The lure of exotic research locales

Our group was typically atypical of ecologists. We all love the natural world, but few of us are content to always stay close to home for our research. We build on a long tradition of scientists who travel to exotic locales for scientific research.

From Carl Linnaeus and before, since Charles Darwin was selected to accompany Captain Robert Fitzroy on the second voyage of the Beagle, naturalists have sought opportunities to study abroad. While few have had a fraction of the biological impact that attained by Linnaeus with his nomenclature system and by Darwin following his voyage and subsequent Theory of Evolution, many of us are drawn to the adventure of travel and the lure of discovery in exotic locales. Somehow, seeing new ecological systems improves the chances we can make more general predictions about all ecology.

The desire for exotic research is, for some, a contradiction in values. As ecologists we understand the environmental costs of burning fossil fuels to travel vast distances for research. As international citizens we understand the abysmal poverty that is the yoke for so many on Earth. Why should we use resources to travel halfway around the world to study what most people view as insignificant animals, plants, and microbes that inhabit streams?

Our use of resources can only partially be justified by some of our lifestyle choices otherwise (some of us recycle, bicycle to work, turn down the heat and up the air conditioner, etc.). Still, most scientists that study the natural world have a very large footprint. In my book, Humanity’s Footprint, there is detailed discussion about how those that live in the developed word are “cheaters” that take advantage and use more than their fair (sustainable) share of the Earth’s resources. There is also detailed discussion about how being a “cheater” is deeply ingrained and evolved human behavior, much of which is not likely to change. Scientists are perhaps the most hypocritical because they understand the global environmental problems, have a solid concept of how their lifestyle influences the environment and still continue to use more than their share. I am a “cheater.”

Still there are some positive aspects to travelling to developing countries to do our work. We are much like any other eco-tourists, albeit more educated in the subject of ecology. We spend money in developing countries. W are different because we work with the locals, pass information and training to those who have less access to research universities and all their benefits. We are the same because we come to see the last places on earth that have been minimally impacted by humans, and resent others who despoil our private natural experiences. Like all eco-tourists we resent the presence of people while we ourselves make the last places on earth a little less wild.

The compulsion to research in exotic parts of the world has among other things, caused researchers to contract exotic tropical diseases, torn apart personal relationships, and kept some from advancing in their careers. Some ecological research trips are conducted under dangerous and extremely primitive conditions, require an exhausting schedule of mind-numbing work, and are physically and psychologically draining. Some research is done in dangerous political areas; guerillas and rebels tend to favor hiding in remote, relatively pristine natural areas. The most extreme research expeditions still are worthy of the status of a National Geographic special.
Much of this kind of extreme ecology seems testosterone-driven. It is mostly, but not only men who have fallen under the spell of such extreme study areas. Some will undergo tremendous hardship to ask a scientific question that could be answered much closer to home. Take for example much Arctic and Antarctic research. Many of the questions could be approached by study of high-altitude habitats in the United States and Europe. The justification for some of the grant proposals (what we call intellectual merit and broader impacts) often seems contrived. The grant agencies are as influenced by the romance and adventure of this extreme research as are many researchers and still are fond of funding such ventures.

The exotic research casts such a strong spell, ecologists go through the tedious process of writing grants, begging leaves of absence, leaving behind family and eagerly pursue the next trip. The adventure is as addicting as the possibility of unique scientific discovery. Being able to tell an impressive story to fellow researchers at the next scientific conference is an additional reward.
Sometimes, however, the only way to accomplish a research project is to travel to an exotic locale. The frog extinctions of Central America are a case in point. As the wave of extinctions spreads down Central America, the possibility of ever studying these animals in the wild and how they are related to their environment disappears as well. Many researchers who study tropical species have found themselves working in front of a wave of extinction; they rush to document species and ecosystems that are rapidly disappearing and may never be seen in the wild again.

This global spread of extinction has let to ecological “swat teams” that rush to collect as many unique species as possible, and document ecosystems before they disappear. These groups of specialists are made of taxonomists of various specializations (for example a botanist, a mammalogist and an entomologist). They work in front of the path of loggers and developers in the highest diversity habitats on earth. This can be depressing work. The swat team rushes to take specimens, usually not living, before the species disappears from earth forever. Our group was a similar “swat team” rushing in front of the disease wave.

