On the Recombinant Ecology of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Imagine a lake that was once never a lake. Then imagine an island on that lake that was once never an island. Imagine, finally, a forested hilltop on the island that is no longer a hilltop, and you may begin to form a reasonably good image of the magnificently ‘unnatural’ history of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island.

As this description begins to suggest, Barro Colorado Island occupies a paradoxical space. The island is covered by a seasonal tropical forest, parts of which are likely to be similar to those encountered by the first Spanish conquistadores in the early 16th century. It is fortunate, in this sense, that the island was transformed into a biological reserve in 1923, and that it is now a part of the world-renowned Barro Colorado Nature Monument.

And yet, the island lies next to—indeed exists thanks to—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes: the Panama Canal. Unsurprisingly, the Panama Canal Authority regards the Canal as Panama’s foremost industrial zone. A visit to the island indeed affords views of tropical forest, but also of the many container-laden behemoths that continually make their way past Barro Colorado. As one field agent for the Panama Pacific Line evocatively put it in a 1932 edition of the magazine Ocean Ferry,

‘An island where fierce black monkeys climb tall trees to shake their fists and howl defiance at passing airplanes; where animals nearly as big as bears pass their whole lives upside down, clinging to limbs, where there are 55 varieties of snakes, 33 of lizards and 47 of frogs and toads, where animals live on crab-meat—but why proceed? […] Such an island easily might be located in the land of fancy where men had but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead. It might be, but it is not; for it is in the Panama Canal Zone, and every passenger who goes through the Canal on a Panama Pacific liner passes close enough to its shores to toss a penny from the ship’s deck to the land, if so inclined’(1).

* * *

The origin of this paradoxical space may be explained with reference to the design of the Panama Canal. Prior to the construction of the Canal, Barro Colorado was a forested hilltop along the Chagres River Valley. The Chagres River rises in the Cordillera de San Blas and flows west-southwest until it reaches the present-day town of Gamboa. Until 1910, the river turned at this point and flowed in a northerly direction before draining into the Caribbean Sea. Before the Canal’s construction began, anyone climbing the tallest tree on Barro Colorado’s highest point would have been afforded a view of mostly unbroken tropical forest extending as far as the eye could see.

All of this changed when U.S. engineers decided to abandon the original French plans for a canal ‘à niveau’. Instead, the engineers opted for a canal that used gigantic locks to raise ships coming in from the Caribbean (or the Pacific) to an inland waterway that crossed the Panamanian isthmus. A further set of locks then lowered each ship to the ocean (or sea) on the opposite end of the canal. The required waterway was constructed by damming the Chagres River at a point close to its mouth on the Caribbean side of present canal. The resulting Gatun Lake—then the largest man-made lake in the world—replaced the views of forest with views of emerald waters even as it solved three problems for the Panama Canal’s engineers: first, and as I have just noted, the new lake’s waters served as a major part of the waterway that linked the locks on either end of the Canal. Second, it allowed the engineers to control the Chagres’ extraordinary force, a force that, during the raining season, wreaked havoc first on the French, and then on American efforts to build the canal. And third, the Gatun provided the extraordinary volumes of water required to fill the locks for each ship’s transit—estimated at some 98,500,000 litres (or 26,000,000 US gallons) per ship.

So it was that, in 1907, a massive dam began to be built close to the Chagres’ mouth. In 1910, the diversion channel that was used to enable the construction of this dam was blocked, and the lower reaches of the Chagres River Valley began to flood. The Gatun Lake began to form, and as its waters rose, the surrounding hills became shores. By 1913, the highest hilltop in the Gatun had become the lake’s largest island: the 1500-hectare Barro Colorado Island.

