Figs and the wasps that pollinate them present one of biologists' favorite examples of a beneficial relationship between two different species. In exchange for the pollination service provided by the wasp, the fig fruit provides room and board for the wasp's developing young. However, wasps do not always pollinate the fig. Fig trees "punish" these "cheaters" by dropping unpollinated fruit, killing the wasp's offspring inside, report researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

A workshop at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has nearly doubled the number of people capable of quatitatively testing for chytridiomycosis, dramatically improving the ability of conservationists and regulatory agencies to monitor the spread of one of the deadliest frog diseases on Earth.

Plant fossils from the same site in northern Colombia where the Titanoboa was found reveal a rainforest very similar to modern neotropical rainforests, but several degrees warmer.

A 16-year study of tropical butterfly migration links a global climate pattern, El Niño, to local increases in plant production and peak migrations.

A long-term study of Africanized bee invasion of Mexico's Yucatan shows that "killer bees" may actually increase food resources for native bees.

The China Regional Climate Center, the newest of five international sites where HSBC bank volunteers work with scientists to conduct the world's largest experiment on the effects of climate change on forests, opened September 22 in Gutianshan National Nature Reserve in eastern China.

The World Cultural Council will present the 2009 Albert Einstein World Award of Science to Sir John Houghton, president of the John Ray Initiative. The Hungarian artist Marcell Jankovics has been selected as the winner of the 2009 Leonardo da vinci World Award of Arts. This year, the 26th Award Ceremony of the World Cultural Council will take place Nov. 25 in the Academic Hall, Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium.

The Ecological Society of America presented Stephen P. Hubbell, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, with the 2009 Eminent Ecologist Award.

Hungry, sexual organisms replaced well-fed, clonal organisms in the Caribbean Sea as the Isthmus of Panama arose, separating the Caribbean from the Pacific, report researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The fossil record shows that if a species could shift from clonal to sexual reproduction it survived. Otherwise it was destined for extinction, millions of years later.