Curious places in Panama
4 articles, each fact-checked and tied to a spot you can stand on.
These ants don't eat the leaves they cut. They use them to farm a specific fungus that exists nowhere else in nature. They've been farming for 50 million years, maintaining monoculture gardens and producing antibiotics to protect their crops.
Morpho butterflies produce color without pigment using nanoscale crystal structures. Engineers now copy this for anti-counterfeiting and display technology.
A 50-hectare plot of rainforest in Panama where every tree thicker than one centimeter has been tagged, mapped, and measured since 1980. The data helps explain why tropical forests contain so many species packed into such a small area.
The land bridge connecting North and South America became the site of a massive two-way animal migration starting about 3 million years ago. Animals flooded in both directions, and many species that had thrived for millions of years in isolation went extinct within a geological instant.
Prefer coordinates over lists? Every place here is a pin on the map.
Explore on the map