CAMP AMAZON: U.S., Brazilian scientists hope to find a way to help the rainforest survive.
MANAUS, Brazil - It's as clear as a Nebraska night and the crickets make you feel right at home.
But the sky is unfamiliar as you gaze through a break in the canopy, catching a glimpse of a small bat gliding over your remote camp.
A Great Jacamar interrupts the serenity with a dive-bomber call, crying out with news of some danger or maybe just enjoying the sound of his own voice.
Two Blue-crowned Motmots echo each other in owl-like hoots and a Black-faced Antthrush calls out like a rooster, though it is several hours to daybreak and your fellow campers are just swaddling themselves in blankets and hammocks.
After a solitary walk to a nearby creek, with only a penlight to help you find the way, you reluctantly join the snoring crowd, fighting off sleep for fear of missing a moment of what's likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Around 4 a.m., you wake to a strange sound, almost like the low moan of a semi rolling down some imaginary distant highway - an eerie, rhythmic chorus that can only be the song of howler monkeys greeting the coming dawn.
Welcome to the Amazon rainforest and Camp 41, an open-air research station run jointly by the Smithsonian Institution and the Brazilian Institute for Research in the Amazon.
The small camp 50 miles north of Manaus is a base for rainforest researchers and a frequent stop for U.S. dignitaries, including a dozen American journalists who spent the night as part of a June fact-finding trip to Brazil.
Visitors learn about the Amazon's oldest ongoing research project, a 23-year collaborative effort looking at whether the rainforest can survive the march of development - and, in particular, whether science can determine the correct size fragment of virgin forest necessary to maintain the most diverse environment on the planet.
To the untrained eye, the Amazon seems exotic, but is hardly teeming with wildlife. In a guided hike around Camp 41, the journalists didn't see a snake or jaguar or even the roaring howler monkeys, which live in groups of 15 or 20 and grow only to the size of small dogs.
"We're in the world's richest forest," says Mario Cohn-Haft, an American ornithologist, "but they're doing a spectacular job of staying hidden."
In the river basin and vast forest covering an area about three times the size of Nebraska, scientists are still learning about the incredible diversity and remarkable interconnectedness of species so numerous they haven't yet been counted - with estimates somewhere between 800,000 and 5 million.
Take Cohn-Haft's research as proof of the diversity.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in biology from Dartmouth, he eventually found himself banding birds as an intern at the rainforest project. He turned a six-month stint into a full-time assignment, working on a master's from Tulane and a doctorate from Louisiana State University.
Cohn-Haft has a knack for whistling the songs of birds and he noticed that while some birds in different Amazon regions looked the same, they sang different songs. Turns out after genetic testing the birds actually are different species, though to the naked eye they appear identical.
What caused the genetic difference? Cohn-Haft doesn't know - but he suggests that even a river may prove to be an important dividing line, maintaining the reproductive isolation that may have caused diversification.
All this means the Amazon actually has even more species of birds than had been previously thought, and that each region within the Amazon is distinct from other regions, Cohn-Haft says.
For those who hope the rainforest might be the source of life-saving medicines or new commercial products, this presents a complication.
"From a conservation standpoint," says Cohn-Haft, pointing to different portions of a map of the Amazon region, "you've got to save here, here and here."
The interconnected nature of the ecosystem is another argument in favor of conservation. If one type of plant is eliminated, scientists fear it might have a domino effect on the survival of other plants, insects, birds or mammals.
Some examples of the connections:
Cohn-Haft brushes away the top layer of leaves on the ground to show decomposition and tree roots close to the surface. "If a leaf makes it to the ground, it's immediately absorbed back as nutrients into other plants
He points to a termite nest on a nearby tree with tracks leading away from the nest like blood vessels - an easy target for hungry birds.
Several different kinds of spiders have worked to connect their webs in the shape of a globe, enhancing their ability to capture flying insects for all to eat.
A variety of different types of birds confound the old adage about birds of a feather flocking together, occupying an area in the canopy with one bird acting as a sentry for the others, warning of dangerous intruders.
Leafcutter ants climb 100 feet or more to the tree tops to cut a piece of leaf the size of a fingernail or smaller - then use the foliage as a parachute to fall to the ground. Burrowing as far as 30 feet underground, the ants turn over soil, providing a ready home for worms.
Though the diversity of species is large, the density is often small.
Thus the importance of the basic research into forest development - and the cooperative effort between the U.S. and Brazilian governments called the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project.
In the late 1970s, Brazil was looking to speed development in the interior of the country and began a program in a 1.2 million-acre area of relatively undisturbed forest near Manaus. But while encouraging logging operations and cattle ranchers, the government chose to set aside small parcels of virgin forest for research purposes. Some parcels were as small as 2.5 acres - about the size of a couple of football fields. Others were as large as 2,500 acres.
Rita Mesquita, a plant ecologist with the Brazilian research institute, said researchers hoped to find a way to strike a balance between development and conservation, looking for the minimum size of forest needed to maintain the diversity of the species.
Mesquita, a Brazilian married to Cohn-Haft, says it is clear bigger fragments are better than small ones - but, on the whole, "these fragments are in trouble."
The fragments are dryer and hotter, exposed to more wind than the mature, virgin forest, she says. And researchers see a clear "edge effect" as the forest is affected up to a half-mile or more from where cutting occurred, she says.
This is where the large diversity and small density of species in the rainforest works against conservation, Mesquita says. When you cut down a portion of the forest, you may leave as few as one or two members of a given species in an area isolated from others of its kind, she says. That makes preservation difficult.
Researchers have found that cutting portions of the rainforest results in fewer birds, insects, primates, bees and termites - but it also leads to an increase in small mammals, amphibians and butterflies, all of which tend to thrive in edge areas.
Mesquita focuses her research on areas where the forest is growing back after clearcutting or development. The least diversity in regrowth comes on land that was cleared and burned for use as cattle pasture. It's better if the land was simply logged, but not burned. For instance, in one logged parcel she's monitoring, researchers identified 370 species of plants vs. 1,000 that would be found in virgin forest.
Undaunted, American and Brazilian scientists continue their study in this one-of-a-kind laboratory, hoping to find a way to help the rainforest survive while guiding government plans for rational use of forest resources.
While the plan for preservation is not yet clear, Cohn-Haft predicts the solution will be uniquely Brazilian and large areas of the Amazon will be saved in some way.
"If I thought it was manifest destiny, I'd give up," he says.
"But I think there's hope."
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