A Land of Ghosts by David G. Campbell

Author:David G. Campbell [Campbell, David G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Adventurers & Explorers, Nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, Forests & Rainforests, Travel, South America, Brazil
ISBN: 9780547523439
Google: c_vkAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-06-10T01:06:33+00:00

How do I decipher pattern among the billions of light-seeking leaves, all hanging on to a tier in the canopy, a chink in the bark? How do I interpret this bedlam of sepal and petal, fruit and yeast, wing and scale? Grasping the parts of this forest is a bit like learning a language: you absorb a few syllables at a time, daunted by the knowledge that you can never finish the job. Learning to recognize one or two species is a good days work. And if the species are the words in this new vocabulary, then the voucher specimens we collect for each individual tree are the syllables. A voucher is no more than a dried sample of foliage, flowers, or fruit. It is the irreducible element of our analysis of this forest’s structure and diversity. Vouchers are a necessity in a region for which there are no field guides or comprehensive taxonomic keys, none of the handy conveniences that facilitate identification in the temperate north. Roger Tory Peterson never walked here. Our vouchers will be sent to taxonomists in herbaria, universities, and museums all over the world, where they will be compared with specimens already archived. If were lucky, they will identify them to species. Our vouchers will provide proof to a skeptical scientific community of the diversity that we claim. Without those specimens, our conclusions would become no more than unreproducible opinions formed long ago in a place far away, a place perhaps forever destroyed.

Unfortunately, most of our vouchers are sterile; that is, they lack flowers, seeds, or fruits. Sterile vouchers, which are less than fully diagnostic, are the bane of taxonomists, who, following the precedent set by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, rely on a plant’s sex organs to construct their keys. Although Linnaeus did not understand evolutionary theory, he knew that a plant’s reproductive parts, which are adapted to pollinators, dispersers, water, and wind, are more diagnostic of species than the vegetative parts. We know now that small changes in the morphology of a flower can reproductively isolate a lineage from its ancestors and lead to the genesis of a new species. And the adaptations of fruits and seeds—devised to stick to the fur of a mammal, pass through the gut of a fish, or bob in the flooded plain—are equally diagnostic. Therefore, taxonomists celebrate the sex life of plants; they are voyeurs who use a plants reproductive organs for their analyses.

We fold each voucher specimen inside sheets of newspaper and bundle it tightly to take back to camp. The folios of newspaper are unsold runs of O Jornada, a scrappy Manaus daily. Every page is the same, and its old news: hysterical screeching headlines: POLICE DESTROY BARRACKS AND SQUATTERS FLEE THE LAND; SEXUAL MANIAC KILLS WENCH WITH A KNIFE TO THE HEART; a photo of Fabio Jr. surrounded by lovesick teenyboppers. All day I plaster the limp specimens into Fabio’s leering maw. This hay-baling would be tedious enough if we collected only one voucher

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