mongabay.com
August 13, 2007
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of bird in dense bamboo thickets in the Peruvian Amazon.
Writing in the journal The Auk, authors led by Daniel F. Lane of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science describe the new species of twistwing (Cnipodectes superrufus).
The scientists say the brownish-red colored bird (with colors of various body parts ranging from "mahogany red", "auburn", "burnt sienna", "Sanford's Brown", "chestnut brown", "Argus brown", "Xanthine orange", "Prout's brown", "Vinaceous-Fawn" and "raw umber" among other shades of brown) remained unknown until the present due to its poorly known, and largely inaccessible habitat: thickets of thorny bamboo (Guadua weberbaueri) in southeastern Peru. The researchers not that while the species was only recently discovered, it may prove to be a common species with "immense blocks of Guadua-dominated terra firme forest in southwestern Amazonian Brazil, southeastern Peru, and northwestern-most Bolivia." Further, some of the birds were spotted within the Manu Biosphere Zone, a large protected area.
"Presumably, there is a healthy population within this protected zone," write the authors. Relatively little is known about the species. It apparently eats small arthropods (mostly insects) and has a call similar to that of the Sulfur-bellied Tyrant-Manakin (Neopelma sulphureiventer). While C. superrufus was only just now described, the "type specimen" was first captured on February 22, 1990. The specimen was deposited at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de la Universidad San Marcos and remaind unstudied until 2002. Subsequent trips to its native habitat turned up recordings and more specimen. Daniel F. Lane, Grace P. Servat, Thomas Valqui H.A, and Frank R. Lambert (2007). A DISTINCTIVE NEW SPECIES OF TYRANT FLYCATCHER (PASSERIFORMES: TYRANNIDAE: CNIPODECTES) FROM SOUTHEASTERN PERU. THE AUK Volume 124, Issue 3 (July 2007)
Related links :
More about Manu National park
About Thomas Valqui
Manu National park tours
Manu park map
Thursday, August 20, 2009
In Peru, the discovery of a waterfall draws tourists
BY STEVE HENDRIX
Washington Post Service
Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.
This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the preflight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.
But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.
In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.
But the press release that crossed my desk last year was darned near irresistible: ''World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.'' Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.
A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?
Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.
And so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin.
This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.
According to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.
This had better be good.
THE `DISCOVERY'
So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.
Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists.
It's mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans have been. No Americans have signed in yet. (Now that boggles the mind.)
''We knew it was there,'' Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. ``But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world.''
It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.
Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people -- who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people -- are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called ''freeleap.'' (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)
All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, ''third highest'' gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon.
''I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall,'' said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. ``It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.''
The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region.
I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome.
GOING TO KUELAP
We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election.
In the foothills, the road climbed through an arid, Maui tropicality where cacti grew in the shadow of papaya trees. But six hours on, the pavement ended and the rest of the day was spent lurching on a rope ladder of a road that clung to the cliffs above the frisky Utcubamba River.
Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. They are not so bad in the daylight, when the splendid scenery is both compensation and diversion. But when you're trying to sleep (our first sightseeing trip started at 3 a.m.), a radically rough road is a kind of torture.
Yet you get used to it. Mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.
Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, one good steakhouse and a tradition of awful coffee. From there, our first outing was 2 ½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.
At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within.
At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses -- there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s.
The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge even as dawn fired the tips of surrounding peaks. Soft morning murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below.
Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. They were only cackling shadows until they flew through columns of sunlight and flashed a sudden brilliant green.
Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.
We got a deep briefing on Chachapoyas history from Lerche, the anthropologist, that night at his brother-in-law's hotel, a charming colonial-era hacienda near the river. Numbering nearly half a million at their peak, the Chachapoyas were taller and paler than the Incas who eventually overwhelmed them. At least one scholar argues they may have been the lost tribe of Israel.
Like the mystical, mysterious Anasazi of the southwestern United States, the Chachapoyas left a vast and scattered archaeological record in dry mountain cliffs. Most of them are yet undiscovered.
''Personally, I know of more than 350 sites,'' Lerche said.
One of the best, Lerche said, was a massive necropolis discovered by looters, a grave robbery that ended up founding a remarkable local museum.
