Scarlet Starsong on the
Tambopata River

Turn off your headlamp on an overcast night, alongside the Tambopata River in the Southeastern Peruvian province of Madre de Dios, and when your eyes adjust, you see that the forest glows in the light of its own organisms---glow worms embedded in a cliff shine like stars, fireflies flicker, mushrooms resonate softly, and leaf litter fungus gives off a faint pale bioluminescence.

I am drawn to places that pulsate with life, and this western perimeter of the Amazon Basin, this wild network of Amazon tributaries which form at the eastern edge of the Andes, is ground zero for biodiversity on Earth.

I am hopping a network of three lodges to the Tambopata Research Center, six hours upstream from the port near Puerto Maldonado. I hope to ask, and maybe even answer, some questions about the meaning of places that contain mega-biodiversity. What does it really mean, and why is biodiversity important?

From the Refugio Amazonas lodge, about two hours upriver, I walk down a small path with a handful of tourists, guides and naturalists, and step onto a riverboat.

It's been raining upriver, at the river's origins in Bolivia, and in the isolated and nearly uninhabited protected zones to the south. That means the riverboat pilot, who communicates with the captain from the front, needs to be extraordinarily vigilant; the river is already raging, and islands of logs are rushing downriver.

I ask Saay, who I hired as a jungle guide under contract with Rainforest Expeditions, about the Ceiba tree to the right of the river. At nearly 200 feet, the tree towers above the rest of the rainforest canopy.

The trunks of ceiba trees rise straight up without branches, and form a grand umbrella, providing imposing shade beneath. In the darkness of the tree's upper limbs, you can make out a silhouette of orchids, heliconias, oropendola nests and vines. It is deep in the shadows of this umbrella that Peruvian tribes imagined Gods to dwell.

Hearing Saay's reply, a jungle tourist in the seats ahead of us turns around. Clifton is wearing a khaki shirt, sport sunglasses bound by Croakies, and technical pants that zip off into shorts.

"When we were in Africa," he says, looking out at the tree, "we saw these giraffes. They are so tall, they could eat the tops off that tree."

"They weren't that tall, dear," his wife says, challenging him.

He looks at the tree, "Maybe not. But maybe. Those giraffes are really tall."

It's going to be a long trip upriver, so I put my feet up and rest my binoculars on my lap, and looking out into the jungle, I sleepily imagine a tribe of 200-foot tall giraffes; double the length of an adult Blue Whale, wandering carelessly along the banks of Amazonia.

It is in this sleepy state that, in my head, the sepia and ochre hues of those imaginary giraffes give off both numbers and letters. I perceive the giraffe kind of like this: 13-26-13-26-13-26-13-26, as well as HD, HD, HD, and so on and so forth, all the way down the length of that ceiba tree. For most of my life, I had thought that this way of seeing the world was how everybody else saw it.

About a year ago, I was driving west back home in Oregon, and an NPR interview was playing on the radio. The interview subject described this condition that affects about one in a hundred people.

I slammed on the brakes and pulled into a gas station. Into my phone, I typed a phrase and found the definition of synesthesia, and suddenly I understood something about how I have perceived the world my entire life.

Synesthesia comes in many forms. To some people, sounds have taste, or musical notes have color, and others perceive points in time as floating in space. For as long as I remember, numbers and letters emanate color, and words are like little palettes of paint, dates, weekdays and months have hues. Regardless, in anybody who has synesthesia, there is a level of mental crossover, or union, between our senses.

Today, I understand the power of my synesthesia on my travel to the Peruvian Amazon, and how it influences the way I see this place.

We stop at a small river island to look for macaws. Saay notices river water flooding gently onto the island, and suggests we just leave our boots on the boat. We cross the muddy island with a group of jungle tourists, many who have come all this way just to see the extravagant birds.

Some comment on my bare feet. "Is that just your style?" one asks. Another, "Watch for fish up your urethra!" referring to the Amazon tall-tale of the candiru fish, which climbs into your privates.

But as we approach the other side of the island, I get this feeling that the entire island will soon be underwater. Saay and I bird the clay licks in our bare feet, the river water pooling at our feet, while others, in their boots, are forced further and further back.

Good call, Saay.

