: 1. Saw-billed Hermit. In: del Hoyo, J.. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona. ISBN 84-87334-25-3 BirdLife Species Factsheet Saw-billed Hermit photo gallery VIREO Photo-High Res- Saw-billed Hermit videos on the Internet Bird Collection
Costus
See Catherine of Alexandria for the man named Costus held to be her father. Costus is a group of perennial herbaceous plants in the family described by Linnaeus as a genus in 1753, it was known as Hellenia after the Finnish botanist Carl Niclas von Hellens. It is widespread through tropical and subtropical regions of Asia and the Americas. Costus is characterized and distinguished from relatives such as Zingiber by its spiraling stems; the genus as a whole is thus called spiral gingers, but this can refer to C. barbatus specifically. Costus spectabilis is the floral emblem of Nigeria, it is important not to confuse Costus speciosus, C. spectabilis etc. with the herb known by the common name "costus". Some species are of importance to herbivores, such as caterpillars of the restricted demon which feed on Costus speciosus; the crêpe ginger is a source of diosgenin, a compound used for the commercial production of various steroids, such as progesterone. In Trinidad and Tobago, a mix of Costus scaber juice and crushed Renealmia alpinia berries is used to treat dogs bitten by snakes.
Placed hereNumerous other species have been called Costus over the years, but are now regarded as members of other genera. Such genera include Alpinia, Caulokaempferia, Chamaecostus, Hellenia, Renealmia, etc
Heliconia
Heliconia, derived from the Greek word Ἑλικώνιος, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Heliconiaceae. Most of the ca 194 known species are native to the tropical Americas, but a few are indigenous to certain islands of the western Pacific and Maluku. Many species of Heliconia are found in the tropical forests of these regions. Several species are cultivated as ornamentals, a few are naturalized in Florida and Thailand. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, toucan peak, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise; the last term refers to their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers. Collectively, these plants are simply referred to as heliconias; these herbaceous plants range from 0.5 to nearly 4.5 meters tall depending on the species. The simple leaves of these plants are 15–300 cm, they are characteristically long, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles longer than the leaf forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, consist of brightly colored waxy bracts, with small true flowers peeping out from the bracts.
The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna and bananas, to which they are related. The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges and greens, are subtended by brightly colored bracts. Floral shape limits pollination to a subset of the hummingbirds in the region; the leaves in different positions on the plant have a different absorption potential of sunlight for photosynthesis when exposed to different degrees of sunlight.droopy The flowers produce ample nectar that attracts pollinators, most prevalent of which are hummingbirds. Fruits are blue-purple when ripe and bird dispersed. Studies of post-dispersal seed survival showed; the highest amount of seed predation came from mammals. The Heliconia are a monophyletic genus in the family Heliconiaceae, but was included in the family Musaceae, which includes the bananas. However, the APG system of 1998, its successor, the APG II system of 2003, confirm the Heliconiaceae as distinct and places them in the order Zingiberales, in the commelinid clade of monocots.
Species accepted by Kew Botanic Gardens Most of the 194 known species are native to the tropical Americas, but a few are indigenous to certain islands of the western Pacific and Maluku. Many species of Heliconia are found in the tropical forests of these regions. Several species are cultivated as ornamentals, a few are naturalized in Florida and Thailand. Heliconias are an important food source for forest hummingbirds the hermits, some of which – such as the rufous-breasted hermit – use the plant for nesting; the Honduran white bat lives in tents it makes from heliconia leaves. Although Heliconia are exclusively pollinated by hummingbirds, some bat pollination has been found to occur. Heliconia solomonensis is pollinated by the macroglosine bat in the Solomon Islands. Heliconia solomonensis has green inflorescences and flowers that open at night, typical of bat pollinated plants; the macroglosine bat is the only known nocturnal pollinator of Heliconia solomonensis. Many bats use; the Honduran white bat, Ectohylla alba, utilizes five species of Heliconia to make diurnal tent-shaped roosts.
The bat cuts the side veins of the leaf extending from the midrib, causing the leaf to fold like a tent. This structure provides the bat with shelter from rain and predators. In addition, the stems of the Heliconia leaves are not strong enough to carry the weight of typical bat predators, so shaking of the leaf alerts roosting bats to presence of predators; the bats Artibeus anderseni and A. phaeotis form tents from the leaves of Heliconia in the same manner as the Honduran white bat. The neotropical disk-winged bat, Thyroptera tricolor, has suction disks on the wrists which allow it to cling to the smooth surfaces of the Heliconia leaves; this bat roosts head-up in the rolled young leaves of Heliconia plants. Heliconias provide shelter for a diverse range of insects within their young rolled leaves and water-filled floral bracts. Insects that inhabit the rolled leaves feed upon the inner surfaces of the leaf, such as beetles of the family Chrysomelidae. In bracts containing small amounts of water, fly larvae and beetles are the dominant inhabitants.
