Belize

Dances With Science

by Neal Matthews

Rewrite filed 21 Aug 2000



Tearing through the night along the New River, our speedboat's

spotlight beam sweeps the shallows for the telltale pink glow of

crocodile eyes. Doctoral student Thomas Rainwater, splay-legged on the

bow with a rope snare on the end of a pole, has captured more than 300

endangered Morelet's crocodiles along these tree-lined banks, but

tonight all the creatures spook as we move in. It's late. Time for one

last try.

This is the Night Safari from the Lamanai Outpost Lodge in

central Belize, a one night stand involving tourists and scientists.

Sometimes Rainwater fills the boat with as many as 15 crocs, whose

blood he will sample for DDT and other chemicals before releasing them,

at the same GPS coordinates, the next day. Visitors get to help schlep

the creatures from the black lagoon to his lab at the eco-lodge, and

observe the examinations. "For me, having people along is kind of a

rush," the Texas Tech grad student had told me before strapping a

hunter's lamp across his forehead. "I'm a little idealistic and I hope

I don't grow out of this, but I want to make a positive impact. There's

a big gap between scientists and the public, and there's gotta be a

bridge. Maybe eco-tourism is that bridge."

About eight miles upriver from the Maya temples of Lamanai, the

water is a black mirror under a lopsided moon. The spotlight, directed

by Maya bushmaster Ben Cruz, finds another pink pair of eyes. Cruz

kills the boat's engine (an eco-friendly four-stroke outboard),

enveloping us in a wave of insect chatter and birdsong. Rainwater, his

headlamp steady on the six-foot reptile lying on the bottom amid a

welter of fallen branches, slides the snare under the surface and

sneaks it past the croc's nostrils, where two pointy teeth protrude

through the upper jaw. The animal moves back a little, it's clawed toes

sinking deeper into the bottom mud. Rainwater whispers that it's a

female as he lifts the snare over a branch and tries again, gently

slipping the loop past the croc's fangs, over the gem-like eyes, past

the tiny ear slits -- then he jerks the line. The water explodes.

Her pleated belly is a rolling blur in our lights. In quiet

voices and quick, practiced movements, Rainwater and Cruz play her out

into deeper water, where she soon gives up and awaits her fate. "Let's

get her back quick," Rainwater tells Cruz as they muscle her aboard and

wrap her snout and legs in duct tape. Rainwater points out her widebody

build and guesses she's pregnant with eggs -- especially good news for

the scientist, and a major thrill for the rest of us.





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In Belize, scientists make it possible for visitors to feel like

participants in a national resistance movement against the

environmental assault underway throughout Central America. Stuck like a

pebble under the boot of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, with a population

of only 230,000 in a country the size of Massachusetts, Belize has

protected about 43 percent of its landmass in 58 separate forest

reserves, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and marine refuges --

all with the help of scientists like Rainwater. Research activity in

Belize has achieved critical mass and chain reaction.

"It's got the reefs, snakes, monkeys, birds, archaeology -- you

name it," says Norm Rosen, a professor of anthropology at Cal State

Fullerton, who was on the Night Safari as a tourist and just

established a field school covering culture, archaeology, primatology,

and visual anthropology at Lamanai. "There are no civil wars here,

they're not ripping down the forests. Scientists are making some real

breakthroughs, and the government is encouraging to researchers. When

you're opening up a field school, I guess you don't want Camp Runamuck,

but you want everybody to be happy. On a scale of one to ten," Rosen

chuckles, "we found Belize to be a twelve."

The country's official language is English -- the semi-official

language of science. The vibrant but war-scarred cultural ferment of

neighboring Guatemala and Honduras, and the political slipperiness of

Mexico, make peaceful Belize seem like an oasis. Prior to 1981 it was a

British colony, and while its forest were logged for hardwoods, luckily

its mountains were never clear-cut, and rivers instead of roads

provided transportation. It's ecological assets can still be saved with

preventive, rather than curative, measures. Belizean researchers speak

openly of trying to save the country from being swamped by the incoming

tide of tourism, and this has led to conservation-minded research,

giving Belize a leg-up in protecting her treasures from being loved to

death.

At Lamanai, Rainwater's crocodile study is just one of many such

projects, including work on birds, bats, insects, howler monkeys, and

archaeology. The propeller heads are literally unavoidable. A short

distance from the lodge, you step off the boat in front of the Mayan

ruins and practically trip over archaeologist Linda Howie-Langs. She

studies how Maya ceramics changed at the time of the Maya cultural

collapse, around 900 A.D., in a temporary thatched lab set up in front

of the ruins where she spreads out her potsherds on a big wooden table.