Arriving at Tambopata Research Center

On most days, there is a fifteen foot staircase to climb from the river to the path through the forest that leads to the Tambopata Research Center. Today, the rains have completely drowned the stairs. By tomorrow, I'll walk down the complete staircase to get back into the boat.

The Tambopata Research Center is one of the most remote lodges in Latin America. It lies in the center of a dense, well-preserved forest that, like so many other Latin American jungles, is threatened from every side by oil exploration, gold mining, and the construction of the Interoceanic Highway, which will connect Brazil to Peru directly via the Madre de Dios rainforests.

The research center hosts the Tambopata Macaw Project, a long-term research project focusing on the ecology and nesting habits of the iconic birds.

The macaws, as well as the lure of a potential big cat sighting, draw tourists up the river, and as tourism grows, so does the justification to expand the protection of the wilderness.

In this way, species like macaws and jaguars serve to protect something much bigger; a slice of biodiversity. The fact that there are people all over the world interested in seeing magnificent birds and cats is a wonderful thing, as is the way that tourism can act as such a powerful tool in protecting tracts of land.

But how would we protect land if we were motivated purely by the concept of preserving biodiversity itself, and if we truly understood the benefits of doing so? Is it possible for us to look beyond the tourist dollar or the flagship species, and say that what we're really trying to protect are the ants, the beetles, the bacteria, the fungus and the frogs?

Rivers of Ants and the Antbirds who Follow Them

Soon after arriving at the small lodge, Saay and I boot up and head out.

One of the first things you see when you walk into the neotropic forests are the leafcutter ants, scurrying across logs and vines, carrying chewed leaves off to the deepest interiors of their underground nests, where the material is processed into a substrate for cultivated fungus.

The ants survive off this staple crop, but in order to keep their fungus healthy, the leafcutter ants have developed another strange symbiosis; the ants actually grow a bacteria on their bodies which secretes chemicals that keep the fungus healthy and free of various pathogens and molds. These strains of bacteria, which the ants have utilized in their farming techniques for 50 million years, are the same we use for over two-thirds of our antibiotics and cancer-fighting compounds. Scientists believe the future of antibiotic medicines lies in the biology of this symbiotic relationship.

Scientists also believe that the compounds of the future; the materials of industry, technology and medicine, lie in the secrets of unknown or unstudied species. In the Latin American jungles, some random ant, some fungus, some bacteria, or arachnid will contain answers to the advancements of our future.

As we walk deeper into the forest, the mud gets thick, to the point where we're walking through pools of brown water and tugging at our boots to pull free with each step.

Around the rims of these pools of mud are lines of ants, moving quickly. And it is easy to see an individual line of these ants as being like the lines of leafcutters - a column of organized industry. But if you look farther into the forest, you'll see that these columns are actually everywhere, and they are all headed in the same direction. This is an ant that is not headed home. No nests to crawl into, no cavities to rest in. The army ants are in constant motion, perpetually moving, raiding, destroying everything in their path.

This is all good for Saay and I, because we had agreed to spend the better part of the day antbirding. Wherever you find army ants, you will find birds, many of which are often those related antbirds, anthrushes, antwrens, antshrikes, antvireos and antpittas. These hundreds of birds tend to be drab, adorned in the dark hues appropriate for the dense, dark understories of Latin American forests.

As army ants storm an area, they leave the carcasses of their prey behind, creating constant opportunism, and a niche, for a mad diversity of birds, and so, mixed-species foraging flocks are in constant pursuit of these columns.

The flocks are often there, not far from you, but you can't see them. They are often nearly invisible, and sometimes even silent. Because of this, antbirding can be immensely frustrating, and, as Saay explains, "lonely, and even boring, when you're out there by yourself, but when there are two of us, it's exciting again."

The pursuit of antbirds is to isolate something out of the chaos of the environment; a visual puzzle wrapped in the sweat and effort of jungle hiking. It's chaos and confusion into order, clarity and beauty. There are few views of Earth as spidery and three-dimensional as the view from the understory of a jungle. For a synesthete, all this structure of vines and buttresses, patches of light and vast swaths of dark comes with some extra inputs, because our senses are cross-talking through the experience.

