Empty forest or empty rivers? A century of commercial hunting in Amazonia

Empty forest or empty rivers? A century of commercial hunting in Amazonia

The Amazon basin is the largest and most species-rich tropical forest and river system in the world, playing a pivotal role in global climate regulation and harboring hundreds of traditional and indigenous cultures. It is a matter of intense debate whether the ecosystem is threatened by hunting practices, whereby an "empty forest" loses critical ecological functions. Strikingly, no previous stu...

Tree recruitment in an empty forest.

To assess how the decimation of large vertebrates by hunting alters recruitment processes in a tropical forest, we compared the sapling cohorts of two structurally and compositionally similar forests in the Rio Manu floodplain in southeastern Peru. Large vertebrates were severely depleted at one site, Boca Manu (BM), whereas the other, Cocha Cashu Biological Station (CC), supported an intact fa...

Half empty or half full?

Prevalence of empty sella syndrome

Background: The empty sella syndrome (ESS) is a neurological or pathologic finding in which sella turcica is devoid of pituitary tissue and the subarachnoid space extends into sella turcica, which is either primary or secondary as well as partial and complete. The widespread use of CT scans and MRIs today has made the ESS a common finding in imaging. The aim of this study was to evaluate the pr...

Schizophernia and empty sella – casual or correlated?

A male patient, 44 years old, with schizophrenia which started at the age of 18. At his last follow-up visit, laboratory tests and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were performed, revealing the presence of a sellar arachnoidocele. To our knowledge, there is only one similar case report of a set of male monozygotic triplets with schizophrenia and empty sella syndrome. High-resolution chrom...