while before we get into the slides i was just asked the question how did you get into this and i think it's appropriate at the beginning to talk about this how many of you are familiar with an organization called earth watch ok those of that so much of field research is done by the kind of thing that can be done by anybody you know anybody can say one two three four five bird sitting on that branch and then you write it down or digging in the archaeological dig that sort of thing so they put together the fact that people like us who are untrained in research if we're willing to pay the money to go can go and help the scientists do what they need to do with the simple stuff and the money that we paid to do it becomes the operating budget for the research that's going on so it's really over a wonderful opportunity for the the scientists to get funding and get the help that they need and for people like us to i was in costa rica catching octopuses so it's a great chance to do wonderful stuff and be supporting a good cause to begin with so this particular target was which i've been titled with the amazon begins is an earth watch program that was assessing the health and future of the peruvian rain forest and this was cut ten years ago now i think about it on the syria river  in peru but i can guarantee you that not much has changed in the last ten years so the area that we're going to be talking about is amazing from the standpoint that it's biodiversity is unequalled anywhere in the world you can just see the animal life in the background here on this and it's also an area where there's an interface between there's an interface between two great forces one of which is the animal life in the area and the other is the people who live there and this is causing a lot of problems that require a lot of very clever solutions so let's take the area first of all we're talking about this is the north part of south america it's the largest rain forest in the world it's almost the size of the continental united states give you an idea of size and we're going to kind of and treat ourselves in this area down here here's peru this is all brazil here here's colombia ecuador and so we're going to be in this area and right here is the town to be key to those which we're going to be seeing so here's the amazon river and we'll one is you can take a bus trip over some of the scariest mountains in the world get to the other side get on to the u p a river and take about a week to get there there's also an easier way which i did i flew which took an hour and a half so this is the area that we're going to we're going to concentrate on here so let's enlarge that and this area right here is that because some area national reserve which is the area that we spent two weeks doing research another kind of summary of national reserve here are some facts about it it's a cruise  protected area it's more than eight thousand square miles which makes it about the size of new jersey so it's a big big place and it has one of the planet's greatest diversity of animal and plant life  the top this is one of the tributaries of the amazon which flows into the amazon a little bit to the east of where we are and we're going to get off of the marry me on and on to the cemetery river right here and we're going to come down on a river boat and we're going to park it by all of our k and from there we're going to spend the next couple of weeks going back and forth on the some area river with various research projects so what i want to talk about with this slide is three things first of all let's talk about that well life the animal life that's there second of all let's talk about the problems that are going on between the interface between people and animals and then third what's being done about it and what is what alligator only it's more aggressive and so it's one of many reptiles there are a lot of poisonous snakes a lot of interesting lizards now these are my photographs in the whole presentation except for the animals slides that i'm going to show you and after we've seen the long explain why that is monkeys there is about eleven species in the area that we were this is a woolly monkey the  pendulum this is a peccary which is a wild pig i guess you could call it one of the popular game animals of the area of the brazilian paper which a lot of people think because of that funny nose that it must be a and speaking of and eaters this is the animal had always wanted to see and that's me having my first look and trying to figure out weekend i'm looking at this is the journey of it here and i mean this is a masterpiece of evolution this huge long snout here with a tongue that is probably i'd say twelve fourteen inches long which is sticky which they stick into the termite and nest to feed and huge cla in the trees except for a weekly sojourn to the to the ground to have a bowel movement and no scientists have ever been able to pick her out why this has to be and why can't they do it in the trees because when they come down it makes them  very vulnerable to predators so a mystery and then rodents these are the biggest of the rodents these recovery bearers can go up to two hundred pounds and weight so and then of course the top of the food chain of the cats this is a jaguar and there's also ocelots and promos and all kinds of other beautiful creatures and bred life is phenomenal these are blue and yellow because we'll talk more about the various species later on but this is a house in which is of unusual bird they say it has two or three stomachs it's when the chicks are hatched they have hooks on their wings so they can climb through the trees the hooks drop off when they fled and then they can fly but they will spend their entire life in an area about as big as this in just two or three trees their entire