In 1996, in a high alcove above the nearby Lake of the Condors, a group of workers found a huge cache of ceramics, textiles and almost 220 perfectly preserved human mummies dating back more than 500 years. The looters pilfered some, but infighting among them quickly led someone to spill the beans to the authorities. What was left is now housed in the Leymebamba Museum at the far end of the valley, a little Smithsonian in the heart of nowhere.
It took another three-hour lurch-fest to reach the tiny village of Leymebamba. But all the shaking was forgotten when we entered the stylish, modern museum. The textiles and pots alone are worth the trip.
But it's the glassed-in chamber of mummies that will grab you by the retinas. The scores of desiccated men, women and children are clearly visible, tucked in tight fetal curls and draped in moody white gauze. Hollow eyes peek between bony fingers, giving them expressions both terrible and bashful.
Marcelita Hidalgo, a white-coated technician, took a withered little man from the shelf and showed us tiny threads tied around his fingers and how his ankle tendons, like all the mummies', were cut to make him fold more compactly.
We were the only (living) people there. I was growing to adore this place.
A MISTY WRAITH
Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.
''We've never seen this much interest in the area,'' said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. ``It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now.''
Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.
The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.
At the end of town, a drunk blocked the trail, haranguing our local guide about the increased foot traffic past his house. A local loco, the guide whispered to us.
We moved on, settling into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.
This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say ''Oooh,'' bounce my knees Chevy Chase-style a couple of times and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this . . . this was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.
Gocta, at this time of year, is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.
We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away. The boulders within the falls were red with some mineral patina, or maybe just raw from centuries of flaying. I was soaked in seconds, looking up to bathe my face in an ecstasy of proximity.
Then, feeling oddly rushed, as if the promised tourist boom was about to appear on the trail, I stripped off my clothes and dove into the freezing pool. (OK, I lowered myself gingerly into the freezing pool.)
THE LOWER FALLS
There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.
Dover asked around and arranged for us to camp in the yard of an Adventist church. He paid a neighbor woman to stir up her outdoor fire and boil us some fine chicken and rice. We ate, fended off stray dogs and played with our cook's two sweet and baffled children. We turned in, in utter silence under bright stars.
Of the 20 or so Adventist parishioners who showed up for the 5 a.m. singing service, about 15 of them tripped over my tent line.
It took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet.
When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.
I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.
No doubt they will make this easier in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money for local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.
By the end, I didn't visit this waterfall. I had an affair with it. And that was more than I ever expected.
IF YOU GO
• GETTING THERE: Reaching Chachapoyas in northern Peru takes time and, lately, money. In addition to the fare to Lima, the onward flight to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo will cost you $150 to $200 round trip. Lan Peru dominates the route and has ticket and baggage agreements with American. The long overland trip from Chiclayo to the Chachapoyas region will usually be wrapped into your tour, but inexpensive overnight buses are available if you go on your own.
• SEEING GOCTA: You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around.
Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year. The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. But for now you pretty much have to rough it with one of the archaeological tour companies already there.
Washington Post Service
Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.
This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the preflight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.
But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.
In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.
But the press release that crossed my desk last year was darned near irresistible: ''World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.'' Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.
A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?
Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.
And so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin.
This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.
According to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.
This had better be good.
THE `DISCOVERY'
So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.
Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists.
It's mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans have been. No Americans have signed in yet. (Now that boggles the mind.)
''We knew it was there,'' Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. ``But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world.''
It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.
Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people -- who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people -- are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called ''freeleap.'' (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)
All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, ''third highest'' gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon.
''I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall,'' said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. ``It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.''
The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region.
I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome.
GOING TO KUELAP
We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election.
In the foothills, the road climbed through an arid, Maui tropicality where cacti grew in the shadow of papaya trees. But six hours on, the pavement ended and the rest of the day was spent lurching on a rope ladder of a road that clung to the cliffs above the frisky Utcubamba River.
Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. They are not so bad in the daylight, when the splendid scenery is both compensation and diversion. But when you're trying to sleep (our first sightseeing trip started at 3 a.m.), a radically rough road is a kind of torture.
Yet you get used to it. Mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.
Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, one good steakhouse and a tradition of awful coffee. From there, our first outing was 2 ½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.
At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within.
At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses -- there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s.
The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge even as dawn fired the tips of surrounding peaks. Soft morning murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below.
Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. They were only cackling shadows until they flew through columns of sunlight and flashed a sudden brilliant green.
Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.
We got a deep briefing on Chachapoyas history from Lerche, the anthropologist, that night at his brother-in-law's hotel, a charming colonial-era hacienda near the river. Numbering nearly half a million at their peak, the Chachapoyas were taller and paler than the Incas who eventually overwhelmed them. At least one scholar argues they may have been the lost tribe of Israel.
Like the mystical, mysterious Anasazi of the southwestern United States, the Chachapoyas left a vast and scattered archaeological record in dry mountain cliffs. Most of them are yet undiscovered.
''Personally, I know of more than 350 sites,'' Lerche said.
One of the best, Lerche said, was a massive necropolis discovered by looters, a grave robbery that ended up founding a remarkable local museum.
In 1996, in a high alcove above the nearby Lake of the Condors, a group of workers found a huge cache of ceramics, textiles and almost 220 perfectly preserved human mummies dating back more than 500 years. The looters pilfered some, but infighting among them quickly led someone to spill the beans to the authorities. What was left is now housed in the Leymebamba Museum at the far end of the valley, a little Smithsonian in the heart of nowhere.
It took another three-hour lurch-fest to reach the tiny village of Leymebamba. But all the shaking was forgotten when we entered the stylish, modern museum. The textiles and pots alone are worth the trip.
But it's the glassed-in chamber of mummies that will grab you by the retinas. The scores of desiccated men, women and children are clearly visible, tucked in tight fetal curls and draped in moody white gauze. Hollow eyes peek between bony fingers, giving them expressions both terrible and bashful.
Marcelita Hidalgo, a white-coated technician, took a withered little man from the shelf and showed us tiny threads tied around his fingers and how his ankle tendons, like all the mummies', were cut to make him fold more compactly.
We were the only (living) people there. I was growing to adore this place.
A MISTY WRAITH
Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.
''We've never seen this much interest in the area,'' said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. ``It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now.''
Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.
The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.
At the end of town, a drunk blocked the trail, haranguing our local guide about the increased foot traffic past his house. A local loco, the guide whispered to us.
We moved on, settling into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.
This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say ''Oooh,'' bounce my knees Chevy Chase-style a couple of times and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this . . . this was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.
Gocta, at this time of year, is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.
We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away. The boulders within the falls were red with some mineral patina, or maybe just raw from centuries of flaying. I was soaked in seconds, looking up to bathe my face in an ecstasy of proximity.
Then, feeling oddly rushed, as if the promised tourist boom was about to appear on the trail, I stripped off my clothes and dove into the freezing pool. (OK, I lowered myself gingerly into the freezing pool.)
THE LOWER FALLS
There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.
Dover asked around and arranged for us to camp in the yard of an Adventist church. He paid a neighbor woman to stir up her outdoor fire and boil us some fine chicken and rice. We ate, fended off stray dogs and played with our cook's two sweet and baffled children. We turned in, in utter silence under bright stars.
Of the 20 or so Adventist parishioners who showed up for the 5 a.m. singing service, about 15 of them tripped over my tent line.
It took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet.
When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.
I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.
No doubt they will make this easier in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money for local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.
By the end, I didn't visit this waterfall. I had an affair with it. And that was more than I ever expected.
IF YOU GO
• GETTING THERE: Reaching Chachapoyas in northern Peru takes time and, lately, money. In addition to the fare to Lima, the onward flight to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo will cost you $150 to $200 round trip. Lan Peru dominates the route and has ticket and baggage agreements with American. The long overland trip from Chiclayo to the Chachapoyas region will usually be wrapped into your tour, but inexpensive overnight buses are available if you go on your own.
• SEEING GOCTA: You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around.
Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year. The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. But for now you pretty much have to rough it with one of the archaeological tour companies already there.
Earliest-known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found
Source: Vanderbilt UniversityDate: June 29, 2007
Science Daily — Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes.
The discovery was published in the June 29 issue of Science.