Today the island is part of a biological reserve that is the site of a tropical research station administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution. All that remains visible of the submerged forest is the odd tree stump that stands as a silent witness to the life that once surrounded the hilltop-turned-island. Actually, some of the stumps are rather noisy havens for colonies of chestnut-headed oropéndolas (Psarocolius wagleri). The birds have discovered that the stumps constitute the ultimate snake-proof nesting site: they are surrounded by water, but are located a stone’s throw from the island’s forested shores. The stumps may, in this sense, be regarded as a metaphor for the island as a whole; Barro Colorado’s circumscribed nature is part of what led the earliest naturalists to propose that it be set aside as a biological reserve, and to this day, that very nature is part of what protects it from the destruction that the mainland forests have suffered.

* * *

Many if not most contemporary accounts of Barro Colorado emphasize the continuity between the island’s contemporary forest and its ancient forebear. In fact, a strong case can be made that today’s forest is both very similar to, and very different from the one encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Very similar: paleobotanical research conducted by Dolores Piperno in a central area of the island known as the 50-Hectare Plot suggests that the forest in this part of the island is at least four to five hundred years old; that before the Spanish conquest, it was not subject to agricultural slash and burn techniques; and that even though some areas were cleared for human settlement between 400 and 1500 AD, an ancient forest continued to exist around such settlements. As Piperno puts it, a ‘mosaic-like image’ emerges from the paleobotanical register, with areas of forest and of clearing. The clearings corresponded to primary ‘residential zones’, while some of the forest around these clearings appears to have been left relatively undisturbed (2).

Very different: the Spanish conquistadores would not, of course, have reached today’s island-which-was-not-an-island by boat. Nor would they have walked along the trails that now crisscross the island. Even if the region’s aboriginal groups had some of their own trails, Balboa and the rest of the Spanish explorers that arrived in the region in the 1510s would not have seen the hundreds of artifacts associated with today’s research projects, and which are found along the contemporary trails. Indeed a walk along parts of the present trails can be something of a surreal experience; even as one appreciates the striking beauty of the forest, many of the trees and plants in the understory have fluorescently coloured ribbons that mark the places where scientists have conducted experiments. By the Smithsonian’s own account, Barro Colorado Island is probably the most intensively researched tropical forest on Earth. One doesn’t have to believe in the fabled ‘butterfly effect’ posited by chaos theorists to suggest that the hubbub of scientific activity is itself likely to have had significant effects on a number of aspects of the island’s ecology. For example, the trails made for the scientists are also used by some of the non-human mammals, and this may have directly or indirectly affected the distribution of these species, if not of those they feed on. The more intensive presence of scientists working in some areas of the island may well have led some species to either vacate those areas, or on the contrary, to seek food or shelter there. Last but not least, if parts of the island had already been modified by a modern human presence when the Canal was built, the very effort to erase such a presence would have had an effect, however benevolently conceived, on the surrounding forest. From this perspective, the question is not whether the scientists and modern culture more generally have had an effect, but the precise nature and extent of that effect.

* * *

In the report that I am currently writing about my research on Barro Colorado, I employ the notion of a recombinant ecology to refer to the interaction of any such transformations with what are likely to be the much longer durations of most evolutionary dynamics on the island. Readers familiar with the second part of ‘Showing to Save: A Critique of Natural History Documentaries’ may recall that I defined such an ecology as ‘the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. This definition, which I borrowed from Sarah Whatmore and Steven Hinchcliffe(3), is hardly suitable for the ecology of Barro Colorado. In some respects, the island is almost as far removed from Panama’s urbanity as is the forest along the Colombian border. And yet, as noted by W.H. Allee, one of the island’s earlier naturalists, ‘One can commute from civilization at Ancon and spend from 9:15 to 3:30 on Barro Colorado’, and ‘Probably the greatest value of this new station for biological research lies in its ready accessability and its nearness to the highly civilized cities of the Canal Zone’(4).

