The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them

by Elizabeth Royte
328 pages (September 26, 2001) Houghton Mifflin Company; ISBN: 0395979978

Reviewed by Melinda Gammon, Biology Dept, UMass Boston

If you have ever visited a tropical rain forest, been a graduate student or field researcher, or spent time living among strangers, you will relate to Elizabeth Royte’s vivid observations in The Tapir’s Morning Bath. If you’ve never been to the tropics, or haven’t been involved even marginally in the world of biological field research, Royte’s book is a quicker and less expensive alternative to the real thing. She offers commentary on field research that you won’t get from a strict ecology text, making this book a sort of racy, yet nerdy, expose of a tropical research community. Her subjects are the flora, fauna and humans on Barro Colorado Island, or BCI, where she lived for a year to write this book.

Located in the Panama Canal, BCI has had a biological lab in operation since 1923. The island provides a small, closed system that is attractive for many types of scientists, and it has a rich history of valuable studies and famous researchers. Royte communicates awe of BCI along with analysis. For example, she shares her sense of wonder at seeing vines large enough to drink from, yet also outlines the main hypotheses on tropical biodiversity, and discusses them with the researchers. She pays extraordinary attention to the studies on the island, and participates in work on the demographics of spiny rats, the effects of leaf-cutting ants on tree transpiration, the biodiversity of mangrove arthropods, the correlation of hormones and copulation in spider monkeys, feeding and ranges of tent-making bats, the flight and hearing of moths, and others. If you are so inclined, you can find more information about the island and the research from Royte’s extensive citations. Or, you can simply enjoy learning about the people and wildlife chronicled in The Tapir’s Morning Bath, including the pet name of a particularly well-fed tapir on the island (the book’s namesake). Until the tapir was discovered, Alice’s daily bath and bathroom break caused water level data at a pond to change mysteriously, throwing a monkey-wrench into the data of Dr. Robert Stallard.

The experience of field station life is also a running theme of the book: the struggle to find dry, mold-free clothing; to maintain mental health; and to become the type of person who can improvise. Royte dedicates her year on BCI to profiling as many people as she can, from field assistants to those in charge of running the legacy. The author gets close enough to the researchers so that the truths of the PhD process are revealed, the toil of field research is rightfully appreciated, and the current pressures on future scientists can be understood on a personal level. Royte has an insight into human behavior and psychology that makes you feel close to the people on BCI, and also to her, as if you had read excerpts from their personal journals.

What makes this book most valuable is that Royte is able to explain a wide range of research with a fair amount of depth. As a writer who is not a scientific researcher, she challenges the scientists she meets on BCI to explain the relevance of their work to the layperson, to society, and to the conservation of tropical forests at large. She herself feels ambiguous about the conservation issue, which nags at her (and the reader), but it is easy to sympathize with Royte’s bittersweet sentiments during her stay. She has an overwhelming feeling of privilege for being in such a special place, but is faced simultaneously with accepting the harsh plight of most of this habitat.. She sees the tremendous work done, yet is wary as to how this relates to preservation. In one of the final chapters she asks:

In the context of vanishing rainforests, why did knowing BCI’s leaf-area index--the total area of leaves above each square meter of forest--matter?…How could one be a good environmentalist in this era of crisis and still believe that such narrowly focused studies in the tropics were time and money well spent?

Royte asks this question to nearly everyone she meets, and records the many replies for the reader . It would be unfair to leave it to Royte alone to conclude what the scientific community should do, but the book’s lack of resolution is not easy to swallow. Conservation biology, in all of its complexity, deserves to be discussed rather than read (read this book with a friend or two). You may find yourself, as I did, agreeing with many points of opposing arguments. In the end, perhaps the best that we readers can do is accept that researchers do not themselves agree and will not likely come to agreement. Some scientists have given up and feel powerless. Others are not interested in championing a cause other than their own careers. A biologist is not necessarily an environmentalist. But as Royte opines, students and scientists who feel the need to get involved will, perhaps, have stronger knowledge and opinions by having done their work on BCI.