A motley crew

The immensity of the loss of an entire group of animals was abstract to me, until I took my first trip to Panama and saw a jungle stream teeming with so many types of frogs I had never seen before in my life; so the story begins with the trip to get there. Most of our research group met in February 2006 in the Atlanta airport to fly to Panama. This was an eclectic group of individuals who are science nerds (Ph.D.s), globe trotters, adventurers, and generally workaholics. Our common bond is a drive to understand the natural world. Everyone in the group has research experience in aquatic ecology around the world; studying streams is the thread that flows through all of our lives. Matt Whiles, Bob Hall, Alex Huryn and I were the lead researchers that traveled together on this trip.

Our connection in Atlanta was tight, and a bit of running was required to make it from the domestic terminal to the international departure gates. Bob Hall is the kind of person who is amusing to watch run for an airplane. Although I am told he is an excellent skier, he is tall, gangly and awkward looking when he runs, like a camel or a stork. He has the look and the accent of an Ivy League aristocratic intellectual. Bob looked a bit worse for the wear because he had recently returned from a research trip to streams in Venezuela and had not yet decompressed from that experience. He had a touch of the Chavez’s revenge as well.

Currently, Bob is an Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming. We have been friends since we met years ago in the North Carolina Adirondacks. We were attending a workshop to explore the use of stable chemical compounds to trace movement of elements (nitrogen) in streams. This new technique opened up an extremely productive area of research. We could use it to dissect out the basic processes that nourish all the plants and animals living in the streams. The method ultimately allowed comparison of streams from the tropics to the tundra, and resulted in a large project and ultimately a publication in the prestigious journal Science. Many investigators never are able to publish in this journal, as it is one of the top scientific outlets in the world and extremely competitive to get papers into.

It was our expertise in this tracer method that prompted Matt to involve us in the Panama project. In North Carolina, Bob and I hit it off immediately when we discovered our shared interest in home brewing. He had brought several small kegs of some of the best and more exotic beer I had ever tasted, a fact guaranteed to make me sit up, sip up, and take interest. Bob has since published some of the seminal papers on how animals and other organisms mediate movement of nitrogen through stream environments.

Alex Huryn was at the gate when I arrived. Alex is tall and slender, with a matching ambling bearing, thoughtful personality, and a preoccupied air. Many ecological researchers of my generation never left the 1970’s with regard to their hair, and between Alex’s brown hair over his collar and a substantial mustache, it was unlikely that he would be mistaken for a businessman outside of the silicon valley. He has studied stream invertebrates across North America, including the tundra of Alaska. Alex did stints in New Zealand and Maine, among other places, before he landed at the University of Alabama. Like so many ecologists with a pedigree from the University of Georgia (Matt and Bob included) he has a reputation for top level ecological research and partying hard, presumably to balance the tremendous intellectual and work load required to answer the questions that they doggedly pursue (or maybe that is just the excuse). They don’t call them the Georgia bulldogs for nothing.

I had seen Alex out-on-the-town at conferences. The last time I had seen him, he had crawled across a dance floor in New Orleans and bit me on the calf. The bulldog connotation again comes to mind. Before being bit on the calf, I had admired his research papers, but did not know him well. I was hoping he was easy to work with, but was not sure given our prior interaction.

Matt Whiles had a delayed flight from St. Louis and came to the gate at the last minute. He has been a close friend of mine since the 1990’s when we worked at Kansas State University together. Now he is a professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He is a very gregarious person; people are compelled to tell him their secrets for some reason, probably his friendly face. He has hair about the same as Alex, another child of the 70’s. Matt is gifted in the art of diplomacy and a perfect leader for a group such as ours with strong personalities and the professors’ common trait of always being certain of being right and ready to argue the point exhaustively.

Personalizing Extinction

This is a tale of loss and how people respond to loss. Few people know frogs are disappearing from the mountains of Central America. Those who do, can’t do anything about it. All we can do is to try to understand the loss. The context of Panama is important to the story as is the way that scientists relate to such an event in the natural world. Thus, this story is a research log, a travelogue, a description of natural history, and a documentation of one part of one of the great extinctions occurring in our lifetime, perhaps in the history of life itself.

