The Arbornaut, page 24
For most of the year, tropical trees look alike with elliptical, entire leaves and smooth brown bark. But the local shaman knows every species and has learned about important plants over many generations. In contrast, professional botanists often train for a lifetime, painstakingly waiting years for tropical plants to flower and fruit, because sometimes those are the only features that differentiate one species from another. Identification can’t be mastered during one quick expedition. When I take groups of people into the canopy, I ask them to think about the analogy of visiting an art gallery. If you see one or two painters you recognize, suddenly you feel “at home.” It is the same in the rain forest. If you find the pixie cups of Inga or the sea-urchin fruits of Apeiba, then suddenly you have friends among an otherwise homogeneous-seeming salad bar. But it is impossible to learn too many trees at once, because they look so much alike to the amateur eye—green, oval, toothless leaves.
One practical use of tropical vegetation by ribereños in the upper Amazon is the construction of blowguns, silent weapons that allow sustainable hunting by these indigenous river-dwelling families. First, the shaft is carved from the blowgun tree, called pucuna caspi by the Yagua Indians. They cut a long section of wood in half with a machete, and then whittle a channel out of the center of each piece. When two opposite sections are aligned and carved, a tar-like plant resin is used to cement them back together, leaving a hollow tunnel through the center. The flattened aerial roots of a philodendron are wrapped around both halves to seal the blowgun, and a mouthpiece is carved from the lightweight timber of local mulberry. The darts, carved from palms, require a toxic substance called curare to tip the arrows for killing game. Made from the bark of a liana (Curarea toxicofera) and a shrubby tree called strychnos (Strychnos panurensis), curare reduces neuromuscular activity in the prey, resulting in paralysis and eventual death from respiratory failure. Great kapok seeds are propelled by a silk cotton material, and this substance is harvested to wrap around the blowgun dart, creating the aerodynamics to propel it through a six-foot-long blowgun chamber. The darts are silent, quick, and deadly to a monkey or capybara, and over many generations the local people have hunted sustainably without endangering local wildlife populations.
When Eddie and James were only eleven and ten, respectively, they accompanied me to the Amazon during a Christmas holiday. There was never any plan B when their mom traveled since, in a single-parent household, the boys could not stay home alone and I tried not to overutilize the favor bank of their grandparents. James felt sorry for himself because he missed his first-ever invitation to a New Year’s Eve party. But then the village shaman pulled him aside and offered to teach him how to use a blowgun. Not only was he a deadeye shot, but he got his very own instrument made by the Yagua Indians. After returning home, he never thought once about missing that party, and proudly took his blowgun to school (without darts) and explained its botanical parts to his fifth-grade science class.
I love bringing entire families to the rain forest, because children often become the best citizen scientists, honing their five senses more quickly than their parents. In Belize, my children found a new species of slingshot spider busily hunting food by zinging a silk strand plus itself forward at lightning speed to snare prey. Arachnologists later measured the acceleration of a slingshot spider’s silk strand at 1,200 yards per second squared (as compared to a cheetah, which chases prey at a mere 13 yards per second squared). Both James and Eddie had eagle eyes not only for finding spiders hanging under branches or tiny beetles feeding on leaves, but also for locating well-camouflaged pink-toed tarantulas hunting prey on the edge of bromeliad tanks. As children, they had a pet tarantula, easier to manage than dogs or cats given our frequent travel schedule. At first, it was named Harry due to its distinct hirsute exoskeleton, but when it grew enormous, the boys realized it was female, so the spider was renamed Harriet. In the spider world, females can be up to a hundred times larger than their male counterparts. Every two weeks, we dropped one cricket into Harriet’s glass terrarium, and she stalked, terrorized, and finally pounced on her prey. The neighborhood kids loved to watch her feeding exploits. If you blinked, you might miss the rapid hunting prowess. What an ideal pet, which only required a single cricket every two weeks. Pink-toed tarantulas were relatively common in the Amazon, living up near bromeliads where they captured insects coming to sip water or lay eggs. But they also set up housekeeping in the rafters over our beds, hunting insects that are unfailingly attracted to humans. One year, when one citizen science family arrived with four teenage daughters, there was an enormous shriek when they spotted a tarantula in their bunkroom. Knowing this was a make-or-break moment for the success of the trip, I instantly praised the teenagers for having the coolest room and making the first observation of this awesome species. They kind of looked at one another wide-eyed, and soon after bragged to all the other kids about their amazing eight-legged roommate. They went on to have a life-changing expedition, with family memories and science exposure no school classroom could ever offer. This same family held a boa constrictor several days later. That must have provided an unforgettable family holiday photo!