The research team made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley, which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.
"We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago," Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and lead author on the publication, said. "Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood."
Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes. The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.
"The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area," Dillehay said. "We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.
"The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts."
The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.
Dillehay published the findings with fellow researchers Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas C. Andres, The Curcurbit Network, New York, N.Y.; and David E. Williams, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.
Dillehay is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt, Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral de Chile and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Vanderbilt University.
Pharmacy student learns about medicine in Peru
Monday, July 02, 2007
College group also explores foreign culture, canoes down Amazon and climbs Machu Picchu.
By GINA VASSELLI
The Express-Times
Ryan Toth canoed down the Amazon, stood on top of Machu Picchu and got class credit for doing it.
The 23-year-old Phillipsburg man traveled to Peru this summer as part of his studies as a pharmacy student at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
The study abroad program was organized through the Global Awareness Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the rainforest, according to its Web site.
Toth and 11 other pharmacy students from across the country returned June 25 from their three-week trip.
Shelli Holt-Macey, director of Wilkes University's Experiential Programs for the pharmacy school, said the students were selected by the institute's founder, Dr. Barbara Brodman.
The students flew June 1 into Lima, Peru.
"That was basically the last city I saw," Toth said. "The rest was more or less all jungle."
Toth said they visited the GAI's Center for Natural Medicine in Iquitos to learn about natural medicine and drug discovery.
While the group was in Iquitos, it was visited by a shaman who talked about the plants used by the different tribes.
Toth said after her speech, the shaman stayed at the center because of a national workers strike in Peru and demonstrations in Iquitos.
"I guess she was scared to go back," Toth said.
He said the strike was unexpected and surreal.
"That was weird. It happened like two days after we got there," Toth said.
The group left the center a few days later and traveled to Cusco, Peru. It arrived there in time to experience the winter solstice at Machu Picchu.
"It's so huge you just wonder how they could build it," Toth said. "They didn't use mortar and the stones fit so perfectly together you can't fit a credit card between them."
But his parents, Brenda and Dale, had other concerns about the Incan city.
"I knew he was going there but I didn't realize how steep it was. So when I saw those pictures it made me a little nervous," Brenda Toth said.
Ryan Toth said the group traveled down the Amazon in canoes for about three days, which was not always easy.
"One time we were rowing as hard as we could with the current and we weren't moving because of the wind coming against us," he said.
Along the river they met three different native tribes: The Bora, Huitoto and Yagua.
Ryan Toth said he became friends with a river guide from the Bora tribe named Wellington.
"He spoke a little English and I speak a little Spanish so we became friendly," he said.
Wellington hand-carved a mask for him and it became one of many tribal souvenirs Toth took home.
Holt-Macey said the program was a great success because "it's directly related to the study of pharmacy and understanding how other cultures work without a system like the U.S.," she said.
Ryan Toth said the trip "was not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. We got to see places and people that barely anyone ever sees."
Gina Vasselli is a staff writer. She can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at gvasselli@express-times.com.
College group also explores foreign culture, canoes down Amazon and climbs Machu Picchu.
By GINA VASSELLI
The Express-Times
Ryan Toth canoed down the Amazon, stood on top of Machu Picchu and got class credit for doing it.The 23-year-old Phillipsburg man traveled to Peru this summer as part of his studies as a pharmacy student at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
The study abroad program was organized through the Global Awareness Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the rainforest, according to its Web site.
Toth and 11 other pharmacy students from across the country returned June 25 from their three-week trip.
Shelli Holt-Macey, director of Wilkes University's Experiential Programs for the pharmacy school, said the students were selected by the institute's founder, Dr. Barbara Brodman.
The students flew June 1 into Lima, Peru.
"That was basically the last city I saw," Toth said. "The rest was more or less all jungle."
Toth said they visited the GAI's Center for Natural Medicine in Iquitos to learn about natural medicine and drug discovery.
While the group was in Iquitos, it was visited by a shaman who talked about the plants used by the different tribes.
Toth said after her speech, the shaman stayed at the center because of a national workers strike in Peru and demonstrations in Iquitos.
"I guess she was scared to go back," Toth said.
He said the strike was unexpected and surreal.
