Science in Yasuni Sheds Light

In 1993, Universidad San Francisco de Quito and Boston University administrators asked me to suggest possible sites for a new biological field station somewhere in Ecuador’s eastern rainforests. Instantly, I was fantasizing about all the wondrous things that we could do and see at such facilities, if the location were chosen wisely.High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds.

Immediately, a rush of all the unique scientific and educational opportunities inundated my brain. Wow! Just imagine what would come along with a never-before-explored site in a truly intact piece of western Amazonian wilderness. Being a bit of a worrier, a moment later, the initial fantasy was elbowed aside by preoccupations. That “IF” quickly grew exponentially into a list of many practical and logistical considerations. And when I say “considerations,” I mean “complications”; when I say “many,” I mean “big.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.”

Certainly in the beginning, if you truly expect to attract visitors of any kind, the place must provide great opportunities to view animals. And nobody cares about insects and spiders – they want the big stuff. If you don’t have something to offer in this realm, most people simply won’t bother to come. If you don’t have visitors, the money dries up and the whole thing falls apart. And if it’s to be successful over any time at all, it has to be reasonably accessible. Yeah, I know, that part is more than a bit of fantasy.

Nature lovers everywhere will tell you that these two characteristics are in their very essence, mutually exclusive. Wild fauna and accessibility? No way, can’t be done. If people, any people, have access, they have impacts; the greater the access, the greater the impacts. But what’s more exciting than a good challenge, right?

How to find a balance? In my opinion, for this endeavor to be worthwhile, we simply had to be far from population centers, developmental and agricultural frontiers, hunting activities and timber harvest. But we certainly didn’t want to encroach upon any lands that rightfully belong to indigenous peoples. Above all, we wanted to be good neighbors to everyone in the region – without actually having neighbors.

To put it simply, we wanted to be able to study and teach about nature itself, not human impacts on nature.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. Some pragmatic scientists are quick to point out that this is the real fantasy; science should in fact be studying impacts to provide solutions to real problems as opposed to dwelling on a situation that barely exists any longer and has even less likelihood to exist in the future. Well, I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel yet. And besides, I think we should have a legitimate zero point with which to compare our impacts as well.

OK, we had to sacrifice on the accessibility side a hair. I ended up choosing a site that’s a challenge but you can get there from the capital city of Quito in 8 hours – on the north bank of the Tiputini River, along the north central border of the Yasuní National Park. A couple of years earlier, in 1991, a canoeing/camping trip along this same river made it stand out forever in my mind as a paradise for viewing fauna.

On one of the first days, I’ll never forget taking the dugout a short distance up a right-bank tributary, the Tivacuno, where we were soon delighted by the appearance of a giant otter family. While completely enthralled by these chatterboxes 10 feet ahead of the canoe, from the back of the boat, our cook said, “Wouldn’t you rather see something big?” pointing over her shoulder at a 500-pound tapir curiously swimming toward us!

Travelers who go to Africa on safari typically judge the quality of their visit on the “Big Five.” Such a short list doesn’t really exist for visitors to Amazonia; anyone who comes here has to recognize that getting a glimpse of the various classic symbols of the Neotropics requires everything from having a guide with magical powers to putting in some time previous to the trip working on your karma. Rainforest provides serious cover; savannah not so much. I tend to think that’s precisely why it’s so gratifying even when experiences are fleeting.

Seeing any or several of these following species in the wild should be considered a stunning success: jaguar, tapir, giant otter, giant anteater, ocelot, capybara, spider monkey, woolly monkey, anaconda, harpy eagle, curassow, pink river dolphin, scarlet macaw, sloth, giant armadillo, roseate spoonbill, boa constrictor, fer-de-lance, vampire bat, white-lipped peccary, toucans, bushmaster, and the Amazon’s equivalents of the unicorn, the bush dog, short-eared dog, black jaguar, and silky anteater.