Non-synesthetes wonder about the noise of synesthesia; how can you concentrate with all that background noise? But this is like a person who sees in black-and-white saying the same to someone who sees in color. Since we were born with these crossing paths, we know nothing else.

I guess now, I understand enough about it to know that we synesthetes were meant to use it as if it were a gift.

Antbirding is particularly difficult for people from North America. We're used to the visual cues hidden among oaks, maples and pines. Saay has lived his whole life in the Amazon, and his eyes are going to work with him on that observation.

Saay grew up in both countries, and worked in each as a logger.

His job was to carry freshly cut timber along a trail. With a group of loggers, he would lift and carry the wood a small distance, handing it off to another crew, forming a long transport chain through the jungle. One day, logging wrecked his back, and he had to find a new career.

As an English and Spanish wilderness guide, Saay moves between guiding in the Tambopata and in the Brazilian Pantanaal. When he returns home to Puerto Maldonado, he races enduro motorbikes through jungle tracks, sometimes traveling throughout Peru with his friends, following the route of enduro competitions.

Swamps, Snakes and Biomass

Back at the lodge, a young man is throwing up. "He's been sick all day. He's crying. He's going to need to get out of here," I overhear somebody saying. That's not an easy proposition; the only way out quickly is to full-throttle back down that raging river, for six hours.

At the bar, I meet up with Clifton (giraffes in Africa), who explains, "he's probably got some e-coli in his stomach. You know, they say that when it rains in the jungle, it pours. And it's pouring on this guys vacation. Luckily, I've got just the right medicine for him."

By morning, the young man will be cured. But, seeing Clifton transformed from bumbling jungle tourist into doctor-in-action reminds me of this incongruity that is on display in the jungle. Here, we have someone like Clifton; likely a successful, brilliant cardiologist, who has trained in medicine for many years, meaning that he has advanced training in a practical form of a biological science. Yet, once he's back in the natural world, he stumbles over the most basic facts of biology. No, there are no chimpanzees in Peru. No, spiders are not insects. No, giraffes cannot eat from two-hundred foot tree-tops.

But Clifton is not alone. All of us tourists at the lodge are capable of revealing our spectacular deficiency in our understanding of the natural world. And, if those of us who have traveled this far to see something of the natural world are largely uneducated about it, what does that mean for the rest of the world? Does it matter whether some guy sitting at a desk may or may not comprehend the value of all these life forms, crawling and slithering about, in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away? How important is it for a global public to deeply understand the riddles of the natural world, and the complex, sometimes invisible threats these far-flung hotspots may face?

Tonight is especially humid, and I have trouble getting my wellies on. We walk out into the jungle on a pitch black night; Tonight, we're looking for snakes, and we walk deep into the forest, down into the lowland, where six inches of mud turns into eighteen inches of stale water.

Plants and vines hang over and grow out of the swamp, and we silently drape each one with the light of our headlamps, as we look for the camouflaged vine-like shapes of snakes in the tangle.

The spiders in this swamp are everywhere, and they all seem to be the larger variety. On four occasions tonight, we pass by brazilian wandering spiders, the most venomous spider genus in the world. In each case, we see the animal and adjust our path.

Finally, a snake emerges. It is a Blunthead Tree Snake, with large slit-pupil eyes and a body as slender as a scallion. Both arboreal and nocturnal, the silent and elegant creature moves through the trees with an otherworldly grace. If simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, then the Blunthead Tree Snake is the most divine sophisticate - just a string with big eyes at the end, and a coat of rhythmic white and amber.

There are 60 snake species in the Tambopata region of Peru, and in some ways, the Amazonian rainforests of this part of the world are often considered synonymous with snakes - so much so, that you could almost imagine them to be lurking underneath every branch. But snakes, like any other larger animal in the Peruvian Amazon, are scarce. And this is an important lesson about biodiversity: if you would measure the mass of all the living things in a forest, or rather, measure its living biomass, you would find that the apex predators, like jaguars, caimans and even snakes, account for just a tiny fraction of that total biomass.

Each level down the food chain, from the apex predators through various levels of consumers, like mice and birds and insects, down to the primary producers, like grasses and algae, you'll find that the total biomass increases substantially at each level, like a pyramid. In order for each level to thrive, the level below, naturally, must be thriving.

