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

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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.

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.

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.

Ms. Royte has written the book that I've always wanted to write. I've done my share of hanging out with biologists and archeologists at field sites in Central America watching them undertake tedious and lengthy data collections under uncomfortable situations. She captures how caught up these people can be in the work they do and how hard it can be for them to relate and function in social situations. Toward the end of the book she describes the migration of the Urania butterflies. I live in Panama City and there is a migration going on outside my window right now. Only it is much more enjoyable after reading Ms. Royte's explanation of what is going on.

On the trail of the scientists who make the trails

A journalist follows researchers into the South American rain forest to study the mystery of their devotion

By Diana Muir

Deep in the tropical rain forest, a small fruit-eating bat carefully nicks the veins on the underside of a philodendron leaf, causing the edges to fold down like a miniature tent. The bat curls up under its little tent and goes to sleep. Other bats don't make tents, why do these?
In "The Tapir's Morning Bath," journalist Elizabeth Royte follows field biologists into the rain forest with a similar question: Other people, after all, do not feel compelled to sit up all night being bitten by mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers. Why do these?

The Panama Canal is made up of a channel leading inland from each coast, joined by an immense manmade lake that covers what was once a rain forest. Numerous islands dot the lake. In the 1920s, a group of foresighted scientists managed to have the largest, Barro Colorado, with its nearly intact tropical forest, set aside as a scientific preserve.

In these pages, the present-day researchers of Barro Colorado spring vividly to life. Royte follows a young biologist from UC Berkeley, as the biologist follows a troop of spider monkeys.

Studying monkeys like this entails long days of trailing the agile little creatures as they skitter through the treetops, clambering easily from branch to branch. For an earth-bound researcher, keeping up with the troop entails scrambling up steep ravines, pushing through tangled undergrowth, and skidding down hillsides slick with rain. The early weeks are especially frustrating, as distrustful monkeys shy away from the interloper.

Royte, a New York journalist, is as much an interloper on the island as this scientist is among the troop of monkeys. The scientists, after all, have paid their dues to get here. They have spent years in graduate school, and they reach Barro Colorado only after their laboriously planned studies survive rigorous review to be selected for funding.

But Royte ingratiates herself by offering to help. On the island, these scientists work long hours, and conversation can be larded with arcane jargon incomprehensible to an outsider. She's willing to wade through this - and the muck of mangrove swamps - to hang insect traps on branches and sit on the forest floor counting the number of leaf-cutter ants that march past.

As they whiz across the lake in a Boston whaler, Royte is determined to pursue her subject at full throttle, even as the distinguished biologist perched in the bow tries to net moths without falling overboard. He shares his excitement about the natural world in all its magnificent complexity.

For instance, he tells her, urania moths migrate annually. Some years, however, only a few hundred appear. Other years, several hundred million moths fly past the island. No one knows where they come from or where they are bound. In Royte's retelling, scientific enthusiasm is infectious. Soon we, too, want to know what drives these winged nomads.

Readers will come away from "The Tapir's Bath" with an appreciation of the way narrow research questions become the material from which useful knowledge is constructed. But don't read it for that.

Read it for the thrill of the chase. Will the young researcher from Berkeley who has trudged the forest for three days without so much as a glimpse of a non-human primate ever locate her spider-monkey troop? Will the German biologist whose sophisticated equipment fails manage to contrive an impromptu method to measure the effect of leaf-cutting ants on the trees they harvest? And will the PhD candidate from the University of Michigan astound his professors by synthesizing a new theory to explain why biological diversity decreases with distance from the equator, or fulfill their expectations by failing even to discover why bats make tents?

And just why does a tapir take a morning bath?

* Diana Muir is the author of 'Bullough's Pond,' winner of the 2001 Massachusetts Book Award

Elizabeth Royte successfully outlines the mysteries of the tropical rainforest and the plenty of questions it still harbors. A layman who is overwhelmed by the abundance of species gets a glimpse of an understanding of biodiversity and its interdependencies. For me it was impressive how Royte narrows down that each living being is part of that big wonder called nature. Like in a waterfall she is coming down 3 levels from general questions raised by Charles Darwin and S.T.R.I. founder's spirit to the emphatically described individual projects of the scientists on BCI. By watching the scientists at their work in a first place she finally learns that she can not remain out of the loop, but is herself a part of the permanent cycle of life. I was lucky enough to visit BCI for a couple of days only, but immediately felt a deep affection and rememberance during reading. This great book has the potential to make researcher's work more transparent und thus more popular and at the end of the day to have people treating nature with more respect.

I absolutely loved every page of this book. As a field biologist who's spent time in remote rainforest field stations, I can say that she very accurately portrays many of the ups, downs and quirks of station life. Not only that, but she gives very honest descriptions of many aspects that biologists aren't as open to acknowledge (like the competitiveness and one-upmanship in wildlife viewing).
The only down point in my opinion, is that many of the scientific names are misspelled, which detracts a bit of seriousness from other information she gives. Then again, I am one of those "peculiar" rainforest biologists, so maybe I take it too personally *grin*
I also very much enjoyed her views on conservation and scientific research. Once again, she presents things from a different angle, with refreshing honesty and bluntness that is often missing in books written by biologists.
I would not hesitate for a second to recommend this book!!

This is a really good book! I'm a biologist and I'm currently in Panama and I've spent the last couple of years in Central America. I can assure you that this is an excellent work about biologists, research, and life in Central America.