I’ll go on into the realm of the aquatic with the black caiman, electric eel, and ocellated stingray, piranhas, peacock bass, tiger-striped flathead catfish, the arapaima, and finally a real oddity showing up from inside the forest about nightfall, skimming the water’s surface to gaff small fish, bulldog bats. Among the invertebrate world, trophy sightings include electric blue Morpho butterflies, bird-eating tarantulas, giant earthworms, peanut-headed bugs (or any of their bizarre wax-bug relatives), giant leaf mantis, army ants, leaf-cutter ants, bullet ants, camou katydids, bearded weevil, elephant beetle, rhinoceros beetle, Hercules beetle, giant stick insects, harlequin beetle, and the white witch (a huge moth). All these, beginning to end, are present in the Yasuní, part of a contingent estimated at as much as one million total species (mostly insects) – or about 1/10th of all life on the entire planet Earth!

Being situated very near the Equator and blessed with abundant rainfall (annually receiving right around 10 feet of precipitation) in ecologically-stable western Amazonia, near the Andean foothills has provided the conditions that produced all this biodiversity. The question now is how this particular patch has managed to survive into this century. An area once equally as diverse, just to the north, has been converted horizon-to-horizon into a cut-over land of oil wells, dusty gravel roads, scattered bamboo huts, open pastures full of introduced elephant grass and practically devoid of its original copious dose of biota.

The difference is that outsiders, in their lust for oil dollars, ran roughshod over that region while they were terrified to venture south of the Napo. Yasuní is the traditional territory of the Waorani,“the fiercest tribe in all Amazonia,” according to their own completely justified description, a nation of warriors that repelled all intruders with deadly barrages of serrated palm-wood spears, until quite recently. Their own densities were always low so their impacts at the landscape level were minimal over thousands of years. Thanks to the Waorani for having kept most outsiders out for so long, and for giving us one last chance to document life at its pinnacle of diversity.

Currently, a wave of acculturation is quickly converting these guardians into their own worst enemies in relation to the traditional resource base. Bush meat markets have turned their hunting skills into money makers and in some parts, they are now depleting the abundant game of their forefathers faster than it can be replenished through natural cycles.

Because there are so many kinds of life in this exuberant ecosystem, seeing any particular one tends to be a challenge. There’s a phrase that sounds just plain stupid when you first hear it, but it’s absolutely applicable. “It’s rare to be common and common to be rare.The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry,” A few things can indeed be seen all the time, but most are only seen now and again, and many are truly once-in-a-lifetime sightings.

From my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, I made my way to Amazonia for the first time in 1979; I’ve lived permanently in Ecuador since 1990 and chose the land for the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in 1994. After all that time, I still can’t go for more than a few minutes at TBS without seeing something I’ve never seen before – and knowing that in most cases, I’ll never see again. At this point, I’ll admit that new sightings are mostly small creatures, primarily among the insects and spiders, but I have yet to see in the wild several mammals from the list in that earlier paragraph, including the giant armadillo, bush dog, melanistic jaguar, and silky anteater.

But they’re out there, and knowing that is extremely exciting – there’s always a chance. How do I know? The giant digs of giant armadillos are seen every day. And naturally,If you have a fondness for china mosaic brimming with romantic roses,while I wasn’t around, an individual visited our camp every night for a week while I was tending to chores in other parts of the country – and lots of good-hearted students have since made special efforts to show me their pictures posing within feet of this behemoth, and with their cabins in the background. Both the bush dog and black panther have been captured by our camera traps. Now and again, one of our scientists happens upon these canines out in areas rarely tread by humans.

A few months ago, while seeking photographs for a book we just published (Yasuní, Tiputini and the Web of Life), Pete Oxford spent an hour and a half within 8 or 10 yards of a magnificent black jaguar right out on the riverbank, less than half a mile upstream from our camp. A couple of primatologists, Sara Alvarez and Laura Abondano, tell the tale of their study subjects knocking something loose from the canopy (as often happens when spider monkeys hurl their 20-pound bodies from tree to tree) and having fall literally at their feet, the diminutive silky anteater, a fluffy straw-colored ball of fur complete with a baby on its back! In case you’re also a worrier, mother and child were fine; soon after the tumble, they were back up in a tree, the mother feasting on termites.