life this sort of the size of a big big chicken and lots of others this is a walking through forests and all you can see is green as the animals there they know how to hide you don't see them about eighty percent of the wildlife in a rainforest is in the canopy so most of the life is eighty to one hundred feet over your head so when you can walk for hours through a physically populated by animals rain forest and that's the thing and that's why i was able to i was not able to take decent pictures of any of the animals but everywhere you look there was something interesting this was on the boat that we stayed on which i'll show you later it's just a light switch and in the morning this lovely month was hanging in there during the days and the butterflies were absolutely beautiful and the fish like this whole area was an inland sea which was cut off millions and millions of years ago so everything is unique in the area this is and one of the shops that saw the fish from the from the river now the point of diversity by species just to give you some idea of the numbers we're dealing with here you've got over one hundred thirty species of mammals three hundred plus birds two hundred  fifty or more species of fish one hundred thirty feet of reptiles and flora over two thousand so you could sometimes have a hundred different trees in an acre  whereas here you're lucky to have five or six now there's one other species that we didn't mention and that's us this is about forty thousand people living on the on th reservations and that's where the trouble happens is you can imagine between the species around one hundred forty the government government of peru decided to make this whole area a preserve and one of the first things they did because all of the villages are alongside the river like this one is gunboats came down the river went to every one of these villages and said get on the boat you don't live here anymore well met well because they wanted to preserve the area for the animals and they figured that was the smart thing to do well it was about the dumbest thing they could have done because this meant that these people being transported realize the error of their ways and they finally realized it was such a dumb thing to do they brought the people back in and began an education program to help them understand how their actions could preserve the environment and their stewardship would guarantee their future so now when you see people fishing like this you know that they have an appreciation for what they're doing is going to affect them and their children the thing that the government the discovery was that you can't you can't get people to cooperate by telling them they need to preserve biodiversity you know the answer is what's in it for me but you can get them to cooperate  you persuade them that it's their interest to preserve their future ok so by looking at it through their eyes it's people like this who are always aware what the catch will have to do with what's going to be available to them next time dangerous thing i've ever seen there's just a propeller at the end of the thing churning up water people if they happen to be in the way this is a typical fish market and the nice thing having gone through this with the biologist is what you're seeing here is the fish that they should be catching and you seeing the animals that they should be catching and reproductive rate is that is the big issue here you want to if you want to kill the animals that have high reproductive ra this would be peccaries that would be deer this would be cappy bara it would not be monkeys and river otters and that sort of thing have very low preprinted rates so there is a consciousness of that and good things are happening now a little bit about the people the people call themselves cocoa to come a cook a meal people and they probably lived here for several thousand years nobody really knows how long but it's been a long time and they were pretty much the way they always have with the exception of but you look carefully here this just looks like grass this is rice ok so they're growing nuts and fruits and plantains and whatever everywhere some people live alone by the side of the river but usually they're in small villages there's only one big town in the area called melton which has been there for i know several thousand years apparently it's on high ground this boat was that this i took from the boat that we were on so i'm on the river when i took this picture this is the waterfront this is the high rent district it's a town of about three thousand people and it's the reason it's there is it's one of the few high ground areas in the whole area most of the land between here and the atlantic ocean which is two thousand miles away is flat like this with a few high points and that's why now that is situated situated here where it is it's got just about everything th have any craft this is about the best piece of art i could find in the whole place pretty awful but it's a very sort of a spartan existence which i found rather surprising for a civilization has been there that one but the people who are wonderful spanish speaking and very friendly outgoing now back to northern south america again and this is the area that we're going to be dealing with this is the great  rain forest of the amazon valley this is the amazon now which is the amazon begins well it depends on who you talk to if you talk to a peruvian they will tell you that the  it's by far has the biggest body with water big somebody told me one time that the amount of water that the amazon dumps into the atlantic every day is enough water to serve the city of new york for seven years to give you some idea of the body and that's that's going on there so this is the rivers themselves that feed into it of which there