Dawson White - BRIT In Fort Worth Texas and Andes to Amazon Research Station
Final Report

The Importance of Being a Botanist

What does it mean to be a botanist?  At what point can you consider yourself a “professional” when standing in the middle of a grassland or looking out over a virgin forest?    The obvious answer would be that a botanist is a student of the Kingdom Planteae, someone who has spent years examining some facet of plant being, but this is too grand a definition to tell someone who actually wanted to pursue this career.  Surely one needs some sort of direction or specialization when delving into such a diverse and immense area of study.  A “botanist” could be a technician in a lab; creating medical supplements, looking at microscopic anatomy, determining taxonomy, speculating about evolution, investigating photosynthesis, etc. etc.  These technology based studies are incredibly complex as well as interesting and important.  Even though their products serve to enhance our knowledge of biology, history, medicine, chemistry, and life, they cannot really foster any abilities useful in field botany.  Allow me to expand on my definition of this area.  I am talking about the ability to walk through a glistening, sunny, green and gold, forest and to know exactly what is growing around you.  In terms of a tropical forest, to know how an ancient and colossal hardwood is related to the shrubs and saplings at its feet, and how it is different.  To know why lianas choose to grow so thickly on certain tree species while totally abstaining from others of similar construction.  Knowing why a tree is flowering and fruiting on its trunk or what tree species will harbor ferocious jumping ants.  From simply smelling the crushed leaves of a sapling, to know what kind of giant it will evolve into fifty or five hundred years down the road.  Or knowing why a vine, a shrub, and a tree can be classified into the same family.  This sort of native, holistic, naturalist field botany allows one to intimately understand and therefore better appreciate the diversity and abundance of coexisting life in an ecosystem. Furthermore, being able to dictate the diversity of families, genera, and the number of species that can be found in a forest is fundamental in creating an argument for conservation.

The deep pool of botanical and ecological information is daunting, to say the least, but one must start somewhere.  After spending a few weeks at the CICRA research station I am excited to think that a career in botany might be right for me.  CICRA, El Centro de Investigacion y Capacitacion Rio Los Amigos, is nestled between the mouth of Rio Los Amigos and Rio Madre de Dios in the heart of the Madre de Dios district of Peru.  The concession was set aside in 2001 and consists of 133,000 hectares of pristine low-land rainforest.  CICRA is a very professional, yet humble place; it consists of a dormitory, lab, classroom, cafeteria, cabanas, and a soccer field, as well as almost forty walking trails through many kinds of terrain.   The research done here is quite impressive.  Various science teams come here from around the world to complete their tropical research in an unspoiled environment.  There are people working with bats, ants, tapirs, peccaries, monkeys, birds, bacteria, marsupials, nutrient recycling, parasitic fungus, various tree species, exotic mammals like the short eared dog, and of course, plants.  Needless to say, there is plenty to talk about.  CICRA headquarters and all of its buildings are huddled together on a terra firma plateau overlooking the lumbering meanders and endless, gnarled vegetation of the Madre de Dios river drainage.  On a clear day, the razorback of the Andes is silhouetted on the western horizon.   CICRA's trails, in conditions ranging from a dirt road to nothing more than a matted and claustrophobic bearing, allow you to observe a selection of ecosystems I never knew existed within the definition of rainforest.  

