A Tree Hugger, With a Twist

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BARRO COLORADO ISLAND, Panama — Stefan Schnitzer paused along one of the trails that crisscross this forested island in the Panama Canal waterway. Around him were trees, their high canopies muting the light from the tropical sun, the occasional woody vine, or liana, climbing up their thick trunks.

But Dr. Schnitzer’s attention was turned to a break in the forest just a few yards off the trail.

There, in harsher sunlight, a tree stump was all but obscured by a riot of lianas, their tangled stems forming a heavy thicket. Clearly the tree had come down at some point, which created an opening in the forest canopy that allowed the vines to run amok.

“This is really typical of lots of tropical forest,” said Dr. Schnitzer, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which is based in Panama City and operates a field station here, about halfway across the isthmus. “Where you get some disturbance, you get this massive influx of vines. They come down in the disturbance, but they don’t die. They just start putting out these stems everywhere.

“This is the liana-tree interaction at its most horrible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/science/24vine.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210