Her work requires no further excavation, part of the less invasive

modern approach to archaeology. She lives at the Lamanai Outpost Lodge,

and part of her deal there requires that she be willing to mingle and

answer questions from visitors. "It's very Indiana Jones, a very

dramatic site," she says. "I've had two snake days in a row -- a boa

lives close to my work table. And there's a colony of tarantulas

too..."

Not that she's complaining. "Having close contact with other

scientists is a real plus," Howie-Langs explains. "Working close to

monkey people and bird people gives you awareness of different ways

scientists approach problems, and increases your awareness of the

environment." Then she laughs. "At the lodge, having all your meals

prepared and your laundry done, if you don't finish your work you can't

blame it on primitive living conditions!"







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Near the boat dock of Lamanai Outpost Lodge, Mark Howells looks

up into a tall tree at Mikelet, the resident howler monkey. She stares

down at us through shiny black eyes, a silent participant in the

conversation. "The thing it comes down to," says Howells, who operates

the lodge with his wife, Monique, "is this is my home, and I'd like to

see it stay as it is."

Toward that end the Australia-born Howells established, with his

late father, the Lamanai Field Research Center. He set aside three of

his 20 rooms for scientists working on local research projects, and his

lodge is now a microcosm of what's happening throughout Belize. "To

talk about conservation, you have to put a value on the land," says

Howells. "It has to be worth something in order to save it, and you

have to convince the local people of that worth. And science can play a

huge part in building that financial foundation on the environment."

That can extend all the way down to the grass roots, where

Rainwater sometimes pays local Belizeans for crocodile eggs which would

otherwise be destroyed. Howells employs local cooks, maids, and guides

who otherwise might be dependent on slashing and burning the forest for

subsistence farming, and requires that scientists at Lamanai regularly

visit the nearby elementary school to give presentations. In the

classroom, Rainwater and a few other researchers regularly let local

snakes bite them (they enjoy comparing scars), chipping away at

ignorance and proving not every snake in the jungle is deadly.

The morning after the Night Safari, I find Rainwater in a small

wooden out-building behind the eco-lodge, taking a blood sample from

the pregnant croc and rigging it into a rope sling for weighing. Using

a centrifuge and a microscope, he'll be checking hormone levels in her

blood to determine whether agricultural chemicals in the lagoon have

affected her. Rainwater's crocs are the proverbial canaries in the coal

mine. They are registering a baseline level of chemical contaminants

that will be used to measure environmental degradation from expanding

agriculture or tourism activities.

"Hopefully, in 20 or 30 years I'll come back and see some of the

same crocs," Rainwater says as he hoists the motionless animal onto a

hanging scale. Her soft underbelly is a mosaic the color of faded

gardenia petals glowing in the early light streaming through the

doorway. Weight: 70 pounds. Length: six feet, six inches. A couple of

visitors from the lodge have wandered back to the lab after breakfast,

and snap pictures as the scientist readies the croc for the return to

its lair.



Mounds of Secrets



But not every scientific outpost is a Norman Rockwell tableau.

Along the Guatemalan border, at El Pilar Archaeological Preserve, an

advanced research technique that protects the Maya forest is attracting

poachers precisely because it is so successful. When I visit the

ancient Maya city, blanketed in dense jungle about 12 miles north of

San Ignacio near the village of Bullet Tree Falls, it is late afternoon

and the pale yellow butterflies seem to float on the thick air. Looming

mounds overgrown with ferns cover intricate Maya temples in cocoons of

time. Dappled sunlight falls onto grassy dells studded with copal trees

rooted in 1000-year-old ceremonial plazas. A trail leads to ridgelines

overlooking the border, a buzzing green riot of rolling forest that

appears deceptively indestructible.

El Pilar is a unique kind of research project spread over 1900

acres in what was once a thriving Maya metropolis about 60 miles

southwest of Lamanai. The purpose of the El Pilar Archaeological

Preserve, a moody warren of some 15 overgrown plazas and numerous

temple mounds, is to create a conservation model encompassing the Maya

forest as well as the hidden ruins, overseen by a formal association of

Maya descendants in the nearby villages who operate the Amigos de El

Pilar cultural center and crafts shop in Bullet Tree Falls.

