Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [21]
Back on the boat, I took the time to enlighten her as to what had inspired the brief but serious melodrama.
“It was so pretty,” she murmured, “and it looked harmless.”
I nodded. “Sure. That’s what makes it so dangerous. A lionfish looks dangerous, so nobody tries to grab it. Same with a spiny sea urchin. In contrast, a shell is just—a shell. Except when it’s a live cone shell.”
She nodded back at me. “Maybe I’ll just stick to collecting shells on the beach.”
“Good idea. And while we’re on the subject . . .”
“Yes?”
“Just in case the occasion should present itself, you should avoid trying to shake hands with any pretty little octopuses, too.”
V
JEALOUS ANTS, MILLIONS OF ANTS, AND REALLY, REALLY BIG...ANTS
Southeastern Peru, May 1987
THERE MAY BE NO OTHER place in the world as magnificently wild and biologically diverse as Manú National Park in southeastern Peru. At 3.7 million acres, approximately the size of the state of New Jersey, Manú encompasses within its boundaries 13,000-foot Andean heights, spectacular untouched cloud forest, and glorious unspoiled lowland Amazonian rain forest. More than 15,000 kinds of plants have been found in Manú, more than 625 varieties of tree can inhabit a single acre, and the park is home to more than 800 species of birds, almost as many as in all of North America.
Only a small part of this extraordinary example of still intact Amazonia is open to the public. Another somewhat larger section, mostly along the Alto Madre de Dios River, has been made available by the Peruvian government for mixed use. The great majority of the park is maintained in its original, natural, untouched state and is open only to scientists and government-approved explorers. Within its boundaries can be found perambulating spectacled bears, the raucous cock-of-the-rock (Peru’s national bird), innumerable snakes, macaws, parrots, primates, giant otters, giant catfish, rare black caimans, piranhas of varying size, species, and disposition, towering trees, entangling vines, the dreaded candiru, at least two human tribes that have essentially no contact with the outside world, and potentially thousands upon thousands of undiscovered, unnamed, and unstudied creatures of every order and genus.
There are also an awful lot of ants.
I first visited Manú in 1987, the year it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. At that time, there was no place close to the park’s boundaries where interested visitors could stay, and certainly nowhere within them. Besides the single primitive ranger station precariously situated at the edge of the Manú River near the entrance to the park, a single scientific station was located much deeper inside the park boundaries on the shores of Cocha Cashu, a small oxbow lake. Quite properly, this facility was and still is closed to non-researchers. In charge of its supervision was the eminent ecologist John Terborgh, whose book Requiem for Nature, set largely in Manú, I highly recommend.
Asking around the modern Andean city and ancient Inca capital of Cusco (or Cuzco, or if you want to really be a stickler, Qosqo in Quechua) about the possibility of visiting Manú, my traveling companion Mark and I were told to try and find a certain Boris Gómez Luna, as he was the only one who could conceivably arrange such a visit on short notice. Though his name made him sound like a character from a John Le Carré novel, Boris turned out to be a slight, charming fellow whose unexpected youth was matched only by his dedication to and enthusiasm for the wild Manú. Though in the years that have passed Boris has since moved on to bigger things, his enthusiasm for Manú has never flagged.
Señor Gómez Luna, we learned, was in the process of building the first facility inside the park that would be permitted to accommodate non-researchers. In other words, visitors like Mark and myself. Could we possibly, we inquired when we finally managed to track him down, make some arrangement with him to spend a week or so