Peruvian fish-eating rat

Transcription

(Emily) - In three days' time, Team Brain Scoop is setting out for the Peruvian Amazon. We're in search of genus and species known and unknown: reptiles and amphibians, plants, birds, mammals, fishes, and insects. Our expedition is for three weeks in the jungle. Cameraman and frogman Tom McNamara and I will go beyond the dead ends of roads, deep into the neotropical forest where few people have journeyed. We'll be well out of range of cellphones, subjected to the harsh realities of weather, insects, and disease, and there's definitely going to be no Twitter. The voyage to our camp in Peru will take four days, three airplanes, a half-day boat ride, and a trip by helicopter—dropping into a little-charted region between the rivers Tapiche and Blanco, with a crew of a few dozen researchers. The objective? To document and save the rainforest. For the past two decades, The Field Museum's top-notch conservation team, aptly named "The Action Center," has been working in conjunction with local scientists and communities, making annual expeditions to Central and South America in order to study and preserve the natural wonders that still remain there. This medley of ornithologists, ichthyologists, herpetologists, geologists, bontanists, and anthropologists— It's like The Avengers but with scientists— identify uncharted areas of the rainforest. so pretty much everywhere Google Maps hasn't been yet. They spend just a few weeks documenting the selected area's biodiversity and at the end of their time, these scientists come together and write a cohesive report of their findings, to be presented to the governing bodies of that country. Then, the case can be made for protecting the surveyed area, potentially even designating it as a national park, which is a step toward preventing illegal deforestation and mineral extraction. The challenge of implementing conservation is that you can't hope to protect an area if you don't know what's there. That's where the Action Center comes in. In the last twenty years, they've discovered more than 150 new species to science and have protected 32 million acres of wilderness. So, Team Brain Scoop is joining in on this Amazon adventure. A journey to the limits of what we know about the natural world. In 72 hours' time, we're packing up and shipping out with The Action Team. We can't know what to expect. I imagine I'll come home with some gastrointestinal parasites and a boatload of unidentified diseases. Tom will probably come back with a monkey companion/rival. In order to better prepare ourselves for this mission, we interviewed some of our colleagues who are well-seasoned in conducting field research. Let's see what they have to say. (Emily) - How many field expeditions would you say you've been on? (Bill) - In the past 20 years, I've probably been on, oh, 30 or 40. I spend basically two months of the year in the bush. (Corine) - Sixteen and counting. We leave in three weeks. (Anna) - I would say I've done field work for a little less than a year. - Where have you conducted your field work? (Corrie) - I've been fortunate to get to travel all over the world. So I've been to Ecuador, and Peru, and Venezuela, and Uganda, and South Africa, and Madagascar, and Borneo, and Australia, and China... (Bruce) - I work on rats, bats, and cats in Peru, in Ecuador, in Brazil, and Kenya... Tropical countries. (Josh) - I've done two trips to Malawi, one to Uganda, one to Congo, and also one to Brazil. (Corrie) - Oh! And Costa Rica too. (Bruce) - You can plan for an expedition, but they don't always come off the way you've drawn 'em up on paper. (Emily) - That's good advice. (Anna) - A little wild boar started foraging around my site, so I started peeing around the proximity of my little site, so I thought, "I'll show you, you don't come back to my space! I've got to count these leaves!" So I kept peeing, I kept peeing in these really specific spots so my urine would accumulate. Mama came back with the two babies, and Mama's, like, challenging my space, right? And I'm like, "Blagh!" and it's like, "Meh," and I was like, "Bleablah!" and it's like, "Nohh!" And then like finally I lunged off my little seat and THREW MY ARMS UP! And yelled really loud, and they ran away. (Emily) - So do you or do you not recommend urinating around the perimeter of our work sites? (Anna) - Apparently if you're a boy, that works really well. (Emily) - Aw! (Anna) - But lady pee doesn't really do so much. (Emily) - Okay. (Anna) - Apparently. Well, except to attract them to come back and apparently want to take your space. (Emily) - Today I learned. (Anna) - Yeah. (Corine) - So stalked by a jaguar, attacked by a sort of rival indigenous group in Peru last year, mistaken for the FARC in Ecuador, where a helicopter came in and dropped a whole bunch of soldiers, thinking that they were going to raid a camp of terrorists, of guerrilla soldiers. (Bill) - We were looking for bats near the coast of Tanzania and ran into a five-year-old kid and asked him where the bats were, and he said "Follow me!" And we ran back to the village and went to the local hospital. I climbed up to get these free-tailed bats, which turned out to be a new species to science, and as I was climbing, I hit a weak spot in the false ceiling, and I fell out of the ceiling right into what they call the "chumba ya sindano" which is the "room of the needle" and I fell in there right as a kid was getting inoculated in his butt, and the doctor saw me coming through the ceiling and screamed and hit the needle and the kid screamed and hit the needle, and everyone's screaming and the bats are flying everywhere. It was a pretty amazing day. (Tom) - That's insane. (Emily) - That's perfect. That's perfect. (Emily) - What sort of complications have you experienced? (Corrie) - Things like engorged ticks in my nose that I came home from Africa with. I had no idea—well, I knew something was wrong with my nose but I didn't know what. So essentially an entire field season there and then a plane ride home and figured out I had a giant engorged tick in my nose. (Emily) - Did you report that to Customs? Because you're not supposed to be importing... (Corrie) - I know, smuggling