Despite long-term research by many dedicated scientists, the Amazon is in big trouble. As the world’s largest remaining rain forest, its future is uncertain—clearing, burning, logging, and roadbuilding are on the rise. The estimated 6.2 million square miles (or 4 billion acres) of original primary rain forest has been halved to less than 3.5 million square miles in 2020. Most of that deforestation happened in my lifetime, primarily due to the North American appetite for beef, soy, palm oil, and other agricultural products, and the onset of road construction has led to a frenzy of gold mining and oil drilling, which destroy the forests and create toxic pollution. During one year from mid-2017 to mid-2018, deforestation of the Amazon rose 13.7 percent. Even worse, throughout 2018 the Brazilian Amazon saw an estimated 200 percent increase in deforestation from the prior year, according to the biologist Antonio Donato Nobre (Climate News Network, March 16, 2020). And since 2018, rain forest conservation regulations have been very lax under the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, including massive burning. According to Nobre, land grabbers organized a “day of fires” during August 2019 to honor Bolsonaro and his disregard for the value of the Amazon rain forest. Such significant losses of the eastern Amazon in Brazil have increased the value of the western, and less degraded, rain forests in Peru. Tropical rain forests cover less than 10 percent of Earth’s landmass but house approximately two-thirds of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, with a significant majority of those species in the canopy. The Amazon rain forest took fifty-eight million years to evolve, but scientists predict it could pass a tipping point within the next fifty years, collapsing into dry savanna because an excessive loss of foliage will preclude the normal rainfall patterns. Nobre and his colleague Tom Lovejoy of George Mason University predict that if Amazon deforestation exceeds 20 percent, the hydrological cycle will cease to provide enough rainfall to support forests (as well as humans). In addition to their importance for global moisture circulation, rain forests absorb carbon dioxide (which humans have emitted as pollution), and approximately half the dry weight of every enormous, old-growth trunk represents carbon storage. When forests are burned, the fires release carbon back into the atmosphere. And when the Amazon is cleared, rainfall decreases significantly in the absence of leafy canopy that served as a recycling agent for moisture.
Conservation of rain forests requires an informed and participatory public. Citizen science has become unquestionably successful in fostering public outreach, not only in museums but also for NGOs, state governments, local policy makers, and K–12 science. This is a game changer in the current political climate, where much of the public increasingly casts doubt on science due to misinformation. Expanding environmental literacy is vital in the twenty-first century so our growing global population understands the limits of natural resources. We are fast approaching tipping points where many ecosystems, including the Amazon, reach irreversible damage. Yet, never before have humans had such a wealth of technology to innovate solutions, including the capacity to collaborate from virtually anywhere around the world, draw ideas from multiple disciplines, analyze countless data points, and create novel toolkits for STEM. Planetary scientists must seek to balance cellular versus organismal biology, virtual models versus real-time data, and science blended with policy. Future stewards need skills to assess, predict, manage, and communicate the ecological and societal changes emerging from a dramatically altered global landscape. However, a major stumbling block in training the next generation of practitioners is how to effectively integrate virtual technology with in situ fieldwork. While most older ecologists were originally inspired by outdoor play, younger scientists interact with ecosystems through virtual gaming, social networking, and computer models, sometimes leading to “nature deficit disorder” whereby kids stay indoors. The author Richard Louv, in his bestselling book Last Child in the Woods, reported one youth exclaiming, “I wanna play indoors, ’cause that is where all the electric outlets are.” So, how can environmental practitioners blend hands-on fieldwork with virtual technology? This conundrum is the subject of ongoing debate, but citizen science is one of the creative solutions.
For any country to retain global competitiveness, it needs to encourage STEM innovation and education. Research investments in China, Singapore, and South Korea are topping the charts for scientific literacy of their students and citizen scientists. America increasingly lags behind and, according to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), spends more on potato chips than the federal government’s budget for research and development of energy. The NAS also reports that only 4 percent of Americans work in science and engineering, but this group creates jobs for the other 96 percent. When scientists develop a new diagnostic tool for cancer or engineers patent clean energy technology, these innovations translate into jobs in manufacturing, marketing, transportation, sales, and maintenance, as well as education and training. In recent history, STEM innovations have dramatically transformed the way we live. For example, tape recorders were replaced with iPods, maps with GPS, landlines with cell phones, two-dimensional X-rays into three-dimensional CT scans, and slide rules and daily planners became computers. But an enormous roadblock still exists: some fourteen thousand American public school systems are suffering declines in student proficiency in math and science.
Citizen science is part of a broader solution to reverse these trailing STEM metrics. Getting kids involved in bird counts, shoreline trash pickup, local BioBlitzes to conduct rapid species counts, urban tree planting, or water quality testing is a good start. Thousands of citizens are using an app on their mobile phones called iNaturalist, which compiles photos of biodiversity and maps their distribution. Galaxy Zoo is another computer-based imagery system where citizens search for stars, galaxies, and other extraterrestrial sightings on authentic NASA photos. Other emerging programs illustrate the integration of citizen science with technical scientific research. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a twenty-first-century National Science Foundation project that conducts continental-scale environmental monitoring with large databases accessible to students, citizen scientists, and policy makers. I was one of sixteen scientists who wrote the $300 million-plus grant to NSF to fund the NEON platform. After several years of debate and strategic thinking, our committee reached consensus that such a major initiative would generate long-term data to better understand global change and ecosystem responses as well as engage diverse audiences through many platforms. Similar initiatives are underway in other countries, where citizen-assisted monitoring can gather valuable data. Singapore has invested over $20 million in a vast series of walkways through urban forests, providing incredible access for birding, phenology, and insect counts. In the museum world, citizen science and public outreach are watchwords of success. When I was the director of the Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, we partnered with North Carolina State University to swab belly buttons, cultivating the bacteria in petri dishes, and giving citizens some insights into their own body’s biodiversity. Some scientific questions can be answered more comprehensively from a multiplier effect when the public is involved.