If you consider only animals, then the soil creatures, earthworms, ants, termites, and all other insects account for over 85% of all animal biomass.

But if you add up all the plants, their total biomass comes out at a thousand times that of all the animals in the world.

It gets even crazier with mushrooms, and other fungi, which contribute 25 percent of the world's global biomass.

But once you look at the copepods and cyanobacteria in the ocean, and the world's prokaryotes, or bacterias, the math gets even more profound. The biomass of these organisms overwhelms everything else.

It's true that animals like jaguars, macaws and snakes are important to the ecosystems they inhabit. The reality is that if push came to shove, if we lost many of these primary consumers and apex predators, the world would move on, and adapt.

It's these lower levels, where diversity blossoms into the millions, and biomass explodes into incalculable numbers. And it's these lower levels that create everything about our world that makes it liveable. If the world's bacteria, fungi, cyanobacteria, plants, and countless copepods of the oceans begin to disappear, then so does everything else.

There are some cases in the world where biomass surges in an apparently simple ecosystem. Antarctic krill, tiny crustaceans of the south pole, are believed to have the single largest biomass of any one animal species.

But biomass explodes where biodiversity is rich. A good way to think about this is to think of a big, productive, wealthy city with a large GDP, like New York or Tokyo, and compare it to a place that is financially successful due to a small number of economic inputs, like oil and natural gas boomtowns in Texas or North Dakota.

In the big productive city, where the tall buildings may be representative of trees filled with various ecological specialists, you have a complete economy - from street vendor specializing in catering to a very specific niche of the economy, to the apex mega-corporation, broadly affecting the health of the entire region.

There are a few places in the world that are the ecological equivalent of New York and Tokyo, and they tend to look very much like the forests of the Tambopata River. These are the megadiverse hotspots of the world; they exist in Papua New Guinea, the Congo, and in Indonesia, for example. But most of these hotspots are centered around the perimeters of the Amazon - in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuala, Colombia and Brazil. The Peruvian Department of Madre de Dios, which contains both the Tambopata and Manu regions, is unparalleled.

Donald Trump Caterpillars and Crying Turtles

After returning from the swamp, I want to know: why didn't we die from those brazilian wandering spiders?

I meet Aaron Pomerantz, an entomologist from Southern California who has been hired by the Tambopata Research Center.

"They have no reason to risk themselves by biting a large mammal," he explains. "Wandering spiders will do everything they can to avoid you. It's almost unheard of to see these types of spider bites in the jungle. More often, wandering spider bites happen at farms."

I ask him about his unusual position, which allows him to literally walk out into the woods in search of new and interesting species.

He explains, "First, a decoy spider was discovered in the area. Then, a macaw researcher found the first Silkhenge Spider. The Donald Trump Caterpillar, which looks like Trump's mop of hair, came out of Tambopata. And of course the famous butterflies drinking turtle tears, which only happens here in the Peruvian Amazon, because of a sodium deficiency in the water."

"What first drew me to this particular area was the discovery of the decoy spider. I think that this discovery made it click for the Tambopata Research Center that there are lots of arthropod discoveries left to be made, and that the public finds some of this stuff really interesting if it is presented well. This has sort of created a unique science-marketing combination position here. The discoveries can help promote tourism because when a story goes viral, it's a form of publicity; it can interest people who may not have thought about coming to the Amazon before. This can help promote conservation because tourism supports the infrastructure needed to maintain the Tambopata National Reserve and the scientific publications that come from the discoveries help to add to the body of knowledge about the biodiversity - trying to claim that a region should be conserved is much harder when you don't have studies backing up what biodiversity is actually present in the region. "

I ask him about his recent find of a strange symbiotic relationship between a butterfly and ants.

He explains, "My colleague and I noticed that butterflies were hanging out with ants on bamboo shoots. This was odd because normally ants just rip adult butterflies to shreds like any other invader on their food source. We then found that the ants also take care of the caterpillars; they protect them in return for a sugary food source produced by the caterpillars. This mutualistic relationship is known as myrmecophily and while it is known to occur for caterpillars in this family, this is the first time it has been observed for this particular species and we still think it is unusual for adult butterflies to interact with ants this way."