ticks. (Emily) - That's gross. (Corine) - Giardia, amoebas, dengue, and then the worst thing for me has been Leishmaniasis— so, flesh-eating bacteria. (Bruce) - I've contracted malaria three times. - You're going to get diarrhea. Even if you don't want to. Even if you think you're being careful about what you're putting in there, this does not agree all the time. (Emily) - What's it like having diarrhea in the rainforest? (Anna) - Basically any diarrhea you've had to date is nothing like the diarrhea you're going to get down there. You think your sphincter is pretty tight and you have a pretty good communication with it. All of a sudden everything goes out the window—or the bottom of your pants. And it's like, "What happened?" But everybody with you will understand because it's happened to them too. (Emily) - What has been one of the more notable discoveries on one of these expeditions? (Bill) - So we've come back with the new Hero Shrew. I found a new genus of primate, in Southwestern Tanzania, and several new species of shrews, bats, rodents... (Corine) - We flew over this area and it looked like there were all these palm trees. And I thought, "Gosh, this is going to be super wet. This is going to be totally inundated, maybe it's not even worth going here. It's just going to be so grim. "Well, it's really unique on the landscape; we should go there." And when we got there we realized it wasn't wet at all. It was this huge white-sand forest that nobody knew about. It's the biggest one discovered in Peru. And it's chock-full of all these endemic species, species that only live there. So plants, birds, insects, frogs that only live in this place. (Josh) - Rediscovering a bird called Rockefeller's Sunbird in Congo, which is a bird that hadn't been seen in about fifty years since the early 1960's. It's only known from a couple of locations in the mountains of Eastern Congo. (Bill) - We are the dictionary definition of the planet Earth, right? And that definition changes with every trip to Peru and every trip to Africa. I actually like to think of the... of what we're doing as "defining the edges." Every new discovery, every new observation that you guys are going to go and make, are going to come back and redefine that edge. The Olinguito was just discovered, and is now the smallest member of the raccoon family. So the edges of the raccoon family are now different than they were a year ago. And this is why it's important for the world that what you're going to do is go out and redefine the edge. Maybe you will find that it was exactly the way we thought it was, maybe you will find that it was slightly different. But with every new definition, you now have the real edges in place. (Emily) - So what do you think it's going to be like for me? (Corrie) - The story of Darwin when he was out collecting beetles, and he was so excited that he collected one and then he saw another he one had to have and he collected it and then he saw the third that he absolutely had to have and he couldn't let go of the third, so what do you do? He popped it in his mouth and grabbed the third one. And I think that's going to be you in the field. (Emily) - I think that's pretty accurate. Pretty accurate. (Corrie) - Yeah. (Tom) - So what do you think about going to the Amazon? - I don't know if I could ever fully prepare myself for what we're going to do. I have no idea. I have no idea what to anticipate. It's like when you go camping as a kid, and you feel like you're camping, but you, you know, you're in the woods but then you turn around and the RV is there, or there's the road, or you can hear the highway or airplanes... It's not going to be like that at all. (Emily) - Interview with Tom McNamara: cameraman, frogman, demolitions expert. What do you think about the jungle? (Tom) - If it comes down between me and a monkey... it's going to be me. I'm not pulling any punches for a monkey. (Emily) - I think there's totally a romance that accompanies these kinds of expeditions. Right? It is an adventure, I'm wearing all of this ridiculous adventure gear, we're getting our adventure packs and we're going into the forest, but there are a lot of realities that are never addressed in any of these kind of documentaries. Honestly, one of the questions— and we are keeping this part in the video— One of the things that I'm most concerned about that nobody has addressed so far, is what do women do in the field when they're on their period? (Emily) - What are you packing in preparation for the trip? (Tom) - Camera, lenses, Swiss Army knife, red Jacques Cousteau hat, and Charles Boyer's 1966 album, "Where Does Love Go." (Emily) Can you take a look at this? (Tom) - Oh my— Is this a penis fish? This was in Peru. (Emily) - Yeah. That was collected in Peru. (Tom) - Wow. (Tom) - So this is Public Enemy #1. (Emily) - Yeah, that is the most dangerous and most feared animal in the Amazon. (Tom) - Yeah, because it will swim right up your urethra. (Emily) - If you're peeing in the river, it can detect your urine stream, it senses the ammonia in the water, and it will swim upstream. (Tom) - What about Anna using a perimeter peeing technique as a defense against warthogs? (Emily) - I don't know what she was thinking with that one. I mean, I kind of get what she was thinking— (Tom) - But do you respect it? (Emily) - Oh, absolutely! Yeah. But I want to know what was going on in her subconscious, where her fight-or-flight response was like, "I gotta pee! This is— my primal instinct tells me that I need to urinate to protect my area." (Emily) - What do you think is going to happen? (Tom) - My world is about to get a whole lot bigger, and I'm about to get a whole lot smaller. #deep - I don't even know what I would do if we were in camp and an anteater came in camp. I would be like, "What are you doing here? We're people, we're here!" And the anteater would be like, "I'm an anteater! Got any termites?" I have no idea what that is. Or, like, "There's a stick insect the size of my arm!" There's going to be a tarantula, you know, there's going to be a frickin' boa constrictor in the trees, and it's like, here we are, we are in their world. We have no business being there. And I think my mind's just going to be blown.