Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and University of Costa Rica asked why spiders do not stick to their own sticky webs. Repeating old, widely quoted but poorly documented studies with modern equipment and techniques, they discovered that spiders' legs are protected by a covering of branching hairs and by a non-stick chemical coating and that they modify their behavior to avoid getting stuck.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has released the first completely portable bilingual species identification guide for the shore fishes of the tropical Eastern Pacific as a free iPhone application. Unique fish-finding, list-making tools and range maps make the app a powerful tool for scientists, divers and tour guides and a model for future phone-based field guides.

People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by Dolores Piperno, curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and emeritus staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Small monkey groups may win territorial disputes against larger groups because some members of larger, invading groups avoid aggressive encounters. In a new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Margaret Crofoot and Ian Gilby of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology show that individual monkeys that don't participate in conflicts prevent large groups from achieving their competitive potential.

Smithsonian researchers report that the brains of tiny spiders may fill their body cavities and overflow into their legs. As part of research to understand how miniaturization affects brain size and behavior, researchers measured the central nervous systems of nine species of spiders, from rainforest giants to spiders smaller than the head of a pin. As the spiders get smaller, their brains get proportionally bigger, filling up more and more of their body cavities.

Scientists braved ticks and a tiger to discover how human activities have perturbed the nitrogen cycle in tropical forests. Studies at two remote Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory sites in Panama and Thailand show the first evidence of long-term effects of nitrogen pollution in tropical trees.

Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new, closely related bee species: one from Coiba Island in Panama and another from northern Colombia. Both descended from of a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved into Central America, the ancestors of Mayan honeybees.

History and geology, not current ecology, are likely what has made tropical forests so variable from site to site, according to a new study published in the journal Science, co-authored by Liza Comita, research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.