A Smithsonian scientist and colleague report that a potentially harmful, invasive crab species that has spread to several countries is now established and reproducing in Panama. The researchers report that Harris mud crabs are reproducing in the small, man-made lake designated to become the third set of locks in Panama's new $5 billion canal expansion project.

The man history will honor as the father of a "green revolution" that transformed agriculture in many developing countries in the 1960s has been awarded the highest civilian honor the United States of America can give. The Congressional Gold Medal is reserved for the very few who have made outstanding contributions to either the United States or the world. In presenting the award to Dr Norman Borlaug, the Congress commended his "bringing radical change to world agriculture and uplifting humanity."

According to the first global assessment of forest fire control effectiveness in tropical parks, poverty and corruption correlate closely with lack of fire protection in tropical moist forests. A better understanding of the links between corruption, poverty and park management will help conservationists and policy makers create sophisticated strategies to conserve tropical ecosystems.

New charcoal and plant microfossil evidence from Mexico's Central Balsas valley links a pivotal cultural shift, crop domestication in the New World, to local and regional environmental history.

The Tropical Eastern Pacific, a discrete biogeographic region that has an extremely high rate of endemism among its marine organisms, continues to yield a wealth of never-before-described marine animals to visiting scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

In dangerous environments, females looking for a mate run great risks. Scientists from Seoul National University, in Korea, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama present a new take on sexual signaling in the May issue of the Public Library of Science. The researchers report that females prefer a male sexual signal that helps them avoid their predators as they sequentially visit and assess potential mates.

Drought tolerance is a critical determinant of tropical plant distributions, researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama report in the journal Nature, May 3. In a novel coupling of experimental measurements and observed plant distributions across a tropical landscape, drought tolerance predicted plant distributions at both local and regional scales. This mechanism to explain a common observation will contribute significantly to models of land use and climate change.

Lizards gave rise to legless snakes. Cave fishes don't have eyeballs. In evolution, complicated structures often get lost. Dollo's Law states that complicated structures can't be re-evolved because the genes that code for them were lost or have mutated. A group of sea snails breaks Dollo's law, Rachel Collin, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and colleagues from two Chilean universities announce in the April, 2007, Biological Bulletin.