are about eleven hundred tributaries are all narrow and all through lake if you haven't seen one happens when the river is continued to move and become more and more convoluted an eventual break through here and would then continue while this off and that would become another oxbow lake you can see is these are all places where the river has been before the river is constantly moving constantly changing and it's been over millions of years ok so this is what you see on the amazon itself this is actually what you're looking at the beginning of the amazon river right here because this is america and the u k only comes in from the side so this is where the peruvians say the amazon begins it looks white here but when you get down to the mouth of it is and some places sixty miles across so it's a huge huge river transportation depends entirely on the river this is the taxi if you had taken that route that they told you over the mountains and up the river this is what you would have taken but still on people who are on there with their kick and their sheep and everything else there's also a lot of buying traffic because equipment has to go up the river to the mines and the oil fields and then they bring the raw materials back down the river and then there's eco tourism so you see quite a bit of this of the people like us just going down there and guided tourists to see the rain forest and living on these riverboat which if you put one of these things in boston harbor in a ten mile when came up a bottle of printed side but for some reason the river never gets rough enough to affect them so that's a typical old river boat and then you have  and then take the taxi back home with some cash in their pocket so they're actually at camp on here and they've got an outboard on the back to take them down you never know what you're going to see next of these rivers but everybody gets around in the these dug outs and they look unstable but that's what everybody has and one of the beauties of it is that if yours wears out you're just going to far as to drag out alive and make a doing so this they're doing this exactly the way that they've been doing it for millennia so this is rain forest rain is never far away when it rains it really rains but very dry seasons and there are web seasons and so i want to explain how that works because the entire park depends on the rain and the water to exist this is a giant organism and the river is one of the veins and the arteries without water be a total desert so to give you an idea of how that works here's the scenario river for scale you can see one of the local fisherman here now if you look carefully up here you see this line right here that's where the river at the peak of the rainy season will be some thirty feet higher than what it is right now here here's an example for instance of a village appear and this is where it was when we were there which was the peak of the dry season and over here is about thirty feet stretch this is where it will be when the water is at its peak so everybody has built to be fair and safe for themselves when the so here's how it works because people have to live by the seasons during the dry season from a human to november the fish will be concentrated in the river is and the mammals will wander and birds will wander anywhere they want during the wet season all that changes because the river goes up as much as thirty feet extends back into the forest which means that the fish disperse and it's difficult to catch them but the animals the mammals are limited to the high ground and therefore are easy so the general rule is rid me during the rainy season and fish during the dry season and of course  compounding that is all of the plant life that they that they use there are two kinds of rivers white water river which you see at the top and black water rivers the white water rivers that originate in the mountains so it's all silk and mineral whereas the black are from the flat lands and where there is no silt but it's all organic matter because that the be black and you're here you can see  layer of of leaves which is decaying and believe beneath that will be the sand or clay and it has no chance whatsoever as far as the trees are concerned so the trees have to depend on this very layer and this has really been one of the reasons that this area has remained untouched first of all there are no rooms so people can't get there and second of all because of the character of the land if they did come in to try and firemen they would take the trees off they would get one crop and then nothing because the want to nuke it whatever nutrients and land of the used up there's nothing to replace it so it would be useless so people you know you hear about  all of the land deprivation in southern brazil where they come in and put up cattle farms that's because the government built roads and let people get in there so this land is protected because they can't get in there so there is however one for anybody recognize what this is it generated great wealth somewhat for the people and more or more for the brits the the dutch who are you name a few europeans were building these boats and running them up the  river there steamboat so that meant they had to be run by wood and you can imagine the significant environmental impact of the fact that one of these boats had to be loaded every two days to the hilt with wood which they would b two days so that was huge environmental impact going on there now why did it only last of so short well it's an interesting story the trees were dispersed throughout the forest which was kind of a pain in the neck because you had to look for them and they said well let's build the plantation and grow all the repertory is to make an industry well we tried that that didn't work because they found