It is not just the location of the island that begins to transform it into a rather modern setting. Anyone who visits the island’s impressive science laboratory, and finds out about its remarkable research projects may well come away with the sense that the island is the site, if not for a conurbation, then certainly for an utterly modern set of activities. Amongst other aspects, the use of sophisticated communications facilities and the wonders of radio telemetry mean that an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or indeed a bee traveling through the forest can be monitored from an office in Princeton University. In this sense if not in others, Barro Colorado seems every bit as wired up as a modern city, where any mobile phone user’s location can be precisely pinpointed by way of an analogous system. From this perspective, the island’s ecology is best regarded as a monument to a remarkable interaction between that most modern of projects—engaging in the scientific study of an object, from afar—and a habitat which has managed to survive, apparently relatively undisturbed, in the face of extraordinarily complex, powerful, and extraneous forces. The notion of a ‘recombinant’ or ‘hybrid’ ecology may and must be adapted to refer to such interactions away from urban spaces, sensu stricto.

When one begins to think about Barro Colorado in this way, it becomes apparent that the island’s history, as much as its present, is steeped in such hybridity. As will have been evident from my earlier account of the Canal’s construction, the island’s very existence as an island is the result of a modern project, par excellence. The construction of the Panama Canal was not only one of the great engineering feats of the early 20th century, but also one of several 19th century projects (the Canal began to be built by the French in the late 19th century) that signaled a quintessentially modern impatience, not to say intolerance with ancient physical barriers. In the first half of the 19th century, it was horses that were the victims of this impatience. As noted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

‘As long as the conquest of space was tied to animal power, it had to proceed within the limits of the animals’ physical capabilities. One way of gaining an immediate perception of the distance travelled was to observe the exhaustion of the draught animals … Steam power, inexhaustible and capable of infinite acceleration, reversed the relationship between recalcitrant nature (i.e. spatial distance) and locomotive engine. Nature (i.e., spatial distance) … now succumbed to the new mechanical locomotive engine of the railroad that, in a frequently used metaphor, “shoots right through like a bullet”. “Annihilation of time and space” was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation … Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality’(5).

The building first of the Suez Canal and then of the Panama Canal arguably signaled an even more ambitious determination to use mechanical power to confound the constraints posed by natural space. If steam locomotives in the first half of the 19th century displaced horse power, the building of the Panama Canal showed a willingness to displace an entire continent: at a stroke, the Canal obviated the need to sail around the treacherous Straight of Magellan.

I say ‘at a stroke’, but in this as in so many other contexts, the modern quest for speed took a terrible toll: tens of thousands of people died building first the French and then the American versions of the Canal. The homes and livelihoods of the inhabitants of dozens of villages along the flooded Chagres River Valley were destroyed, and beneath the Gatun Lake’s 425 square kilometres there lies the remnant of a vast forest, most of whose inhabitants were slowly transformed into lifeless bottom dwellers when the Chagres was stopped in 1910. From this perspective, Barro Colorado is something akin to the tip of a tropical iceberg of destruction, a tip, like so many other similar tips across the world, that serves as a reminder of a nature that once was.

* * *

It might be inferred from this account that the most significant transformations stopped when the building of the Canal ended. In fact, a case can be made that far-reaching changes were to continue long after the Gatun reached its present level. If in the first years the island became a veritable Noah’s Ark, with a possible superabundance of species of animals capable of climbing or flying onto the island, this would presumably have had short-, medium- and long-term effects on the distribution of many of the island’s plant species. By contrast, in time some of the species (plant or animal) would have found it difficult to survive in what might well be regarded as a forest fragment. There is evidence, for example, that the number of bird species on the island has declined since the island became an island (6). While some animal species have shown a surprising ability to establish their own migratory channels to and from the mainland, others are incapable of swimming or even flying across a comparatively short stretch of open water. To these transformations we must add, as I began to suggest earlier, those generated by the activities of the island’s contemporary human dwellers.

