On Feb 6, 3:44*pm, Steve wrote:
K Barrett wrote:
"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

I read 'River of Doubt' some time last year. Quite a story and it didn't
make ME want to explore the back country of South America!
I wish the author would have stayed closer to the story without so much
time spent on her little excursions into plate tectonics, biology, etc.
If I want to read about those things, I'll read something written by an
expert in the field.
I'm sure the whole trip would be quite different with modern equipment
(but I'm still not doing it!) and I'll have to read that Wiki article.

Steve

That goes to show there's no pleasing everyone all the time.

I read as a scientist who studies history as a form or recreation;
probably something that makes me a misfit. ;-)

It is the excursions into context that add to understanding of a
story. For example, one of the things I valued in reading Charles
Dickens (e.g. Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist) are his descriptions
of socioeconomic conditions in which his characters lived. For a Tale
of Two Cities, it is the socioeconomic conditions of aristocrats and
peasants in France just prior to and just following the French
revolution. In Oliver Twist, it is the conditions experienced by the
poor in England, and the attitudes of the wealthy toward them, that is
relevant. In both cases, his novels add to an understanding of life
in western Europe at the worst of the little ice age.

From the sounds of things, the treatment of plate tectonics, biology,
&c. the author placed in her book is as useful in understanding what
Roosevelt experienced as was Dickens' treatment of socioeconomic
context in understanding both the stories he told and more broadly the
times in which they were set. Studying Dickens certainly doesn't
replace a treatise on European history during the little ice age, but
it IS a useful complement to it. Similarly, I would extend my library
to include treatises on the ecology of central and south america,
should I find some good ones, but at the same time, if Millard's
treatment of that science is reasonable, and she has done a good job
in documenting what Roosevelt experienced, her book would be a useful
and interesting complement to such treatises. One of the things that
makes biographies interesting is their ability to help understand what
it is like to live in a certain context. I have two autobiographies,
written by sisters who lived in one of the earliest British
settlements in southern ontario, and I don't think it wold be even
possible to begin to understand what their lives were like without
knowing something of the ecology and climate of southern ontario at
that time. Similarly, I have my doubts about the possibility of
understanding Roosevelt's experience without understanding the ecology
and topography of the region he explored.

If "River of Doubt" is still in print, I will likely look into buying
it later this spring (there are, after all, a number of science texts
higher up on my reading list).

Cheers,

Ted