that when these trees were grouped together predators and fungus would kill them so it didn't work but the brits did a very smart thing they snuck a whole bunch of sow several thousand little tiny seedlings to london and grew them into saplings and then transported them to the malay peninsula where there weren't any had to close in the weren't any fungus and all of the sudden cheaper rubber it was coming from what is now malaysia and pretty much wiped out the industry and in peru and along the amazon these different stations with timber some wonderful hardwoods that you can find right here in massachusetts this is coming from there you've got over hunting for sustenance and this is the question of educating two weeks on this absolutely fabulous boat this is one of the rubber tree boats and the scientists who was raised here by where when he decided to get into this research stuff he found this boat driving away and was able to resurrect it and scavenge off of five four or five other river boats and recreated this thing exactly as it was one hundred years ago when it was built with the only exception is that now each one of these is a fair condition cabin which is one of the reasons i went if you've ever been here was i do you want to bring your hair conditioner with you so this is it's a fabulous boat and we spent two weeks on this thing give you a little bit the look on the inside he's preserved all the old facilities and settings here this is the pilot room here's el capitan doing the mark twain act over the site which you have to do because the river is constantly changing that we ran aground more times than i can count on the river you can't see where you heard because there's so much silt in the water that if you literally put your hand six inches three inches actually below bar up here where the drinks were a dollar apiece and all that funded went into one of the local villages so the interesting people on these on these earth watch trips this lady is the  cambridge university i mean you never know where you're going to be sitting next to and typing so it's just this was richard byron man who was the principal scientist and his wife to a the nice thing about this except for richard they're all peruvians except for this chap here who is a british graduate student so the rest of these guys are all the people from the country they love the country and they're and they're going to graduate students in the local university and then defining sustainable use lobes how many should there be a bit too many or too few and then establishing self monitoring programs to figure out what to do about it if there's too many to feel this is always the waiting birds fish turtles because these are the ones for instance in the cars will tell you what the health of the far east is from the standpoint that they live on through anniston because they're in trouble that means there's problems with their their food every the cars to count them and then climb at weeding bridge fences and then also going to the houses and monitoring the fish catch every day with a lot about what's going on underwater where you couldn't see so this is a summary river where we go out every day here's a typical manning probably three or four miles down the river there's a boat boat we travelled on and in this particular case we were doing a monkey census  here again you can see you kind of didn't touch with the people around here because it was awfully easy to get lost in these forests without the help of the locals this is all one little guy who turned out to be a  shaman you would have seen anything they knew where to look they knew when to look in and so in this particular case we were what we're looking at was a couple of monks seche monkeys who were doing a census on us which is kind of surprising because  these all of the animals in these fires have been hunted for so many generations that they're scared of human beings and they put a lot of distance between you and and them whenever they can but a lot of interesting things this particular thing and those are the cavities that the fish make to lay their eggs in the bags so always a surprise this is a harlequin beetle which really i mean it's this big and i tried to pick it up because i used to collect and south america the leaf cutting ants you know about those this is a nest probably going down thirty feet about eight by fifteen feet square he has three four to five million ants and these are the little creatures that you probably see and some of the t v series where they go up in the trees and cut a segment out of the leaf and then bring it back to the nest here you can see and this was all over the place so i didn't have to go far to take this picture here's a little parade of these things each one of these leaves is being carried by here's one of the entrances into the thing you can see the ant here they don't eat the leaves this is this is one of the most amazing parts of this of this creature they don't need to leave they take the leaves down into the cavities where they compost them and on the compost they grow a fungus and the fungus is what feeds the colony so their farm raised and when the when when when they disperse as they do every year they do here  the trees are interesting the biggest danger in the rain forest for tree is is wind and so they've developed various strategies for protecting them so this is what some people call the walking tree or a still tree and  carefully rate here you can you see it's sort of a shade different shade that's the level that the water would be at the height of the rainy season and i'm a mile and a half from the edge of the river here so that giving an idea of how that works and one of the things that you do discover in the ring for us is look before you grab because that's wicked things that