IT SHOULD have caused ecological chaos. When the Panama canal was completed in 1914, it linked the Chagres and Grande rivers – and overnight, communities of fish that had been separated for millennia were brought together. The ensuing competition should have meant that extinction of some species would be inevitable. But a study of the rivers 90 years on shows that biodiversity has actually gone up.
“It flies in the face of what was ecological dogma,” says Eldredge Bermingham of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Unit in Ancon, Panama.
Bermingham and his colleagues conducted a follow-up study of river sites visited by…
