every living thing. man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys, 2009, p.290

[...]... into their cars or onto their motorcycles and circle the single plaza, cruising The poorer, motorless masses look on, faces powdered with the ever-present ether of ancient red dust winnowed from the mountains by time When we arrived, we took motorcycle taxis to a hotel at the edge of town run by a woman named Doña Rosa Our backpacks still on our backs, we had to flex our stomach muscles to keep from. .. started in Cavinas, Bolivia The road to Cavinas is long and in most places not a road at all, but instead a river or a footpath To get to Cavinas our first big step would be to get to Riberalta, the biggest city in the northern Bolivian Amazon.* To get to Riberalta, my wife Monica and I flew to Santa Cruz, Bolivia From Santa Cruz, we took a bus to Trinidad, a sleepy town at the southern edge of Bolivia’s... went to the water to wash, to fish, or even just to admire the reflection of their moon We needed to go upstream, to see what was farther in, beyond the roads We needed to go upstream to get to Cavinas Upstream, from the perspective of the people of Riberalta, the forests are populated more densely by myth than by humans There, “the Indians still live in the old way,” Doña Rosa’s Croatian husband told... discovered, it is safe to assume that for a while every man and most women of Cavinas went to the forest every morning and every night to tap the rubber trees, collect the latex, burn it, ball it and drag it to the shore for transport.* The sap of trees, drawn to protect delicate European feet from the rain, burned the fingers of men and women in the Amazon and often worked them to death.3 Rubber boomed... went out to learn with a local expert To our deep pleasure, there was much to see We went out with several such men, but came to depend on one, Felipe, who was most willing to be our guide Felipe had some plants he wanted to look for anyway (miracle sex plants, we would later learn, that were very popular and therefore hard to find nearby), so it was useful for him to walk along Felipe pointed to plants... land, I began to think of other questions—things I really wanted to know I asked some, but our informants grew weary of our curiosity We were bordering on overstaying our welcome It was time to leave We could fly out of Cavinas by chartering a plane, but we were in the mood to explore, and so we made plans to hitch a ride down the river on a fishing boat We walked one town over to Puerto Cavinas, the... fills In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to find something else, a collection of scientists, often obsessive, usually brilliant, occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries It is easy to imagine that most new discoveries come from global collaborations and expensive research programs in which progress is incremental and dependent on many individuals Yet to a surprising... returned to something like it used to be Now, however, there was a demand for Western goods and therefore a need for money Matches, oil, and frying pans had been discovered It was hard to go back to the old days Then the cycle began again Brazil nuts, from trees that also happen to be abundant around Cavinas, became popular in North American Christmas bowls It was enough to send the Cavineños back out to. .. moved into a first-floor room beside the Beni River, unpacked our things, and proceeded to sleep for the first day and a half We would stay here, our home base, off and on over the next several years Our room had its drawbacks It was close enough to the neighbor’s house for us to hear them fighting, close enough to the street to hear the bread boy’s horn each morning, and close enough to the kitchen to. .. edge of Bolivia’s great, flooded Amazonian savannas From Trinidad, we took the long bus north We were traveling in what was to be the dry season, but the water had not yet drained out of the land The floods still clung to grasses, forest and, as would soon be relevant, to the roads The going was slow A bus ride that was to take one day took several Mosquitoes flew in the windows, fed on us, and flew back . alt="" Every Living Thing Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys Rob R. Dunn Preface by E. O. Wilson To Monica and Lula, my greatest discoveries. ii Contents Preface. come out almost every week. New monkey discovered. New phylum discovered. New spider, new rat, new porcu- pine, new whale, new relative of the giraffe, and on and on they appear. My drawer. those paragraphs. In each place, on each page, people would have to give names not only to all the wild beasts, but also to the plants, the fungi, the beetles, and the ants, and anything else