The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest [Paperback]

Elizabeth Royte (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2002

An engaging portrait of a community of biologists, The Tapir's Morning Bath is a behind-the-scenes account of life at a tropical research station that "conveys the uncertainties, frustrations, and joys of [scientific] field work" (Science). On Panama's Barro Colorado Island, Elizabeth Royte works alongside the scientists -- counting seeds, sorting insects, collecting monkey dung, radiotracking fruit bats -- as they struggle to parse the intricate workings of the tropical rain forest. While showing the human side of the scientists at work, Royte explores the tensions between the slow pace of basic research and the reality of a world that may not have time to wait for answers.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

While researching this book, Royte spent a year living and working intermittently with the ardent rainforest researchers on Barrow Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. A contributing writer to Outside magazine, Royte deftly describes these researchers and their work as well as the historical research done on the island and the history of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which serves as a base camp for researchers on the island. Through stories about spider monkeys, tent-making bats, leaf-cutting ants, spiny rats, innumerable bugs, and even the movement of water in the ecosystem, Royte offers an excellent overview of the need for tropical research. She also discusses the decline of the generalist in the field of biology. Books like Marty Crump's In Search of the Golden Frog (LJ 5/15/00) and Margaret Lowman's Life in the Treetops (LJ 5/15/99) focus on the life-work of one particular scientist (Lowman includes a chapter on her own work on Barrow Colorado), while Royte combines the studies of many researchers, resulting in an introduction to the ecosystem. An excellent book for all libraries. Margaret Henderson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Lib. and Archives, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Intriguing . . . a finely drawn chronicle of fieldwork, with an appealing moral edge." Kirkus Reviews

"Excellent . . . a superb introduction to tropical ecology and theoretical biology, as well as original and thoroughly engaging travel writing." Publishers Weekly

"Royte is a remarkable writer . . . a perfect guide. The book is a charmer; I loved it." The New York Times Book Review

"An excellent overview of the need for tropical research . . . an excellent book for all libraries." Library Journal

"By turns comic and poetic, delivers the pleasures of a meandering excursion . . . the act of observing is its own reward." The New Yorker

"Elizabeth Royte's book represents a moving and satisfying step forward in nature writing." Providence Journal

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (November 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618257586
• ISBN-13: 978-0618257584
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #976,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Rain Forests

More About the Author

Elizabeth Royte is the author, most recently, of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It. Her previous books--Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest--were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2005 and 2001. Royte's writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and other national publications. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor for OnEarth. Her work is included in The Best American Science Writing for 2004 and for 2009, the environmental omnibus Naked, and Outside Magazine's Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison. A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College's John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Royte lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter. She blogs, somewhat irregularly, at www.royte.com/blog

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Island Passions, Mostly for Science, September 25, 2001

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them (Hardcover)

In a lake in Panama sits a six square mile island, Barro Colorado, and there are permanent research and living facilities there which have made the island one of the best-studied patches of rainforest in the world. A wonderful book, _The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them_ (Houghton Mifflin) memorably shows what the scientists are up to. Elizabeth Royte is a journalist, not a naturalist, but she was not just taking notes but taking part. She ingratiated herself into the society of strange eggheads who loved fieldwork by simply making herself available as an extra pair of untrained but willing hands. Because of this we get to follow her on all sorts of recondite forays to coax the jungle to give up its secrets. She follows spider monkeys in order to catch their feces, which she bags so that they can be analyzed for hormones. She climbs out branches to hang insect traps, and counts ants. She drives a Boston whaler zooming around the lake so that a biologist perilously hanging off the front can net migrating moths, and she learns to sex the moths by squeezing their thoraces. She triangulates to find out where bats fly around in the dark. She climbs trees to help monitor the behavior of creeping vines that modify the forest. At one point, a newcomer naturalist comes into Royte's room, mistakenly thinking she has found a fellow naturalist: "Oh, hi. Hi. Do you happen to have a syringe smaller than 1 cc? I'm trying to inject some solution into a butterfly's ear canal and what I have is way too big." Royte is excited about all these tasks, and her enthusiasm is on every page of her book. In addition, she has humorous descriptions of the men and women working on the island, but playing as well, with Ultimate Frisbee one of the least controversial amusements. But it is their work that makes the book. One of them explains that if he were intent on conservation, he'd be doing other work to promote it directly, and that he is attempting something like pure thought: "I'm setting up this experiment as an exercise in thinking. I don't want a utilitarian reason for everything. Why do we need art? I feel the same way about basic science: It's good for us."