The writing is straight ahead, no flourishes of flounces to get in the way. The story is simple but clear and funny and heartwarming. I don't know what more you can ask for in a book.

The BCI Research Station is one of the last great centers for basic research into topical ecology. While it is being taken over, gradually, by biologists who know everything about what's going on inside the cell wall but cannot tell a Red Deer from a Bulldog, there are still enough who are trying to understand what animals and plants are doing and what is the relationship between them.

Whether you intend to travel to the rain forest or not, this is a good read and you will enjoy it. I did and I highly recommend it.

_The Tapir's Morning Bath_ by Elizabeth Royte is an interesting look at the world of field biologists working in the American tropics. The author spent about a year living and working with scientists at a scientific station that was located on Barro Colorado Island (often abbreviated as BCI), an isle that rises steeply from near the middle of Gatun Lake, the enormous midsection of the Panama Canal. Isolated by the waters of the Chagres River (dammed in 1910 to form the canal), BCI was once the highest peak of the now submerged Loma de Palenquilla range. Its summit rises 119 meters above the lake's surface and covers some 1,564 hectares or about 6 square miles.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) runs a lab on the island's northeastern shore, a facility that has operated continuously since 1923, its backyard the most-studied tropical rain forest in the world. The preservation of the island and the lab was the brainchild of James Zetek, a U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist who had been working on mosquito control in the Canal Zone during its construction.

The island is a nearly ideal laboratory for researchers. It is home to 65 terrestrial mammal species (including agoutis, peccaries, deer, sloths, howler monkeys, anteaters, tayras, and tapirs), 70 bat species, 381 bird species, 58 species of reptiles (including crocodiles), 32 amphibian species, and 1,369 species of vascular plants, including 300 tree species. The animals are reached by a series of maintained trails and some are so well studied that good population figures are had for a number of species (there are about 2,500 agoutis on the island for instance).

In order to ease her way into the island residents' culture and also to get a handle on both what life is like as a field biologist and what it was they were studying, Royte volunteered to be a free field assistant to anyone who wanted her. At first the scientists were reluctant but soon she was eagerly sought by a variety of researchers. The heart of the book is really her work in the field with these biologists, describing both what they were studying and the field biologists themselves, what motivated them, what they hoped to achieve, and their views on both their research subjects and larger issues in science.

One scientist she spent a lot of time in the field with was Chrissy Campbell, who was doing a study of spider-monkeys. Her study a difficult one, requiring her to follow the island's one spider-monkey troop all day until it bedded down at 6pm and then be back in the field at 6am to follow it again (if she was late she had to spend all day locating it and was often not successful). She sought to collect fecal samples from the troop's five adult females and record their behavior, hoping that analysis of the samples in the lab and correlation with the behaviors she recorded would reveal information on female hormones, adult behavior, and the relationship between the two.

Another scientist she worked with was Bret Weinstein, who was doing a study of tent making in bats. This behavior (which consisted of a bat biting and bending leaves into shapes to conceal and protect them as they slept) was noted to have evolved three separate times among bats and was found only among small, canopy fruit eating bats of the American tropics. Weinstein hoped to discover the reasons behind the tent-making, a job that kept him up all hours of the night, running through the jungle at night chasing faint signals on radio transmitters he attached to some of his study subjects.

She was field assistant to Paul Trebe, himself a field assistant to a scientist who was back at his university in the U.S. His laborious daily job was to visit scores of traps every morning on BCI and on several small adjacent islands (one island had 99 traps) for the nocturnal spiny rat, collecting information on that species population size, age structure, sex ratio, and reproductive output, which along with manipulating conditions on some of the small islands enabled the scientist back home to do complicated studies that impacted on such issues as the animal's role in seed dispersal and as a reservoir for infectious agents.

Other researchers Royte worked with included a geologist studying the forest's effects on runoff and the canal watershed, two scientists doing a diversity study of lianas, and a researcher studying the effects of leaf-cutter ants on tree growth.

While in the field and talking to the island's residents, Royte noted that there was a rivalry between field biologists and those who worked in laboratories. Field scientists often had a "working-class pride," and "cultivated a spunky disdain for lab jocks." She said that pure animal-behavior studies were "decidedly out of fashion in these molecular times" and was perceived by many as a "soft" science. Many on the island griped that molecular biologists got the lion's share of money and prestige, though some did acknowledge they provided useful insights (particularly in the area of taxonomy).

Royte pondered the often incredibly narrow focus of researchers there, joking once that she "damned tropical biology as a black-art discipline and scientists as high priests of esoterica." Sometimes researchers labored on projects that seemed to have little application and gained deep knowledge about very narrow aspects of an organism but were often "ignorant of the whole." Royte wrote that the increasing number of scientists and decreasing amounts of funding available (consumed partially by huge university bureaucracies) forced scientists to specialize early, to carve out a niche that no else had in order to "avoid competition and make names for themselves." She also noted that sometimes seemingly very arcane research results can yield surprising answers to larger puzzles.

A very good book, I enjoyed her descriptions, the obvious research she did, and a subject she came back to repeatedly in the book, why tropical rain forests are so diverse.

I bought this book based on the second part of its title: "Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them". I thought that it was going to cover Central and South America. It does not. The author only covers a small island in Panama: Barro Colorado. But, don't let that stop you from buying this book. It is very interesting and well-written. If you are interested in learning about the plants and animals of the tropical rain forests, and how scientists attempt to unravel what's going on, then you will enjoy reading this book. I also plan on looking for a couple of the books the author read and gave as references.