Book Review: The Tapir's Morning Bath

Bridget found this book (The Tapir's Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte) in the equipment storage room and passed it on to me. I finished it earlier this week. I'm so pleased to have time to read for fun here.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about research in tropical biology, or who just enjoys good narrative non-fiction. But I also recognize that, as every book can take on different meanings depending on the reader and the context in which they read it, I found this book particularly compelling because it connects so naturally to my current experience. The book is about Barro Colorado Island, an island preserve in the middle of the Panama Canal, with a research station clinging to its steep slopes - one of the most thoroughly examined tropical forests in the world, yet still full of mysteries (as Royte continually reminds us). I spent a week on BCI over fall break last November, trying my hand at soil science with a Princeton class focused on biogeochemistry, and will spend another three weeks there later this semester learning about monkeys. Having seen the place, I got a kick out of mapping Royte's descriptions to my own experiences hiking along the Zetek trail or lying in a hammock on the deck of the lab building. Knowing that I will go back there soon, I was eager to learn more about BCI's history and culture. Immersed as I currently am in the study of tropical biology, every chapter I read echoed things I had just learned in the field, and provided me with further context for exploring the rain forest the next day. As someone considering a career in scientific research, I also appreciated her close examination of the lives of scientists, of the stresses and joys of field work and what it takes to get through grad school.

Royte, a journalist, spent about a year living on BCI, observing and assisting scientists working on a wide variety of research projects, from tent-building bats to leaf-cutter ants to spider monkeys. While full of interesting natural history, this is actually a book about people - about what drives scientists to study tropical biology; about the nature of field stations and communities of isolated researchers; about how the history of research on this island reflects how science has changed over the past century. Royte frames herself as a behavioral scientist of sorts, visiting the island to study the resident scientists just as they might study spider monkeys, letting them grow accustomed to her presence and then following them into the forest to observe their every move. I sympathize with both the scientists and the journalist in this arrangement - so while at times I resented her treatment of BCI's inhabitants as strange creatures under observation, I could also identify with the fascination with human motivation and the urge to learn and tell the stories of people with unusual lives. It helps that her interest in participation seems so genuine, that she is not just following scientists around but also picking up monkey dung samples with her own hands, or sitting through a rainstorm in the middle of the night radio-tracking bats. I appreciate the realism in her portrayal of the drudgery and occasional excitement of field work. And according to a scientist living on BCI who gave us a guest lecture last week, the picture she paints of the social dynamics on the island is also very accurate.

Good book. I'd recommend reading it, even if you aren't in a tropical rain forest. I'm passing it on to another classmate now.

School's Out! For the Weekend ...

Three weeks passed surprisingly quickly. Our first course is already over. After 2 days spent madly analyzing our data and writing papers, we all presented our results yesterday morning, then said goodbye to our professor and TA's over lunch at a crepes restaurant in Albrook Mall. Taking classes on a block schedule means cramming a lot into each period of three weeks, but it also means utter freedom in between. Yesterday we celebrated with an afternoon at the mall - an overwhelming labyrinthine place full of bright colors, giant animal statues, and store after store selling cheap clothes - and an evening that included accidentally crashing a Panamanian wedding at Club Capibara at the resort up the hill. Today we are all reveling in doing nothing. In a few days we will embark on our next big adventure, studying coral reefs in the San Blas islands, an archipelago in the Caribbean inhabited by the indigenous Kuna people.

With our living conditions reminiscent of summer camp, I find myself craving solitude. One of the highlights of my week came when we stayed in the tiny rural town of Achiote, a place surrounded by cattle pasture and evergreen rainforest, and I walked through town alone after breakfast one morning. The day was just beginning to warm up, and I delighted at walking at my own pace, waving "hola" to children playing in yards and old men sitting in hammocks in front of cinder-block houses. There are some places in Panama where I would not feel safe wandering around alone, but it's so good to feel that freedom when I can.


Panama fact of the week: I learned that Panama has a substantial Chinese population, descended from the Chinese workers who built the canal. So many of them are now shopkeepers, especially in little towns like Achiote, that "el chino" (the Chinese) is a common word for general store. I also hear that Panama City's Chinatown has some great Chinese food ... something I hope to investigate one of these weekends.

Caterpillar Updates; Canopy Crane; Cultural Isolation

Good news about the caterpillars: more of them got eaten at Pipeline Road, and in such a way (the vast majority eaten at edge sites, very few eaten in the interior) that we saw a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between edge and interior. I don't know if I've ever before seen a p-value less than 0.05 for a project I've done for an ecology class. Woohoo!

Bad news about the caterpillars: at our second site, Parque Natural Metropolitano, half of them disappeared overnight. This was probably due to a torrential rainstorm overcoming the holding power of Superglue and washing them off their leaves, though we'd like to be able to say they all disappeared because birds snatched them away. (Why, we asked, did it have to rain so hard during the dry season, at the driest forest we are visiting? - but it's still a rainforest, after all.) We had a frustrating day yesterday rolling new replacement caterpillars in the field, and placing bets as we crashed through the forest as to whether we would find 2 or 3 or even all 5 caterpillars missing when we reached the end of the transect.

