I first became involved in research into primate behavior and ecology in 1968, over 40 years ago, driven by a quest for a better understanding of the natural context of primate evolution. At that time, it was virtually unknown that primates can exploit exudates as a major food source. I was certainly unaware of this myself. By good fortune, I was awarded a postdoctoral grant to work on lemurs with Jean-Jacques Petter in the general ecology division of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Brunoy, France. This provided the launching-pad for my first field study of lesser mouse lemurs in Madagascar, during which I gained my initial inklings of exudate feeding. It was also in Brunoy that I met up with Pierre Charles- Dominique, who introduced me to pioneering observations of exudate feeding he had made during his field study of five lorisiform species in Gabon. This opened my eyes to a key feeding adaptation that has now been reported for at least 69 primate species in 12 families (Smith, Chap. 3) - almost 20% of extant primate species. So exudativory is now firmly established as a dietary category for p- mates, alongside the long-recognized classes of faunivory (including insectivory), frugivory, and folivory. Soon after I encountered Charles-Dominique, he published the first synthetic account of his Gabon field study in a French language journal (Charles-Dominique 1971).

Although biological exploration in Surinam started about 300 years ago, a thorough account of the Surinam herpetofauna has not hitherto been publish ed. Several publications on the subject have been issued (see below), but none of them was comprehensive. However, there are several papers dealing with a part of the Surinam lizards. The main reason for the absence of a complete review of the Surinam lizards (and, for that matter, of the entire herpeto fauna) has been the scarcity of the material available in museum collection although some of the more common species reached museums in considerable numbers. Until about 1900 the interior of Surinam was virtually terra incognita and most collecting took place in a restricted, cultivated area along the coast and the farthest inland point reached was Berg en Dal on the Suriname River. From 1900 exploration of the interior was actively encouraged by the Dutch Government, and under the auspices of the Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aard rijkskundig Genootschap several geographical expeditions explored the main river systems. Although the main purpose of these expeditions was to map the visited areas, usually the physician accompanying the expedition was entrusted also with the collecting of zoological and botanical specimens. Interesting ma terial from the interior started to reach the Dutch museums in ever increasing numbers after the late nineteen thirties when Dr. D. C. GEIJSKES arrived in Su rinam. The Surinam Expedition 1948-49 in which Dr. GElJSKES and Mr. P. H."

The book consists of multiple chapters by leading experts on the different aspects in the unique relationship between arthropods and plants, the underlying mechanisms, realized successes and failures of interactions and application for IPM, and future lines of research and perspectives. Interesting is the availability of the current genomes of different insects, mites and nematodes and different important plants and agricultural crops to bring better insights in the cross talk mechanisms and interacting players. This book will be the first one that integrates all this fascinating and newest (from the last 5 years) information from different leading research laboratories in the world and with perspectives from academia, government and industry.

With the invitation to edit this volume, I wanted to take the opportunity to assemble reviews on different aspects of circadian clocks and rhythms. Although most c- tributions in this volume focus on mammalian circadian clocks, the historical int- duction and comparative clocks section illustrate the importance of various other organisms in deciphering the mechanisms and principles of circadian biology. Circadian rhythms have been studied for centuries, but only recently, a mole- lar understanding of this process has emerged. This has taken research on circadian clocks from mystic phenomenology to a mechanistic level; chains of molecular events can describe phenomena with remarkable accuracy. Nevertheless, current models of the functioning of circadian clocks are still rudimentary. This is not due to the faultiness of discovered mechanisms, but due to the lack of undiscovered processes involved in contributing to circadian rhythmicity. We know for example, that the general circadian mechanism is not regulated equally in all tissues of m- mals. Hence, a lot still needs to be discovered to get a full understanding of cir- dian rhythms at the systems level. In this respect, technology has advanced at high speed in the last years and provided us with data illustrating the sheer complexity of regulation of physiological processes in organisms. To handle this information, computer aided integration of the results is of utmost importance in order to d- cover novel concepts that ultimately need to be tested experimentally.