I am not sure if most people even care about species extinctions in any real sense. When young, my goal was to do something with nature. The realization that people were actually paid to live out in the wild made the career of park ranger extremely attractive to a fishing/ backpacking 5th grader. Then, a trip to the Mediterranean as a young teenager got me into a snorkel and under the sea for the first time. I could not believe what was in front of my eyes…coral, fish, algae, and marine biologist seemed like a dream job. In college I was seduced by the idea of pre-med and the ideal of helping people. Upon deeper reflection, the things that really excited me in the past revolved around nature, not around being a mechanic to fix humans. The grades and test scores were there for medical school, just not the desire. So my path went toward ecology as a graduate student.

After school and work in Oregon and Montana, I landed in Kansas. How can an aquatic ecologist move from those places to the flat, dry Midwest? Well, supporting a family and the option of a paying job was quite attractive. Yet, it did not take long to develop a deep connection to Flint Hills Tallgrass Prairie and particularly the streams that drain it. The streams are clear, clean, and full of fascinating algae and aquatic animals. Kids love to wade in streams and turn over rocks, I just never grew out of that phase.

I am what E. O. Wilson calls a biophile, a nature lover. Many ecologists and taxonomists spend their lives studying the natural world because they too are biophilic. Others take nature up as a hobby and watch birds, camp, fish or hike. But these are the exception, most people want nature at an arm’s length. An animal show on cable TV is ok, maybe a cute movie about penguins. The dirty business of actually being in nature is so far from most peoples’ everyday life, that they cannot be expected to care much about the loss of a few species. To someone who has this deep attachment to the unbelievable diversity of life on our planet, extinction is a troubling idea.

The story of extinction is not dramatic. As Elliot says, the world ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” Extinction is the quiet catastrophe going on all around us now. The amphibian extinctions are emblematic of the fate of many species and how much of humanity is disconnected to that fate. Chris Cokinos in his book “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds” and Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine in “Last Chance to See” both dealt with extinctions. The former deals with the emotional toll in very direct terms, the later is seasoned with Adams’ humor which diffuses the anguish of experiencing species extinctions. Both books served as inspiration to my attempt to put extinctions of some species into context and convey the personal side of watching species disappear from the earth forever, while describing how scientists are documenting the effects of such disappearances.

The extinctions and the opportunity

My conversations with Matt also included his frank assessment that high altitude frogs that lived in the speciose tropical jungles of Central and South America were going extinct. Matt had been to other sites and experienced the disappearance of the frogs. My knowledge of amphibian declines remained academic. But, Matt’s concern spurred me to look more deeply into the literature. What I found there was startling. Matt was just telling a small part of the story, albeit one that involved the potential extinction of tens of species or more.

It was clear that amphibians everywhere were declining or disappearing all together. The causes of amphibian declines and extinctions were not generally agreed upon at this point and were a matter of debate. The fact that declines and extinctions were occurring globally was becoming more and more alarming to the herpetologists who study frogs, toads, salamanders, and reptiles around the world.


What is particularly worrisome about many of the declines is that they were happening across the world’s natural areas, often in relatively pristine habitats. Southeast Australia had been hard-hit. Many species along the Pacific coasts of North America were in decline. Declines were also documented from the jungles of northern South America and Central America. Madagascar, China, and the Atlantic coast of Brazil all had substantial numbers of threatened amphibians. 
These frogs were being lost from among the most beautiful natural habitats occurring on earth. The luxurious jungles with their riot of plant, insect, and other animal variety are the cradles of biodiversity on our planet. These wet, warm habitats are perfect for frogs. The causes and consequences of amphibian declines are not always known or understood. Unfortunately, reports in the scientific magazines seemed to focus on the controversy over causes as much as the tragedy.

As a nature lover, thoughts of potential extinctions and their consequences were disturbing. Matt was offering the possibility of seeing the tropical jungle again, and this was enticing. The Central American jungle with its in-your-face diversity originally inspired my decision to become a field biologist rather than a laboratory chemist. These factors led me to get involved in Matt’s project. I tend to be protective of my time, travel takes me away from home and family, depletes research funds, burns fossil fuels creating greenhouse gasses, and impedes getting “real” work done. Now, I am glad I took the trip and did the research and the following story is a chronicle of travel to Panama, the people I worked with, the work we did, and the people and sites of Central America.