But new tools and technologies alone will not conserve ecosystems or save species. Educated citizen scientists as part of a broader public can do almost anything from finding insects in the Amazon rain forest to mapping human belly button bacteria to counting leaves. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers now have expanded to a classroom education process unbounded by walls, where handheld technologies such as iPhone applications are increasingly available for science education. The big challenge is not a lack of information, but articulating a relevant context such as insect outbreaks or urban canopy cover that will motivate future generations to embrace ecological stewardship. Linking healthy ecosystems to economics and human health is one important stepping-stone. But amid all the technology, students still need curiosity and a thirst for discovery. This does not require expensive equipment, just a chance to engage their five senses by playing outdoors. If students and citizen scientists develop curiosity about nature, not just pushing buttons on video games, then it seems certain they will be more likely to solve the grand scientific challenges of the near future.
In 2022, I hope to lead my twenty-fifth citizen science expedition to the Peruvian Amazon, where volunteers will continue to explore tropical forests using the world’s longest walkway. Despite nearly complete immersion in nature, over the years we’ve sometimes witnessed rafts of logs clogging the waterways, even as far upriver as Iquitos. An oil refinery is now anchored on a barge just several miles from our skywalk base camp, having sailed over two thousand miles from the mouth of the Amazon with all its hardware and toxic chemicals. And next door in Brazil, extensive fires burned over 6,700 square kilometers (4,160 square miles) of rain forest between January and August 2020, releasing 225.8 million metric tons (MMT) of emissions, according to a paper in Science magazine. When the Amazon burns, it not only emits carbon and destroys critical habitat for millions of species, but it also results in air pollution that exacerbates human health. And such deforestation only reflects that portion clearly visible by aerial mapping, not insidious degradation such as roads, selective logging, or edge effects that are tougher if not impossible to measure without ground-truthing (i.e., up-close human reconnaissance). Wistfully, I’ve reminded my citizen scientists that they are privileged to experience this most beautiful tropical roof of the world, because if we don’t do something dramatic as a species to turn the tide on climate change, it will very soon be gone.
The Great Kapok Tree
(Ceiba pentandra)
DURING FREQUENT TRIPS ON AMAZON RIVERBOATS, one lone kapok (Ceiba pentandra) towered over the riverbank about five miles outside of Iquitos, Peru. Each July, when bringing citizen scientists to the walkway, I gazed in awe from the boat at this handsome silhouette. I wanted to ascend that tree, and eventually persuaded a climbing friend to accompany me. We were informed by locals the whereabouts of a shaman who had jurisdiction; it was not respectful to climb without her permission. So we hesitantly knocked at her hut and asked. She was more than friendly and said, without any specifics, if the spirits were willing, we could climb. Hoisting our longest ropes over our shoulders, we trekked to the base of this giant, wondering what she meant. It was much bigger up close than it appeared from afar. Like most kapoks, a single trunk rose at least a hundred feet, and then another hundred feet of hefty horizontal branches angled straight out from the main trunk, almost like aerial shelves. There was only one possible shot over the first branch in between festoons of vines and epiphytes. We used our biggest slingshot, called the Big Boy. It stands on the ground and consists of a vertical three-foot pole that serves as a launchpad for propelling the line. We both gritted our teeth, grimaced, and pulled back its giant elastic band. Crack! The rubber snapped loudly, and our fishline soared up and out of sight. We squinted, and I used my binoculars. A perfect shot! The Amazon spirits wanted us to climb. I was first, but close to the top and seemingly almost halfway to heaven, I felt a quiver on the rope. What was going on? Looking aloft, I saw an enormous bird on the branch, pecking the rope. It was a horned screamer, and we later learned they roost in these emergents. Obviously, the rope looked like a snake, so the bird was defending its aerial perch. I hustled up to prevent my lifeline from being severed and gently shooed away the handsome screamer, which reluctantly shared space with me. Once aloft, I saw that the kapok crown was a lush garden of bromeliads, orchids, philodendrons, buzzing insects, and vines snaking every which way. I collected leaf samples of the most common plants to calculate their herbivory but never climbed that tree again, as a personal homage to its seemingly unattainable stature.
Mayan mythology in Central America claims Ceiba is an important “tree of life” and represents a universal communication between the three levels of earth (underworld, middle world, and upper world). Its roots represent the underworld, the trunk is the middle world inhabited by humans, and the canopy symbolizes the upper world. Kapok trunks bear thorns during juvenile stages, and they are often portrayed on Mayan pottery as symbols of reverence. Adults develop buttresses instead of thorns, and such towering emergents are visible for tens of miles on the horizon. Unfortunately, their stature also pinpoints their location for loggers. Most kapoks have been cut and the Amazon skyscape reveals almost no remaining individuals, except one or two protected by a local shaman for spiritual and medicinal purposes.