In bracts with greater quantities of water the typical inhabitants are mosquito larva. Insects living in the bracts feed on the bract tissue, nectar of the flower, flower parts, other insects, microorganisms, or detritus in the water contained in the bract. All species of Hispini beetles that use rolled leaves are obligate herbivores of plants of the order of Zingiberales, which includes Heliconia; these beetles live in and feed from the rolled leaf, the stems, the inflorescences, or the unfurled mature leaves of the Heliconia plant. In addition, these beetles deposit their eggs on the leaf surface, petioles of immature leaves, or in the bracts of the Heliconia. Furthermore, some wasp species such as Polistes erythrocephalus build their nest on the protected underside of large leaves. Hummingbirds are the main pollinators of heliconia flowers in many locations; the concurrent diversification of hummingbird-pollinated taxa in the order Zingiberales and the hummingbird family starting 18 million years ago supports the idea that these radiations have influenced one another through evolutionary time.
At La Selva Research Station in Costa Rica, specific species of Heliconia were found to have specific hummin
Tropics
The tropics are the region of the Earth surrounding the Equator. They are delimited in latitude by The Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at 23°26′12.4″ N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at 23°26′12.4″ S. The tropics are referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone; the tropics include all the areas on the Earth where the Sun contacts a point directly overhead at least once during the solar year - thus the latitude of the tropics is equal to the angle of the Earth's axial tilt. The tropics are distinguished from the other climatic and biomatic regions of Earth, which are the middle latitudes and the polar regions on either side of the equatorial zone; the tropics contain 36 % of the Earth's landmass. As of 2014, the region is home to 40% of the world population, this figure is projected to reach 50% by the late 2030s. "Tropical" is sometimes used in a general sense for a tropical climate to mean warm to hot and moist year-round with the sense of lush vegetation.
Many tropical areas have a wet season. The wet season, rainy season or green season is the time of year, ranging from one or more months, when most of the average annual rainfall in a region falls. Areas with wet seasons are disseminated across portions of the subtropics. Under the Köppen climate classification, for tropical climates, a wet-season month is defined as a month where average precipitation is 60 millimetres or more. Tropical rainforests technically do not have dry or wet seasons, since their rainfall is distributed through the year; some areas with pronounced rainy seasons see a break in rainfall during mid-season when the intertropical convergence zone or monsoon trough moves poleward of their location during the middle of the warm season. When the wet season occurs during the warm season, or summer, precipitation falls during the late afternoon and early evening hours; the wet season is a time when air quality improves, freshwater quality improves and vegetation grows leading to crop yields late in the season.
Floods cause rivers to overflow their banks, some animals to retreat to higher ground. Soil nutrients erosion increases; the incidence of malaria increases in areas. Animals have survival strategies for the wetter regime; the previous dry season leads to food shortages into the wet season, as the crops have yet to mature. However, regions within the tropics may well not have a tropical climate. Under the Köppen climate classification, much of the area within the geographical tropics is classed not as "tropical" but as "dry", including the Sahara Desert, the Atacama Desert and Australian Outback. There are alpine tundra and snow-capped peaks, including Mauna Kea, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Andes as far south as the northernmost parts of Chile and Argentina. Tropical plants and animals are those species native to the tropics. Tropical ecosystems may consist of tropical rainforests, seasonal tropical forests, dry forests, spiny forests and other habitat types. There are significant areas of biodiversity, species endemism present in rainforests and seasonal forests.
Some examples of important biodiversity and high endemism ecosystems are El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, Costa Rican and Nicaraguan rainforests, Amazon Rainforest territories of several South American countries, Madagascar dry deciduous forests, the Waterberg Biosphere of South Africa, eastern Madagascar rainforests. The soils of tropical forests are low in nutrient content, making them quite vulnerable to slash-and-burn deforestation techniques, which are sometimes an element of shifting cultivation agricultural systems. In biogeography, the tropics are divided into Neotropics. Together, they are sometimes referred to as the Pantropic; the Neotropical region should not be confused with the ecozone of the same name. "Tropicality" refers to the geographic imagery that many people outside the tropics have of that region. The idea of tropicality gained renewed interest in modern geographical discourse when French geographer Pierre Gourou published Les Pays Tropicaux, in the late 1940s.
