Few years ago, I contributed to Science paper saying that caterpillars are safer in temperate forests than in tropics.

Now, I claim that they are not, if we consider also canopy forest strata. Specifically, we found strikingly contrasting predation gradients: predation is highest in the canopy at high latitudes, but decreases toward the tropics—where predation becomes stronger in the understory instead. This means that our earlier paper was not wrong, it only overlooked what is happening above our heads as we had no canopy cranes to get there.

Our work would be never possible without the funding from European Research council and skilled craned drivers, who not only got us up to place the caterpillars, but also helped us to find them up there again.

We also showed how the predation by arthropods vs. birds differ between the strata and forests, confirming that arthropods are attacking many more dummy caterpillars than birds.

Finally, we surveyed available prey items and predators, and indicated how they might interact at different forest strata. Showing for example, that there is relatively more birds in the forest understory of tropical forests, than in temperate forests (where they hand out mostly in the canopies).