One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin asked how a rain forest could contain so many species: “What explains the riot?” The same question occupies the scientists who toil on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island today. Tropical and steamy, these six square miles comprise the best-studied rain forest in the world, a locus of scientific activity since 1923. In THE TAPIR'S MORNING BATH, Elizabeth Royte weaves together her own adventures on Barro Colorado with tales of researchers struggling to parse the intricate workings of the rain forest, the most complicated natural system on the planet. Through the lens of the field station, she also traces the history of modern biology from its earliest days of collection and classification through the decline of the naturalist to the days of intense niche specialization and rigorous scientific quantification. As Royte counts seeds and sorts insects, collects monkey dung and radiotracks bats, she begins to wonder: what is the point of such arcane studies? The world over, rain forests are rapidly disappearing and species are going extinct. While humanizing the scientists in the field, she explores the tension between their research and the reality of a world that may not have time for the answers. "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 Elizabeth Royte is a contributing writer for Outside magazine. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. The Tapir's Morning Bath Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them By Elizabeth Royte Mariner Books Copyright © 2002 Elizabeth Royte All right reserved. ISBN: 0618257586 Excerpt 1 The Lab in the Jungle Gatun lake, the enormous midsection of the Panama Canal, sprawls for thirty-seven kilometers around peninsulas of land, between fragments of drowned mountains, and over the Continental Divide. Oceangoing vessels slice through the canal and shudder into steel locks that close and open almost silently. The lake"s shoreline is wildly irregular, and its waters are as green as the sea. Impenetrable forest flanks the canal. Toucans screech from low branches, and monkeys leap from tree to tree. Iridescent blue butterflies as large as teacup saucers flit along the shore. Inside the forest, a dark tangle of creeping vines and fringed palms battles to reach the sunlight. Here, where two continents meet and the waters of two vast oceans lap against the lake, lies a teeming cornucopia of life at its competitive extreme, a place like few others on Earth. From a spot near the middle of Gatun Lake, opposite a deserted village called Frijoles, Barro Colorado Island rises steeply. Its muddy red banks appear jumbled, its interior black. Isolated by the rising waters of the Chagres River, which was dammed in 1910 to form the canal, Barro Colorado had been the highest point on the Loma de Palenquilla ridge. Now the ridge is gone, and Barro Colorado"s peninsulas and uplifts sprawl over 1,564 hectares, or six square miles; its summit rises 119 meters above the lake"s surface. From where I stood on the deck of the island"s launch as it chugged through the shipping channel, I didn"t see Barro Colorado until we were nearly upon it. Then, just before the place where the canal arcs into Bohio Reach, I spotted several red and green channel markers leading into a small cove. A swimming raft floated there. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of tin-roofed dormitories set into the fringed hillside. Emerging from the background of green was a flight of steep concrete steps, which pulled my eye uphill to a graceful veranda and, behind that, to a peaked roof almost lost in the forest"s lush canopy. The low-lying clouds of early morning draped the thickly forested island, giving it the feel of a Chinese landscape painting. Then a small motorboat puttered up to a dock. A woman in camouflage pants tromped across a metal walkway. The lights flickered on in two low-slung buildings. The laboratory in the jungle came to life. This wasn"t my first visit to Barro Colorado. I had traveled to the island nearly ten years before, in 1990, with the much-lauded Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson.