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.

A complex farming society developed in Uruguay around 4,800 to 4,200 years ago, much earlier that previously thought, Iriarte and his colleagues report in this week's Nature(December 2). Researchers had assumed that the large rivers system called the La Plata Basin was inhabited by simple groups of hunters and gatherers for much of the pre-Hispanic era.

Plant-eating insects inhabit all forest ecosystems, but sometimes their numbers explode, resulting in massive tree defoliation. In the October issue of the Journal of Tropical Ecology researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) associate a severe moth outbreak with drought conditions following the 1997-1998 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event in a dry lowland forest near Panama's Pacific coast. If ENSO events become more common, repeated herbivore outbreaks might alter forest species composition.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has just published a 271 p. English translation of Stanley Heckadon-Moreno's "Naturalistas del Istmo de Panama", a compendium of the adventures of the late 19th and early 20th Century explorers and natural historians who documented the flora and fauna flooded during Panama Canal construction and collected throughout the Isthmus.

One of the first environmental impact studies ever, the Smithsonian Institution's 1910 Panama Biological Survey provided baseline data for Panama Canal construction. The Canal rerouted a river on Panama's Atlantic slope into the Pacific Ocean--connecting watersheds across a continent. Freshwater fish from both slopes intermingled. New results from McGill University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama show that invading freshwater fish caused no extinctions of resident fish in tributaries on either slope.

Evidence presented in the journal Nature (August 5, 2004), by archaeologists from the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University and the University of Haifa, pushes back the date for the processing of close wild relatives of domesticated wheat and barley--a key step in cultural development-- to 23,000 years before the present era.