Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.

In the first study of native African honeybees and honey-making stingless bees in the same habitat, humans and chimpanzees are the primary bee nest predators.

The race is on to buy up inexpensive land along coastlines for vacation homes and tourist hotels. But increased development can mean more nutrient rich runoff that threatens the very coral reefs attracting tourists in the first place. David Kline at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and colleagues find that bacteria on coral reefs grow out of control as the level of simple sugars in seawater increases.

A Caribbean Journal of Science special issue presents the first scientific overview of the marine environment in Bocas del Toro Province near Panama's border with Costa Rica. With color photographic guide to marine invertebrates -- the volume, edited by Dr. Rachel Collin, director STRI's research station in Bocas -- debuts new species and new records for Panama and provides an essential reference for researchers, tourists and conservationists throughout the region.

Much has been made of the economic impacts of recent biological invasions, but what are the implications of invasions in deep time? Luiz Rocha leads geneticists who time travel through ocean environments. The results of their travels, published online in Molecular Ecology, tell us that during warm, interglacial periods, reef-associated fish (goby genus Gnatholepis), leapt around the horn of Africa into the Atlantic, where their range expanded as the world warmed.

As human populations increase, tropical forests change in different ways. Old-growth forests become agricultural lands, degraded land is abandoned, urbanization intensifies, and the populations of tropical countries will increase by two billion over the next 25 years. The tropics support over half of all species and over two-thirds of all people. Without the commitment from the scientific community, the two are unlikely to continue to coexist.

Mary-Jane West Eberhard, biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and author of "Developmental Plasticity and Evolution" published by Oxford University Press, was elected member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, created in 1603 in Rome. It aims to promote, coordinate, integrate and spread scientific knowledge in its highest expression, in the unity and universality of culture. West-Eberhard joins a group of 90 foreign members, 27 of them in biological sciences.

Long before Europeans brought honey bees (Apis mellifera) to the Americas, Mayan bee keepers harvested honey from the log nests of stingless bees native to tropical forests. Now, colleagues from the Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Quintana Roo, Mexico and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) warn of the imminent demise of stingless bee keeping on the Yucatan -- a result of ongoing cultural change and habitat loss.

Dealing a new blow to the dominant evolutionary paradigm, Luiz Rocha and colleagues from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Harvard University the University of Florida and the University of Hawaii, report coral reef fish from neighboring habitats may differ more from one another than from fish thousands of miles away. An ecological speciation model for coral reef organisms may spur the development of a more synthetic treatment of speciation on land and sea.

Steve Yanoviak tosses ants from very high places: tropical forest canopy trees. In the 10 February, 2005 issue of the journal, Nature, Yanoviak, ant biologist, Mike Kaspari, and biomechanics expert, Robert Dudley, publish an amazing observation: canopy ant workers (Cephalotes atratus L) jettisoned from branches 30 m above the ground, glide backwards to the trunk of the same tree with incredible accuracy. This is the first published account of directed gliding in wingless insects.