"That was weird. It happened like two days after we got there," Toth said.
The group left the center a few days later and traveled to Cusco, Peru. It arrived there in time to experience the winter solstice at Machu Picchu.
"It's so huge you just wonder how they could build it," Toth said. "They didn't use mortar and the stones fit so perfectly together you can't fit a credit card between them."
But his parents, Brenda and Dale, had other concerns about the Incan city.
"I knew he was going there but I didn't realize how steep it was. So when I saw those pictures it made me a little nervous," Brenda Toth said.
Ryan Toth said the group traveled down the Amazon in canoes for about three days, which was not always easy.
"One time we were rowing as hard as we could with the current and we weren't moving because of the wind coming against us," he said.
Along the river they met three different native tribes: The Bora, Huitoto and Yagua.
Ryan Toth said he became friends with a river guide from the Bora tribe named Wellington.
"He spoke a little English and I speak a little Spanish so we became friendly," he said.
Wellington hand-carved a mask for him and it became one of many tribal souvenirs Toth took home.
Holt-Macey said the program was a great success because "it's directly related to the study of pharmacy and understanding how other cultures work without a system like the U.S.," she said.
Ryan Toth said the trip "was not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. We got to see places and people that barely anyone ever sees."
Gina Vasselli is a staff writer. She can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at gvasselli@express-times.com.
First Amazon-Andean Crop Plant Transfer And Corn Processing In Peru 3600-4000 Years Ago
Published by Science Daily — Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.
Heading to the supermarket to pick up some corn flour, a couple of tomatoes or a can of beans usually doesn't conjure up the notion of 10,000 years of agricultural development in the Americas--a transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures actively developing and trading new food crops. But this transition is still inadequately understood. New excavations and a growing collection of plant microfossil remains rapidly adds pieces to this puzzle.
A multidisciplinary team excavated a stone house at Waynuna, north of Arequipa on the western slope of the Andes and analyzed plant remains from three grinding stones.
Arrowroot from the Amazon. Starchy arrowroot (Maranta sp.) tubers don't grow in the Andean highlands. So the presence of tiny Arrowroot starch grains and phytoliths on the grinding stones and in associated sediments means that people were moving tubers from lowland Amazon rainforest sites east of the Andes west to the Waynuna site.
Maize from Mexico. Maize (Zea mays) cultivation also swept through the Americas in the millennia following its domestication from Teosinte, a wild ancestor from Mexico's tropical Balsas river valley, some 9000 years ago. At the Waynuna site, maize starch grains were the most common plant remains on the grinding stones. Phytoliths derived from the leaves of maize provided evidence that maize was grown at the site. The shape and grinding damage of maize particles suggests that two races of maize--one used as flour and another, popcorn or dent corn variety--were probably grown and processed at the site. The Waynuna house is older than any of the other sites in Peru where maize has been found and sets back the date of maize cultivation and processing in the region by ~1000 years.
Obsidian trade. The Waynuna site perches on the shoulders of Cerro Aycano, the northernmost point of one of the Andes' richest sources of obsidian. Ample archaeological evidence shows that preceramic peoples moved obsidian from the mountains down into the Amazon basin, so it is not surprising that travelers eventually introduced new foods to residents of this upland area.
Multiproxy microfossil analysis of starch grains and phytoliths is proving to be an extremely important tool--applied to stone tool surfaces and associated sediments, to new sites and to sites where warm, wet climates have destroyed larger plant remains. Future work is expected to yield a better understanding of the domestication and trade of peanuts, manioc and achira, staples depicted in the stone iconography of the first great cultures to develop in a region where amazing cooking is still the standard.
###
The research team included members from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the University of Maine, Orono, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, along with Ithaca College in the U.S. and the Museo Contisuyo, Moquegua and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Alameda, in Peru. This work was funded by a grant from the Heinz Charitable Trust Latin American Archaeology Program, FERCO, the Office of the Provost, Ithaca College, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a unit of the Smithsonian Institution with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, furthers our understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. http://www.stri.org/
Ref. Perry, L., Sandweiss, D., Piperno, D., Radmaker, K., Malpass, M., Umire, A. and de la Vera, P. 2006. Early maize agriculture and interzonal interaction in southern Peru. Nature, 2 March, 2006.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Heading to the supermarket to pick up some corn flour, a couple of tomatoes or a can of beans usually doesn't conjure up the notion of 10,000 years of agricultural development in the Americas--a transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures actively developing and trading new food crops. But this transition is still inadequately understood. New excavations and a growing collection of plant microfossil remains rapidly adds pieces to this puzzle.
