In contrast to the patagial membranes of gliding vertebrates, the aerodynamic surfaces used by falling wingless ants to direct their aerial descent are unknown. We conducted ablation experiments to assess the relative ...

The leaf litter of tropical forests serves as a carbon sink, slows soil erosion and leaching, and is home to a large fraction of the forest's biodiversity. Standing leaf litter reflects the balance of litterfall and ...

Directed aerial descent (i.e. gliding and manoeuvring) may be an important stage in the evolution of winged flight. Although hypothesized to occur in ancestrally wingless insects, such behaviour is unexplored in extant ...

Although the use of mineral licks by diverse Amazonian birds and mammals is well-known, the ultimate motivation for such behavior remains unclear. As aerosol deposition of salts declines with distance from oceanic sources, ...

Sodium is an essential nutrient whose deposition in rainfall decreases with distance inland. The herbivores and microbial decomposers that feed on sodium-poor vegetation should be particularly constrained along gradients ...