you don't want to have stuck in you know when you go this was one of our local guides and he picked up a sort of a not like thing any eggs into these things and the live a the net and take over the cavity and until they develop into a beetle and create the cycle now he popped this open and  and we will spend a lot of time counting them because as i said this tells you with the help of the forest so we are good on the rivers and in one of the boats done and because when they fly and you didn't have to look for it because you could hear them coming from a long distance they usually fly in pairs talking as they come and so these were the senses every day he was recording what when and how many and so forth i tried to get pictures but it was kind of her the only decent picture i fretted and this was at five o'clock in the morning so the camera was had to be really open and kind of focused now counting the bird life along the river it was very important because the bird life tells you what the he the fish is so we would go up and down the river and count birds now here's an example how do you go about this if you don't have a half an hour to sit and do it but what they told us  was what they taught us was taking the area that has ten in it and see how big ten is and then kind of go ten ten ten ten ten there and approximated ok so how many how many brits do you think are in this picture fish as i showed you the picture before and here you can see some of those down here got all over the lot interestingly wise fishing is done really in two ways one is spearing them here you can see the man with the spear over his shoulder here how they do it i don't know because as they said they can't see but that far into the water but every day they come back with a basket full of fish with these spears which is nothing but a stick with a nail in the hand  that's one way and the other way is feigning where starts here in the boat takes it around and lays it out and then step back there and then you grab the two ends of it and you pull it towards you together  the fish that you saw were really interesting this primitive looking thing was a bottom feeder looks like really something out of the fifty five hundred million years ago and some of them are pretty wicked looking  predators and of course there's always these guys you know that is going to write and you don't fool around with these things i have never seen sharper teeth in my life  a six inch fish being feeley with a thirty inch machete you know when you when you can afford it every night one night does it off and here he is doing it and whether this is one of the principal for the river bank with this wedge of kids behind it trying to catch it before it disappeared in the river but we would go out at night with flashlights and down the river and to catch we came in you could always see the cayman because you could see their there's one there's another one and there's also another one over here these are called bottle they're pink river dolphins they're all over the place they come right up to the boat they don't care about human beings they're just interested in fishing it was a real challenge for us to try and get pictures because you'd see the swirl and then you point your camera where you thought it was going to come up and it would always come up over here rather than i was there because there's no reason for sight because you can't see anything in the water so it's all echo location with this with they call the melon front and they do they navigate by sound and here's another picture which  you can see the melon appear there quite amazing creatures there is that the local people have to have a story that when they have parties alongside the river at night sometimes the boaters will sneak up and join the party and they always have to wear a hat because otherwise you see the glow on the top and they said sometimes sometimes the girls get pregnant and the saying this was telling us the story and he said he said i had a group of teenage girls that i was telling this to and when i got to that point he said one of the girls weeks they were very hard to maintain a relationship with the villagers because that relationship was so important to the work they do this girl was a trained nurse and so all the villagers were encouraged to bring over there are children and themselves for checkups every so often this was the shaman that i told you about who was in the first with us doing the shaman bit for this was the youngest member of the group was a sort of a sixteen year old california valley  and or everybody had a little dance and other under the stars so it was it was really nice and people were fun and we really enjoyed it so just to wrap up the region's health as i implied in all depends really on three things one habitat house and wildlife health and social and economic house in other words the land the animals and the people so the research goes for this program which is going on year after year after years are really to to preserve the region's biodiversity and to serve the needs of the indigenous people because that's really what this is all about because they're going to be gone again and again year after year and generation after generation and they're wonderful people so that's my talk spent two weeks doing that that was my introduction to what inspired you to join the fact that you can do things with them that you could not do in your own if you couldn't do  e taking an expensive trip to the travel company and go places that you couldn't do with a travel company or by yourself to some very unusual thing what experience and so you had census there with a clipboard counting us riches elephants graphs in about fifteen different species of purple years in places where no tourist could ever go this is one of the beaut