In low wetland areas near the station, there are a few enormous aguajal swamps, characterized by their total absence of all trees except aguajal palms. These aguajales are standing in an inky pool of mush, when you walk through them you must move slowly and strategically.  It is easy to stumble off a hidden drop and find yourself swimming up to your neck in stinky black slurm.  When walking through the swamp, another curious discovery is that there are absolutely no mosquitos.  It turns out, the same black water is so acidic that mosquito eggs cannot survive on the surface.  This ecosystem provides for a multitude of other unique plants and animals.  There are endemic social-spider and giant weevil species, anacondas, carnivorous plants with small stomache nodes in their roots, angelfish, walking sticks, aguajal snakes, and numerous plant species found no where else in the upper amazon.  Some of the most interesting of these finds are large expanse of tall grasses in the middle of the aguajales, resembling the everglades.  All of the vegetation in the middle of the swamp is floating, as a result the vegetation changes drastically as you wander toward its center.  Around the perimeter one finds the aguajal palms abruptly shotting upwards with lots of other shrubs and vines congesting the scene.  About a kilometer later, the vegetation shifts again into a forest of ferns (and aguajales), then into ferns and grasses, and finally into an open grassland.  This changing ecosystem was fascinating to observe, but the plants here made it even more special.  There were a handful of fern and shrub species that don’t occur anywhere else in the lowland rainforest.  One can find species of the coca genus, Erythroxylon, which is a family suited to high and dry mountainous areas; as opposed to low and incredibly humid rainforest swamps.  The coca was one of several aguajal species that are only found thousands of feet higher, in Andean cloud forest or all the way over in the Guyana highlands.  Another interesting find is the vanilla orchid.  This is easily the most distinctive orchid genus in the Orchidea family. A few of these species are growing abundantly in the aguajales and are being pioneered by AABP team member, Ethan Householder.  This succulent-stemmed, root-climbing hemiepiphytic vine is a fat root stuck to the side of a tree with parasitic and photosynthetic capabilities.  It is a beautiful plump-leafed, climber that seems to prefer the aguajal trunk for some reason.  Not to mention a picturesque yellow flower of impressive size sprouting out the top of the vine.  It is so packed full of vanilla essential oils that it could rival the one other species from which all commercial vanilla is cultivated.  A kilo of these vanilla beans can sell for over $600 on the world market.  A kilo of its essential oils can be sold for over $2000.  The aguajal ecosystem is truly a diamond in the rough, it has never before been studied.

In addition to this there are the floodplain forests and numerous quebradas, or creeks, of similar composition.  In this floodplain there are lakes formed from centuries of erosion and the isolation of meanders, they are known as goosenecks.  This is one of the places you can find caiman and the giant otters, reaching up to six feet in length.  These forests are characterized by generally muddy soil and incredibly dense understory of plants and shrubs.  Here one can find ferns of all shapes and sizes; the diversity is astonishing.  There are shrubs with amazing pink lines running parallel down the primary vein and leaves with beautiful light green veins in geometric patterns, just to name a few.  Another interesting find is when you flip many species over you discover the presence of glands.  These glands, which I have never seen on a plant before coming here, can resemble anything from small brown dots to doughnuts.  They can be found at the base of a leaf, on the top or the underside, or running up the entire bottom; parallel on either side of the primary vein. The thick understory prevented you from ever seeing what was rustling around, which could be pretty intense.

The last ecosystem in the region is terra firma forest.  This forest has relatively little vegetation in the understory, making the viewing of mammals and ground birds much easier.  In addition, this is the place to find the largest of the hardwoods; Fabaceae, Lecythidaceae, and Euphorbiaceae, to name a few of the families.  The largest of these trees can reach 40 meters.  The soil in the rainforest is actually poor quality, and as a result the trees roots grow out along the surface.  As a result one can find enormous buttresses extending from the bases of some of these species.  These large triangular supports can be as big as fifteen feet along the hypotenuse.  In some species the buttresses are hollow, creating a perfect natural drum.  It is very interesting to find what fruit and flowers these giants can produce.  The fruits can take a number of shapes; from little green and spiky pumpkins to woody cannonballs to grape vines. Looking out over the canopy from CICRA one can see the trees' flowers.  The green canopy is speckled in places with lavender, light green, bright red, golden yellow or pearly white.  It is a beautiful landscape, an arboreal world of green.  In my time here at CICRA I have experienced an immeasurable array of life, and I know I am just skimming the surface.

CICRA has taught me quite a lot about the rainforest ecosystem and also much about being a field biologist.  The most rewarding experiences I have had have been with some new mentors from of the AABP team known here as Los Botanicos.  This transect team consists of Angel Balarezo, Benjamin Chambi, Walter Flores Cassanova, and Milton Jimenez; four hard-working, impassioned, knowledgeable, and, best of all, amusing botanists.  They are the heart of the Los Amigos “Rapid Assessment Program”, a program constructed by the late Alwyn H. Gentry to obtain a census of rainforest trees in the fastest and most efficient way possible in order to support conservation.  Gentry, whose field guide, The Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America, is affectionately referred to by the botanicos as “Bible Gentry”.  It is a book that ranks supreme in the neotropical biology field.  One can easily respect Gentry and his work when you simply walk one hundred feet along a trail around CICRA and try to identify as many plants as you can see.  As I was saying earlier, field botany in the neotropics is formidable.  There are almost 200 families of woody plants in the tropics of Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru; with an estimated 45,000 species.  I have been told learning botany is like learning another language; the fact that one man established such a gigantic cache of knowledge is almost incredible.