While scientists in other regions of Latin America have been

sneered at as "bio-pirates" bent on extracting profitable compounds for

corporate masters, in Belize, and especially at El Pilar, scientists

have become guardians. Compared to fully excavated Maya temples, their

treasures long since carted off to distant museums, El Pilar is more

edgy and evocative because you sense the power and presence of the

hidden. It feels as if the forest is a patient mother, waiting for the

day when the modern world self-destructs and the Maya return. But her

patience is beginning to flag.

"The forest at El Pilar is presently at risk," says Anabel Ford,

the UC Santa Barbara archaeologist who started mapping the site in

1983, and remains the designated project leader. "Cows are brought in

to drink from the Maya waterholes, and there's been some illegal

logging. Developing public interest in the site among the local

villagers is one of the main ways conservation can be enforced now."

So Ford is as much community organizer as archaeological

visionary. Her experiment in helping living Maya preserve remnants of

their ancient glory may be shortlived, if the steady chipping away of

the forest continues. Belize has only a handful of forest rangers to

police preserve boundaries, and its history of enforcing environmental

protection regulations is not spotty. Spending an afternoon at El Pilar

has become an act of solidarity with a movement that rejects both

archaeological and arboreal invasion. It's not like hefting crocodiles,

but it's still a participating role in developing research. As the

falling sun casts a misty glow over El Pilar's buried city, I sit to

rest on a rustic bench made of dried jungle vines. From this ridge you

can gaze down across the invisible border to Guatemala, wondering which

trail the returning Maya will march in on.



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The maelstrom of brown nurse sharks in a feeding frenzy seems

unreal -- until one of the animals swishes its tail across my belly.

This is in 10 feet of water in the newest addition to Hol Chan Marine

Preserve, a section of the turquoise shallows off Amergris Caye called

Shark/Ray Alley. When we tied up to a mooring ball our boatman, a

fisherman-turned-dive guide, had chummed the surface with a handful of

anchovies, and before he could stop me I had slipped over the side in

snorkel gear.

The sharks and the big stickleback rays are pettable, but the

nearby corals are strictly a no-touch zone. Hol Chan, a Maya term

referring to the "Little Channel" cut through the reef, is a seven-

square mile marine reserve set aside in 1987, the first of a necklace

of marine parks envisioned along the 185-miles of barrier reef fringing

the Belizean shoreline. Scientists kick-started the project, which has

become a model for squeezing cash out of a coral reef without killing

it.

"All the fishermen have now become dive guides, and they're

making more money," says Miguel Alamilla, a marine biologist and the

manager of Hol Chan. "They were the ones who proposed expanding into

Shark/Ray Alley, and they have now proposed including another area of

about five square miles to the south." The $5 entrance fee covers the

cost of administering and maintaining the park, which hosted 37,000

snorkelers and scuba divers in 1999.

Suspended in womb-warm 100-foot visibility near the Hol Chan cut,

you can take in whole communities of sea life at a glance. Husky

grouper lurk under overhanging branches of healthy elkhorn coral.

Silvery tarpon lie motionless near the bottom of the channel, with

several layers of schooling fish rising above them. Sea turtles cruise

by, and pastel parrot fish pull into cleaning stations to open their

gill plates like car hoods for the busy wrasses. It all seems timeless.

But in reality, such fecundity is a recent comeback. In the early

1980's the reef around Hol Chan was almost a desert, completely fished-

out. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which had also taken an

activist role in preserving Belizean jaguars in the Cockscomb Basin

Wildlife Sanctuary in the Maya Mountains, made an offer marine

biologist Jacque Carter couldn't refuse: a supporting grant to study

Nassau grouper near the Hol Chan cut, and to develop a plan for a

preserve to save them.

"A park is the best way to protect an animal," says Chuck Carr,

the WCS Mesoamerican and Caribbean coordinator, who helped recruit

Carter. "We could see there was all this development on its way to

Belize. What we needed was the aquatic equivalent to the jaguar, or the

mountain gorilla -- big, charismatic mega-fauna." A BCM, in

conservation shop talk.

The Nassau grouper fit the bill, and Carter's study laid the

groundwork for the park. You can usually spot these husky fish down

close to the bottom of the reef channel, looking wary but regal,

surveying their domain from the shade of overhanging coral. Their

august presence certifies the power of human curiosity, and as I dive

down toward one our underwater dance is now a scientific certainty. #