Even as the mentioned transformations have taken place, small and large ships have navigated almost continuously past the island. Anyone standing at the end of the Fairchild Trail on a trade wind-blown day will have wondered how if at all decades of diesel smoke (and before that the soot of steamers) might have affected this corner of the island. In 2007, scientists from the Smithsonian expressed their concern at the rather larger scale effects that the looming enlargement of the Canal might have not just on the Barro Colorado Nature Monument itself, but on the biological exchange that has long taken place in the Panamanian isthmus. For some 3 million years, the Panamanian isthmus has been a kind of biological bridge between North and South America. Might the growing Canal, or rather the adjacent Canal development zone, block that bridge?

* * *

I have emphasized the discontinuity between today’s Barro Colorado, and the ancient forest. But anyone who visits the forest and is willing to look past the fluorescent ribbons is likely to be awed by the permanence of a world that, however transformed by modernity, continues to provide evidence of dynamics that existed long before the first Spanish conquistadores made their way across the isthmus. Every morning, the ‘dawn chorus’ is sung as much by birds as it is by howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). A walk along the Smithsonian’s immaculately kept campus is as likely to provide vistas of giant ships as it is of creatures that treat the concrete paths and buildings as yet another natural structure upon which to carry on with the battle for survival: here the leaf-cutter ants (Atta colombica or Atta cephalotes) file busily along the walkways, there a vested anteater (Tamandua mexicana) snuffles along the storm drains looking for other insects. A small group of Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans (Rhamphastos swainsonii) swoops by even as a boat’s horn announces the last ferry’s departure. In the evening the fishing bats (Noctilio leporinus) make their runs along the edge of the research station’s piers, and the male Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) begin to call out for mates. The continued presence of such animals and their complex inter-relations, let alone the growth of the island’s magnificent trees, act as a warning to any cultural theorist inclined to dismiss the notion of nature as no more than an artifact of a Western imagination.

That said, I have begun to explain why the opposite tendency—to focus entirely on the ‘natural’ nature of nature, with little or no regard for the influence of humankind—is equally problematic and must also be avoided. The predominant popular representation of scientific inquiry continues to try to hold onto the myth of a science that has no influence whatsoever on the objects that it studies. In fact, in Barro Colorado as in other parts of the world, many if not most of the scientists intervene as enthusiastically in the lives of a variety of plants and animals as many of the plants and animals intervene in the epidermises of the scientists. The point is not to deny that aspects of the forest continue to be structured by relationships that have hardly been modified by the activities of Homo sapiens v. barro coloradensis. Rather, the point is to suggest that the overarching narrative that establishes a neat opposition between nature and culture, researched object and researching subject, urbanity and wilderness is perhaps even more difficult to sustain on Barro Colorado than it is in other biological reserves. From this perspective, the fascination of the island, at least for this (social) scientist, lies as much in everything that appears not to have changed, as in everything that has changed, and continues to change thanks to the extraordinary juxtaposition of the spaces and times of an ancient forest, and the spaces and times of modern culture.

References

(1) Winfield M. Thompson (1932), ‘Isle of Upside Down is Barro Colorado’ in Ocean Ferry, Dec. 1932, pp. 5-6, 13.
(2) Piperno, D. (1990) ‘Fitolitos, arqueología y cambios prehistóricos de la vegetación en un lote de cincuenta hectáreas de la isla de Barro Colorado’ in E. Leigh, A. Stanley Rand, D. Windsor (Eds) Ecología de un Bosque Tropical: Ciclos estacionales y cambios a largo plazo. Panama: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, p. 156. Translation from the Spanish by the author of this post.
(3) Whatmore, S. & Hinchcliffe, S. (2002) ‘Living Cities: Making Space for Urban Nature’, in Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture. No. 22.
(4) W.C. Allee (1924) ‘The Barro Colorado Laboratory’, Science, 59:1, pp. 521-522
(5) W. Schivelbusch (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Lemington Spa: Berg Publishers.
(6) See for example, W.D. Robinson (1999) ‘Long-term changes in the avifauna of a tropical forest isolate, Barro Colorado Island, Panama’, in Conservation Biology 13:85-97.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