A multidisciplinary team excavated a stone house at Waynuna, north of Arequipa on the western slope of the Andes and analyzed plant remains from three grinding stones.
Arrowroot from the Amazon. Starchy arrowroot (Maranta sp.) tubers don't grow in the Andean highlands. So the presence of tiny Arrowroot starch grains and phytoliths on the grinding stones and in associated sediments means that people were moving tubers from lowland Amazon rainforest sites east of the Andes west to the Waynuna site.
Maize from Mexico. Maize (Zea mays) cultivation also swept through the Americas in the millennia following its domestication from Teosinte, a wild ancestor from Mexico's tropical Balsas river valley, some 9000 years ago. At the Waynuna site, maize starch grains were the most common plant remains on the grinding stones. Phytoliths derived from the leaves of maize provided evidence that maize was grown at the site. The shape and grinding damage of maize particles suggests that two races of maize--one used as flour and another, popcorn or dent corn variety--were probably grown and processed at the site. The Waynuna house is older than any of the other sites in Peru where maize has been found and sets back the date of maize cultivation and processing in the region by ~1000 years.
Obsidian trade. The Waynuna site perches on the shoulders of Cerro Aycano, the northernmost point of one of the Andes' richest sources of obsidian. Ample archaeological evidence shows that preceramic peoples moved obsidian from the mountains down into the Amazon basin, so it is not surprising that travelers eventually introduced new foods to residents of this upland area.
Multiproxy microfossil analysis of starch grains and phytoliths is proving to be an extremely important tool--applied to stone tool surfaces and associated sediments, to new sites and to sites where warm, wet climates have destroyed larger plant remains. Future work is expected to yield a better understanding of the domestication and trade of peanuts, manioc and achira, staples depicted in the stone iconography of the first great cultures to develop in a region where amazing cooking is still the standard.
###
The research team included members from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the University of Maine, Orono, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, along with Ithaca College in the U.S. and the Museo Contisuyo, Moquegua and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Alameda, in Peru. This work was funded by a grant from the Heinz Charitable Trust Latin American Archaeology Program, FERCO, the Office of the Provost, Ithaca College, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a unit of the Smithsonian Institution with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, furthers our understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. http://www.stri.org/
Ref. Perry, L., Sandweiss, D., Piperno, D., Radmaker, K., Malpass, M., Umire, A. and de la Vera, P. 2006. Early maize agriculture and interzonal interaction in southern Peru. Nature, 2 March, 2006.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Predators Keep The World Green, Ecologists Find
Source: Duke University
Date: February 28, 2006
Published by Science Daily — Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team lead by John Terborgh, a professor of environmental science at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
Their findings confirm the answer to one of ecology's oldest and thorniest questions: why is the world green? It also seems to put to rest a competing theory that plants protect themselves from herbivores through physical and chemical defenses.
The researchers drew their conclusions from study of a Venezuelan valley flooded 20 years ago by a hydroelectric project.
The research, reported in the March 2006 issue of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology, was supported by the National Science Foundation. The paper was co-authored by Terborgh, Kenneth Feeley and Bradley Balukjian from Harvard University, Miles Silman from Wake Forest University, and Percy Nuñez of Universidad Nacional "San Antonio de Abad" de Cusco in Peru.
Their results support the so-called "green world hypothesis," first proposed in 1960 by United States scientists Nelson Hairston, Frederick Smith and Lawrence Slobodkin. Despite being almost 50 years old, the green world hypothesis has been almost impossible to test until now.
"Since the landmark paper by Hairston et al, ecologists have been debating whether herbivores are limited by plant defenses or by predators," wrote the authors. "The matter is trivially simple in principle, but in practice the challenge of experimentally creating predator-free environments in which herbivores can increase without constraint has proven almost insurmountable."
