"Ted Byers" wrote in message
...

It was interesting last night; there was a documentary on TVO (a
station run by the government of Ontario) about a recent expedition to
Guyana. The area they went to had so few indigenous people that the
animals had virtually no fear of human beings. They had never been
hunted. And these people, a moderately large and well equipped party,
were the first scientists to visit the area. They said nothing about
orchids, but they found new species almost every day. The area in
question was enormous, and yet the area the team was able to sample
was likely only of the order of a few hundred square meters.

The last time I did field work in which we identified and measured
every plant within quadrats 10 m square, it took a couple hours to do
one quadrat that size, and the team could thoroughly examine every
specimen in each quadrat could complete surveys of only 5 or 6 such
quadrats. Mind you, as we did it, a part of the record was a detailed
map of precisely where each specimen was located within the quadrat.
This was in mixed decidious forest in southern Ontario, so the sites
we examined were very easy to get to. I can imagine that trying to do
similar sampling in Guyana, on the site covered by the documentary I
saw last night, would require as much as a quarter of your time just
getting to, and returning from, the site, hiking through trackless
rainforest (there were no clearings where a helicopter could land, at
least none shown in the documentary, and the river was effectively
impassable. One of the individual adventures they showed last night
involved one individual going into an area that had to be hundreds of
square kilometers in extent (to get there, he had to descend a large
cliff that separated their main camp site from the area he went to),
and yet the individual appeared to be able to sample a transect a few
hundred meters long. Mind you, think think he, and a couple other
members of that team, were insane to be climbing up or down rock that
seemed to crumble at the slightest touch.

The point is that this documentary highlights just how difficult and
expensive it is to properly survey the life in any given ecosystem,
and why it is certain, even in the absence of the political conflict
in places like Columbia, there are countless species that remain to be
discovered. Predators, human and non-human, only make it much more
dangerous to even attempt sampling interesting sites. I love going
into the boonies, when my health allows it, but I ain't suicidal.

Cheers,

Ted

_____________________

A safe way to get into the boonies is to read 'River of Doubt' by Candace
Millard. Its the story of Theodore Roosevelt's journey down an uncharted
river in the Amazon, but there's much much more in it than just a journey
there and back again. Its part American history, part Brazillian history,
part geography, plate techtonics, biology and anthropology. Then after you
read it google Roosevelt's great grandson's voyage down the same river with
20th century equipment (I think I found it on Wikipedia) Makes a great
yarn.

K Barrett