Yet, more good news about the caterpillars: Parque Natural Metropolitano has a canopy crane. We are trying to put this to good use by expanding our study to also include a canopy-versus-understory comparison. Yesterday we spent an hour dangling above the forest canopy in a gondola, gluing caterpillars to leaves and pausing occasionally to look out across the treetops toward the skyscrapers of Panama City. Our professor, intent on staying out of our way while he accompanied us, sat on the floor of the gondola reading La Prensa and gave me the walkie-talkie to issue instructions in Spanish to the crane operator - "Arriba y a la derecha, por favor, al Ficus grande." Manny - who everyone assumes can speak Spanish because he looks Hispanic and his name is Manuel, but who is actually Italian and Portuguese by heritage - listened and tried to pick up a few words.

One of the strange things about this program is how isolated I feel from the people of Panama itself. Unlike participants in most study abroad programs, we are not here to learn the language or immerse ourselves in a foreign culture; about half the group doesn't even speak Spanish. We are here to learn biology. And so while we are becoming intimately acquainted with the flora and fauna of tropical forests, we have yet to engage much with the people who live here - other than our TA's, the one Panamanian student taking the course with us, and the people, like our bus driver and the canopy crane operator, who dutifully take us where we want to go. We travel everywhere in large groups, attracting stares but little conversation (many Panamanians say "hi" to us in an exaggerated accent, recognizing us as Americans). Last weekend, we visited a club in Panama City and danced the night away, all eighteen of us crowded between the tables and the bar. We realized later that none of the Panamanians were dancing; that they considered the place a lounge, not a dance club (though the music was so loud we couldn't imagine being able to do anything but dance); that the group trying to have a birthday party on the other side of the room probably resented our obnoxious gringo presence. In photos from that night, we look wildly happy, while the strangers behind us look annoyed that we are blocking the bar.

I am looking forward to spring break, when I will travel in a much smaller group (just me and Rajiv), see more of the country, and practice my Spanish more frequently. Yet I will still be a tourist, of course. I will still stand out. I don't know how long I would have to spend here to ever be able to blend in, just as I don't know how long I would have to spend here to ever be able to comprehend the complexities of the tropical rainforest.

Who wants to eat my caterpillars?

In the past two days, I have left 90 clay caterpillars glued to leaves in the forest. I am now hoping that while I sit here in the air-conditioned Gamboa Schoolhouse digesting my dinner, ants and beetles and birds in the rainforest are actively nibbling my caterpillars to pieces.

The study I have designed with my classmate Manny for our Tropical Biology course asks whether predation rates on (artificial) caterpillars are different on the edge of the forest than in the interior. Our forest edge is along a road (Pipeline Road in Gamboa), while "interior" means crashing through the tangled forest until we are 100 meters from the road. Getting to our interior sites can be a huge adventure. It's absolutely essential that we use a compass, and flag trees as we go, so we can find our way back out. We have encountered muddy stream crossings, thorny vines, plants with huge serrated leaves we have dubbed "knife plants," and some vicious bugs. Yesterday Manny got bit on the ankle by a bullet ant, a hostile inch-long creature reported to have the most painful sting of any hymenopteran - his ankle was throbbing and swollen for several hours. I was impressed he wanted to keep going after that, and so glad I was wearing impenetrable rubber boots when I walked through their nest before him and unknowingly provoked them.

We established 6 of our 9 transects yesterday, and returned to find a few caterpillars predated upon, but most remained untouched. Maybe predators actually can't be fooled, most of the time, into thinking plasticine clay is edible, even if it is shaped like a tasty caterpillar ...

Nobody wanted to eat this caterpillar.

Somebody really wanted to eat this caterpillar.

Very, Very Different

Tropical forests, I have been told many times in the past few days, are special. They are also very, very different from temperate forests. Apart from the humidity and the mosquitoes, which call to mind some unpleasant days in New England last summer, it's hard to imagine a forest more different from the forests of oak and maple, or Douglas fir and hemlock, where I have learned most of what I know about forests. The trees reach and spread into a tall, layered canopy, draped in vines and lianas, a huge tangle of leaves of all sizes and shapes, where howler monkeys look down on us from high perches. Nearer to the ground we see tree trunks covered in spines or supported by massive buttresses, morpho butterflies flitting along the path, and the busy traffic of leaf-cutter ants moving along the roads they have made across the forest floor. Learning to identify the plants here seems incredibly daunting; every second tree is a different species.

We are still just becoming acquainted with the tropical forest. Today we went on our second orientation walk. Tomorrow we will visit a higher-altitude montane forest. Thursday we start pilot studies for our individual research projects. I plan to study predation on caterpillars at edge versus interior sites, which will involve creating model caterpillars out of Sculpey clay, gluing them to trees, and checking them for bite marks!

Photo of the day: Our TA offers us a taste of wild cacao seeds. (They're covered in a sour white slime, and inside they taste bitter and the slightest bit like chocolate.)