The Tapir’s Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte

Two of my colleagues went to Costa Rica in August, and since I don’t have any interesting trips on the horizon myself, I think I probably picked up The Tapir’s Morning Bath out of rainforest envy.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath is about the scientists who live and work on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, studying spiny rats, fruit bats, spider monkeys, and other flora and fauna. Before I even began the first chapter, I had already learned something. I had imagined that the Panama Canal was a long concrete trench that stretched all the way across the isthmus, but a map of the Canal Zone shows that ships actually pass through the sizable Gatun Lake during a large part of their passage. Barro Colorado (meaning Red Mud) is the biggest island in the lake. It’s what remains of a ridge of land that was flooded after the damming of the Chagres River in 1910. The island is protected from hunting and development, and a laboratory (now run by the Smithsonian Institution) has been operating there since 1923.

Elizabeth Royte spends a year on the island, off and on, and attaches herself as a field assistant to several scientists. She not only gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to confront a wild peccary on a remote forest trail, or to disentangle a bat from a mist net, but lucidly explains the theories each scientist is setting out to prove. She regrets the passing of naturalists with a big-picture understanding of the interactions of plants and animals in favor of ever more specialized number crunchers, but she recognizes that once in a while even a seemingly useless bit of data completes a missing piece of the puzzle and even offers some practical benefit to medicine or science. And sometimes it just blows a hole in someone’s cherished theory.

Bret Weinstein studies bats that build shelters out of leaves, apparently to give them shelter near their feeding grounds so they don’t have to fly home every night. Bret has also noticed that a male bat keeps several mates in a sort of harem, going to considerable effort to maximize the chance that he can pass on his genes. When the author tells him another scientist has found that female bats often mate in the forest, regardless of what harem they belong to, “a look of consternation” crosses his face. The author thinks of an observation attributed to Mark Twain (though I haven’t been able to find the source): “Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”