However, the researchers realized that the hypothesis could be tested on a vast hydroelectric project.
Within Venezuela's Caroni Valley, an area of 4,300 square kilometres was flooded in 1986 to create a lake (Lago Guri) containing hundreds of islands that were formerly fragments of a continuous landscape.
Terborgh and his team monitored the vegetation at 14 sites of differing size. Nine of the sites were on predator-free islands, while the others were on the mainland or on islands with a complete or nearly complete suite of predators.
They found that, by 1997, small sapling densities on small islands were only 37 percent of those of large land masses and by 2002 this had fallen to just 25 percent. Most of the vertebrates present in regional dry forest ecosystem had disappeared from small islands, including fruit eaters and predators of vertebrates, leaving a hyperabundance of generalist herbivores such as iguanas, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants.
"Mere numbers do not do justice to the bizarre condition of herbivore-impacted islets," the authors wrote. "The understory is almost free of foliage, so that a person standing in the interior sees light streaming in from the edge around the entire perimeter. There is almost no leaf litter, and the ground is bright red from the subsoil brought to the surface by leaf-cutter ants.
"Dead twigs, branches and vine stems from canopy dieback litter the ground, and in places lie in heaps. But in striking contrast with this scenario of destruction, the medium islands presented a relatively normal appearance."
Besides proving that the green world hypothesis is correct, Terborgh's team's results have important implications for the debate raging in many countries over reintroduction of top predators such as wolves. "The take-home message is clear: the presence of a viable carnivore guild is fundamental to maintaining biodiversity," the authors wrote.
Information collected for the Journal of Ecology report is a five-year update of results published by Terborgh and 10 other scientists in the Nov. 30, 2001, issue of the journal Science.
"The Science article reported on the first plant census we did, involving 15,000 plants, but it only gave us a snapshot in time," Terborgh said in an interview. "We could see that there were huge differences between the little islands that didn't have any predators on them, and larger islands that did have predators. But we couldn't say much about where that was going to go in the future.
"This article reports on the re-census," he added. "Indeed, during that five-year interval the populations of small, sapling-level plants continued to decline quite radically. And there's no question that the vegetation on these islands is just in a state of collapse."
A drought that began in 2001 and reached extreme levels in 2003 has now ended the study, Terborgh reported.
"By 2003, the lake level had dropped 26 meters," he said. "By then, I think only three of the islands were left surrounded by water. That ended the experiment because it allowed the animals to redistribute themselves in their own fashion. The overcrowded populations of the plant-eating animals that had been the object of our studies simply dispersed.
"The fundamental premise of the whole project was our ability to study predator-free space, and that condition was no longer met. In one period in 2003 we found six different predators on islands that previously had no predators."
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Duke University.
Date: February 28, 2006
Published by Science Daily — Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team lead by John Terborgh, a professor of environmental science at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.Their findings confirm the answer to one of ecology's oldest and thorniest questions: why is the world green? It also seems to put to rest a competing theory that plants protect themselves from herbivores through physical and chemical defenses.
The researchers drew their conclusions from study of a Venezuelan valley flooded 20 years ago by a hydroelectric project.
The research, reported in the March 2006 issue of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology, was supported by the National Science Foundation. The paper was co-authored by Terborgh, Kenneth Feeley and Bradley Balukjian from Harvard University, Miles Silman from Wake Forest University, and Percy Nuñez of Universidad Nacional "San Antonio de Abad" de Cusco in Peru.
Their results support the so-called "green world hypothesis," first proposed in 1960 by United States scientists Nelson Hairston, Frederick Smith and Lawrence Slobodkin. Despite being almost 50 years old, the green world hypothesis has been almost impossible to test until now.
"Since the landmark paper by Hairston et al, ecologists have been debating whether herbivores are limited by plant defenses or by predators," wrote the authors. "The matter is trivially simple in principle, but in practice the challenge of experimentally creating predator-free environments in which herbivores can increase without constraint has proven almost insurmountable."
However, the researchers realized that the hypothesis could be tested on a vast hydroelectric project.