Tropicality encompasses at least two contradictory imageries. One is that the tropics represent a Garden of a heaven on Earth; the latter view was discussed in Western literature—more so than the first. Evidence suggests that over time the more primitive view of the tropics in popular literature has been supplanted by more nuanced interpretations that reflect historical changes in values associated with tropical culture and ecology, although some primitive associations are persistent. Western scholars theorized about the reasons that tropical areas were deemed "inferior" to regions in the Northern Hemisphere. A popular explanation focused on the differences in climate—tropical regions have much warmer weather than northern regions; this theme led some scholars, including Gourou, to argue that warmer climates correlate to primitive indigenous populations lacking control over nature, compared to northern popul
Pale-tailed barbthroat
The pale-tailed barbthroat is a species of hummingbird in the family Trochilidae. It is found in the Amazon Basin proper and bordering countries, Bolivia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana and Venezuela, its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and subtropical or tropical swampland. The taxonomy of the Threnetes leucurus/T. Niger complex has caused much confusion in recent years: Schuchmann & Hinkelmann considered the sooty barbthroat a melanistic variant of T. leucurus, but as it was described first, its scientific name was adopted for the entire species. This, has not been accepted by all authorities, notably SACC, which consider both T. niger and T. leucurus as valid species. Hinkelmann, C.. Pale-tailed Barbthroat. Pp. 539 in: del Hoyo, J. Elliott, A. & Sargatal, J.: Handbook of Birds of the World, Volume 5: Barn-owls to Hummingbirds. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona. ISBN 84-87334-25-3 Split Threnetes leucurus from Threnetes niger South American Classification Committee. Article w/RangeMaps InfoNatura NatureServe Pale-tailed Barbthroat: Threnetes leucurus Photo, Article Stamps Pale-tailed Barbthroat photo gallery VIREO
Lek mating
A lek is an aggregation of male animals gathered to engage in competitive displays, lekking, to entice visiting females which are surveying prospective partners for copulation. Leks are formed before or during the breeding season. A lekking species is characterised by male displays, strong female mate choice, the conferring of indirect benefits to males. Although most prevalent among birds such as black grouse, lekking is found in insects including paper wasps, fishes, amphibians and mammals. A classical lek consists of male territories in auditory range of each other. An exploded lek, as seen in the kakapo, has more separated territories, but still in auditory range. Lekking is associated with an apparent paradox: strong sexual selection by females for specific male traits ought to erode genetic diversity by Fisherian runaway, but diversity is maintained and runaway does not occur. Many attempts have been made to explain it away; the term derives from the Swedish lek, a noun which denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities.
English use of lek dates to the 1860s. Llewelyn Lloyd's The Game birds and wild fowl of Sweden and Norway introduces it explicitly as a Swedish term; the term was used most for black grouse and for capercaillie, lekking behavior is quite common in birds of this type, such as sage grouse, prairie chicken, great bustard and sharp-tailed grouse. However, lekking is found in birds of other families, such as the ruff, great snipe, Guianan cock-of-the-rock, musk ducks, hermit hummingbirds, birds-of-paradise, screaming pihas and the kakapo. Lekking is seen in some mammals such as fallow deer, Ugandan kob, some pinnipeds, some bats, the topi antelope. Lekking is found in amphibians such as moor frogs and bullfrogs, reptiles such as marine iguanas and some species of fish. Insects like the midge, ghost moth, lesser wax moth demonstrate lekking behavior. Lekking is found in some paper wasp species such as Polistes dominula, the orchid bee Eulaema meriana, in some butterfly species like the black swallowtail, in tarantula hawks like Hemipepsis ustulata.
There exploded. In the classic lekking system, male territories are in visual and auditory range of their neighbours. In an exploded lek, males are further away from one another. Males in an exploded lek are outside of visual range of one another. Exploded lek territories are much more expansive than classic systems and are known to exhibit more variation. A well-known example of exploded leks is the "booming" call of the kakapo, the males of which position themselves many kilometres apart from one another to signal to potential mates. Lek territories of different taxa do not vary in terms of size and location. Males return to the same mating sites because of female fidelity, it has been shown that avian females such as the black grouse and great snipe are faithful to males and not mating sites. Successful males congregate in the same area as the previous breeding season because it is familiar to them, while females return to reunite with said males. Females do not return to a mating site. Another possible explanation for lek stability is from male hierarchies within a lek.
In some species of manakins, subordinate betas may inherit an alpha's display site, increasing the chances of female visitation. Rank may contribute to the stability of lek size, as lower ranking males may congregate to achieve a perceived optimal size as a way to attract females; some species of ants, such as red harvester ants, as well as certain bee species, like Tetragonisca angustula and Trigona spinipes exhibit lek-like mating patterns. Males form reproductive aggregations and collectively give off a pheromone that attracts reproductive females; the more males present to give off the stronger the attraction for the females. Lek mating is common among paper wasp species. For example, Polistes dominula males fight with other males in mid-air to demonstrate their superiority and attractiveness. Males that lose fly away from the lek. Females fly through leks or perch near lekking areas to observe males before making choices on mates and they use the conspicuous abdominal spots on males, which are variable in size and shape, to aid in mate choice.
Males with smaller, more elliptically shaped spots are more dominant over other males and preferred by females compared to males who have larger, more irregularly shaped spots. In comparison, Mischocyttarus flavitarsis males choose a perch site near female hibernation areas, rub their abdomens to mark their territory and wait 6–7 weeks for a female to approach. If an intruder approaches, the owner of the site grapples the other wasp, they fall off the perch site and finish the fight on the ground. The main benefit for both sexes is mating success. For males, the costs stem from females’ preferences; the traits that are selected for may be energetically costly to maintain and may cause increased predation. For example, increased vocalization rate caused a decrease in the mass of male great snipe. Another cost would be male competition. Great snipes, Gallinago media fight to display dominance or defend their territory. Aggressive male black grouse are preferred over non-aggressive males and when the m
_(cropped).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
