Each month, new boatloads of eager scientists skip across the wakes of tugs and tankers to take their turn at this biological Club Med. Since 1974, she's been coming here at least once a year to study howlers. But after a day of that in Brazil, you have to wash your clothes in a river and build a fire. Here you can come in, have a shower, a delicious dinner and someone to talk to. Since 1923, this combination of real-world jungle and relative comfort has made Barro Colorado the most intensively studied tropical forest in the world, the Rosetta stone of forest investigation.
People here have the ability to carry out studies for one, two, three years.
She leans in conspiratorially. Science's love affair with the Panamanian wilderness began not with the 1914 flood that turned a forested hilltop into Barro Colorado Island, but with the flood of entomologists that preceded it. Yellow fever and other insect-born diseases were ravaging the canal construction crews. The biologists brought in to battle the mosquitoes found themselves in the richest tropical habitat they had ever seen. They began whispering in the ears of U.S. government officials to set aside a piece of the Canal Zone for biological research.