Within Venezuela's Caroni Valley, an area of 4,300 square kilometres was flooded in 1986 to create a lake (Lago Guri) containing hundreds of islands that were formerly fragments of a continuous landscape.
Terborgh and his team monitored the vegetation at 14 sites of differing size. Nine of the sites were on predator-free islands, while the others were on the mainland or on islands with a complete or nearly complete suite of predators.
They found that, by 1997, small sapling densities on small islands were only 37 percent of those of large land masses and by 2002 this had fallen to just 25 percent. Most of the vertebrates present in regional dry forest ecosystem had disappeared from small islands, including fruit eaters and predators of vertebrates, leaving a hyperabundance of generalist herbivores such as iguanas, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants.
"Mere numbers do not do justice to the bizarre condition of herbivore-impacted islets," the authors wrote. "The understory is almost free of foliage, so that a person standing in the interior sees light streaming in from the edge around the entire perimeter. There is almost no leaf litter, and the ground is bright red from the subsoil brought to the surface by leaf-cutter ants.
"Dead twigs, branches and vine stems from canopy dieback litter the ground, and in places lie in heaps. But in striking contrast with this scenario of destruction, the medium islands presented a relatively normal appearance."
Besides proving that the green world hypothesis is correct, Terborgh's team's results have important implications for the debate raging in many countries over reintroduction of top predators such as wolves. "The take-home message is clear: the presence of a viable carnivore guild is fundamental to maintaining biodiversity," the authors wrote.
Information collected for the Journal of Ecology report is a five-year update of results published by Terborgh and 10 other scientists in the Nov. 30, 2001, issue of the journal Science.
"The Science article reported on the first plant census we did, involving 15,000 plants, but it only gave us a snapshot in time," Terborgh said in an interview. "We could see that there were huge differences between the little islands that didn't have any predators on them, and larger islands that did have predators. But we couldn't say much about where that was going to go in the future.
"This article reports on the re-census," he added. "Indeed, during that five-year interval the populations of small, sapling-level plants continued to decline quite radically. And there's no question that the vegetation on these islands is just in a state of collapse."
A drought that began in 2001 and reached extreme levels in 2003 has now ended the study, Terborgh reported.
"By 2003, the lake level had dropped 26 meters," he said. "By then, I think only three of the islands were left surrounded by water. That ended the experiment because it allowed the animals to redistribute themselves in their own fashion. The overcrowded populations of the plant-eating animals that had been the object of our studies simply dispersed.
"The fundamental premise of the whole project was our ability to study predator-free space, and that condition was no longer met. In one period in 2003 we found six different predators on islands that previously had no predators."
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Duke University.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Disoriented Penguin Reaches Peru's Shore
Sunday May 13, 2007 2:31 AM
LIMA, Peru (AP) - A "disoriented'' Magellanic penguin swam ashore on Peru's coast, some 3,100 miles north of his home in the frigid waters of southern Chile.
The penguin got lost while looking for food, Peru's National Resource Institute was quoted as saying in El Comercio newspaper Saturday.
"It seems he was disoriented and got lost in the sea due to the different ocean currents,'' said Wilder Canales, who heads the National Paracas Reserve in southern Peru. "In his endless search for food, he casually climbed up on our shores, something that has never happened before.''
Television images showed scientists at the nature reserve treating an injury to the penguin's right wing that was apparently caused by a fishing net.
Peruvian authorities are trying to coordinate with their Chilean counterparts to return the penguin to its home waters.
LIMA, Peru (AP) - A "disoriented'' Magellanic penguin swam ashore on Peru's coast, some 3,100 miles north of his home in the frigid waters of southern Chile.The penguin got lost while looking for food, Peru's National Resource Institute was quoted as saying in El Comercio newspaper Saturday.
"It seems he was disoriented and got lost in the sea due to the different ocean currents,'' said Wilder Canales, who heads the National Paracas Reserve in southern Peru. "In his endless search for food, he casually climbed up on our shores, something that has never happened before.''
Television images showed scientists at the nature reserve treating an injury to the penguin's right wing that was apparently caused by a fishing net.
Peruvian authorities are trying to coordinate with their Chilean counterparts to return the penguin to its home waters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