Reading Royte's book is good for us, too. There is a wide array of scientific information presented here, and plenty of good humor, raconteurship, and insight into how science is done and what makes scientists do it. It is also a deeply personal document, as during the year Royte married (to someone back in the States), became pregnant, and found that her reflections on nature and on evolution were deepened by the embryo growing with her. This is a surprisingly moving book about scientific endeavor and the solving of puzzles within and puzzles without.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly organized, thoughtful and fascinating, September 17, 2001

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them (Hardcover)

Collecting monkey dung, triangulating bat flights, counting liana vines, sorting the trash dumps of leaf cutter ants, enduring chigger bites, a hundred different species of cockroaches, torrential rains and suffocating heat, Elizabeth Royte occasionally finds herself wondering what the point of it all is.

For her first book, "The Tapir's Morning Bath," Royte, a journalist, spent most of a year in the rainforest field station on Barro Colorado Island, located in Gatun Lake, which makes up the midsection of the Panama Canal. Established by an American entomologist in 1923, the station is considered the epitome of luxury for field workers: labs with modern equipment, hot water, staff-cooked meals, even a lounge with beer.

Diversity in the tropics is greater and more complex than anywhere else in the world and scientists have long asked why. Whether measuring water movement through the forest or calculating how far male frogs travel to sing in a group, each piece of knowledge raises a dozen new questions.

Acting as an unofficial field assistant, Royte accompanied many of the scientists on their forest rounds. Personalities emerge as she observes the forest with them, shares their frustrations and triumphs and joins in the evening social life.

Most are starting out in their fields; doctoral candidates or post-docs and their research is narrowly focused. Bret, trying to prove that his tent-making bats construct their temporary shelters in order to reduce feeding commutes, finds himself distracted by other cost-benefit examples and ponders an evolutionary theory of trade-offs which eventually extends to include a triangulation between youthful vigor, cancer and aging. Collecting vital statistics on spiny rats, Paul is a cog in a larger study of limitation factors on rodent population density. Chrissy collects spider monkey dung (for hormone analysis) in hopes of being the first scientist to correlate the sexual behavior of female spider monkeys with changes in ovarian cycle. The work is often tedious and physically demanding.

"Bret's voice sang out through the dark. 'Do you have those little white flies up there? Taking small bites of your flesh?'
" 'Yup,' I answered, examining two dots of blood on my arm. 'When you turn on your light do you get little cockroaches crashing into your face?' "

Royte, sometimes as discouraged as her study animals (the people), asks why, when the rain forest itself is endangered, money and time should be spent on such arcane pursuits. As her time at the station grows, her answer expands.

Starting out, she sees each of these narrow studies as puzzle pieces in a larger picture, extending from the station's founding to well into the future and, in keeping with this view, she places current research projects in context with the people and discoveries that came before. As time goes on Royte sees how often an apparently pointless census of liana vines or canopy insects can provide insight into some marvel of nature - symbiotic relationships between animals and plants or ingenious methods developed to foil predators. And later, as she comes to appreciate even the things she hates about the forest, like rampant mold, Royte views the human hunger for knowledge as a thing of beauty itself, with no other need for justification.

Very well organized, providing a detailed picture of the station's evolution as well as its present, Royte's book is an armchair tour, complete with fascinating stories of natural wonder and a vicarious appreciation for the discomforts of a rain forest teeming with life.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In Depth Study of Primate (Biologists) Behavior in the Wild, March 11, 2002

By 

Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Tapir's Morning Bath (Hardcover)

Let me say first of all that I am a layman who is a science buff. My education is in Psychology, but I love biology, neuroscience, physics, and related topics. Tapir's Bath looked like an entertaining way to cram more about creature behavior into my brain. Actually you end up learning not an awful lot about the behavior of animals in the wild, but you do get an education about the behavior of scientists in the wild. While most primates, man included, are social animals, scientists seem to be loners like members of the cat family. They often are reclusive, enticed to be social only by the promise of a party that offers booze and food. Territorially jealous they form caste systems that allow them to sneer at other specialties. They grumble about cell biologists that sit in nice warm laboratories while they have to plow through muck and rain, bitten by a variety of small insects. Oh yes, and the microbiologists get all of the public attention, and the research funding. The public just doesn't seem to care about the distance a bat flies to obtain food.

The science bits are quite interesting, but not comprehensive enough to add much to your knowledge of biology. But that doesn't matter. The scientists on Barro Colorado Island deserve a lot of credit for their painstaking, difficult, uncomfortable research. I was interested in reading about their field research while being thankful that I majored in a subject that keeps me indoors where my biggest environmental problem is getting the thermostat adjusted correctly. Elizabeth Royte also proves that science writers often have to endure hardships. Pregnant during some of her long stay on Barro Colorado, she also trekked through rain and mud, returning to base to rest in bed and meditate on the cockroaches climbing her walls. It's a fun book.