I have been truly amazed by the identification abilities of these four botanists.  They have done over 700 transects in the Los Amigos Concession, I have been shadowing them almost every day since I have been here.  The transects are fairly simple.  For this set of transects we traveled down the river fifteen minutes to CM1 (Centro de Monitoreo 1) and set out on a trail.  When we came to the

starting point, one man took the machete and the other took the end of a 50 meter tape and walked in a straight line until the tape was fully extended.  The rest of us then commenced the inventory.  We catalogued every tree that was within one meter of the tape and larger than two and a half centimeters at breast height.  For each tree, the genera and DBH (Diameter at Breast Height) would be recorded.  If the team could not identify the genera, a branch would be cut and Walter would attempt to match a leaf to one of the hundreds he carried in photo albums. 

Even though we carried telescoping pruning shears that reached some forty feet tall, sometimes collecting a branch required climbing thirty or forty feet up the trunk of a nearby tree. We had to use special foot climbers called patos de loro-parrot claws to achieve this.  The climber, perched on the side of a bare trunk, was constantly under threat of attack from ants, bees, wasps, or falling caterpillars.  

The botanicos were very helpful while I was starting to identify plant families.  At this point, two weeks in, I am starting to get the hang of things.  One must examine the branches, leaves, latex (if any), bark, pubescence, odors, spines, glands, venation, stipules, petioles, every aspect of the tree to determine its taxonomy.  Sometimes this is fairly easy.  The family Annonaceae has very strong bark; all one has to do to identify this family is pull off a leaf and see if long, fibrous, strips of bark come off with it.  Another fairly easy group to identify is the family Myristicaceae, which has distinctive “myristicacious” branching, where all the branches emerge at the same height, in a ring around the trunk.  In addition, Myristica generally have reddish sap.  At this point I can identify about a dozen families, most of the time.  The hardest aspect of learning is that there are always exceptions to these generalization, but through this practice, I have started to break the ice.  Watching Benjamin and Angel work through the forest is quite admirable.  The Botanicos can quickly and easily identify every family, and quite often they can name the genus and even species.  We were looking at  hundreds of genera each day, all kinds of trees, and each one had a special place in the forest.  We found monkeys almost every day eating the fruits, several species in total.  Daily there were hummingbirds zinging around from flower to flower, and larger birds of every kind sitting among branches; some resting, some hiding, some waiting for the next meal.  There were countless large and florescent caterpillars and other insects eating leaves and ants creating communities in certain species that suited them.  We saw macaws entering and exiting their homes in lofty hollows and snakes nestled between buttresses, waiting for night.  There were always the remnants of peccary homes, burrows dug under root wads or logs which were their shelter for one night and the shelter of some other creature since then.  It was cool to see so many species relying on these trees; they are the base of the ecosystem.   Scientists like these botanicos are working as fast as they can to know every tree in the forest and its role in the ecosystem.   It is not an easy task, finding all these trees, but the word on the street is that half of the world’s forests are already gone forever. We are working against the clock.  Mastering holistic field botany, learning the role of every family as well as each plant, is one of the best ways to battle the destruction of the rainforest.  It is incredibly important in creating conservation because it emphasizes the importance of diversity, as well as the importance and diversity of every single plant in a region.  Valuing all the plants in the region is far better way to achieve conservation than any sort of botany done in a lab, say, researching medical potentials of a component inside just one species; where a monoculture farm would be the most beneficial outcome.  Knowing the ecology of the region based around what plants are at the base of this system is the best way to fully understand the ecosystem as a whole.  After you can appreciate this you can selectively take resources without any damaging effects.  I have had such an interesting time here at CICRA. In addition to good times, I have found an area of study that will impress and challenge me for the rest of my life; at least that is my train of thought right now.  I cannot wait until I can walk through this forest again and be able to recognize each plant that is this beautiful entanglement of life.