Revisiting Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium

Has the National Marine Aquarium undermined its own conservation ideals?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium (NMA) opened in 1998. At the time, it was rightly acclaimed as the best facility of its kind in the UK. Anyone unfamiliar with the developments in the ‘new aquariums’—or indeed, the ‘new zoos’—would doubtless have been astonished by the innovations in the attraction’s displays. These ranged from the ‘Shallow Waters’ exhibit—in which visitors could almost touch rays, flounder, and other species found in the coastal waters of the North Atlantic—to a very large ‘Coral Seas’ display complete with a magnificent simulation of a coral reef.

In many of the exhibits, there was a shift from traditional forms of display that emphasized the distance of visitors from the fish, to forms of representation that sought to give the impression of ‘immersion’: visitors might be, if not ‘in’ the different tanks, then certainly much ‘closer’. The ‘Mediterranean Sea’ display was, and remains, a particularly good example of this trend: the sharply slanting acrylic glass enables visitors to stand and watch as sharks and other fish swim below, in front, and indeed directly above the visitors. As part of my research on zoos (1), I have suggested that such displays actually engage in what I describe as dynamics of transmediation: aspects of techniques of observation normally associated with media representations of nature—especially those in film and television—are transposed to the naturalistic displays. In effect, the exhibits become screen-like spaces that complexly emulate the ‘ways of seeing’ associated with the mass media.

In the NMA as in many other similar facilities, the official discourse was, and continues to be one that emphasizes the ideals of conservation. By showing what there is to save, visitors might somehow identify with the plight of endangered species, and support measures to protect them. For example, the accounts given by some of the signs in the NMA (and by this blog, see ‘Of Sharks and Blockbusters‘) about the plight of sharks alert visitors about the scale of the commercial exploitation of sharks. To be sure, the aquarium’s own experiences with sharks have not been exactly unproblematic: over the years, several of the aquarium’s specimens have died (2). After one spate of deaths, a director of a zoo mused that while zoos would be crucified for allowing such a mistake, in Plymouth the cry went up for the sharks to be replaced as quickly as possible. We have to hope that the current efforts towards an ‘extreme makeover’ of sharks’ reputation will have the desired effects on the popular imagination.

Whatever the aquarium’s role in conservation, anyone familiar with recent urban regeneration trends will know that the building of the NMA was as much about helping fish as it was about helping fellow humans: in particular, those who, like the good businesspeople of Plymouth, must have hoped that a major tourist attraction such as the NMA would help to revive the city’s economic fortunes. Plymouth was, in this sense, an early UK adopter of what has become a popular urban regeneration strategy across the world. Major aquariums have opened in cities like Atlanta, Beijing, and Hull in bids to draw in the much sought-after tourist dollar. The rationale is that if a major attraction can be built that can attract tourists from across the own country (if not from beyond), then the visitors might spend money on the rest of the city—in its shops, restaurants, and perhaps its hotels.

As part of my research on zoos, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the NMA several times since it opened. Overseas engagements meant that I’d not returned for a few years, so I decided to go to Plymouth by train for a walk around the Hoe, and then a visit to the aquarium—in so doing, I engaged in precisely the practice that the aquarium was meant to promote. Alas, I was shocked by a major change in the aquarium—one that arguably undermines the aquarium’s overall design, and indeed, the NMA’s claim to being at the forefront of conservationist practices.

The change in question is a display that was completed in 2006, and is called the ‘Exploreocean’. This exhibit is basically a large tank with ROV’s (Remotely Operated Vehicles) which visitors can manipulate to go through a series of hoops. According to the NMA’s website, the idea is to bring ‘science, technology and engineering to life’ by allowing ‘lucky members of the audience’ to ‘test their skill and wit as they race a mini ROV through the underwater assault course.’ The rationale is that the exhibit, which displaced a ‘river’ display, should allow visitors to ‘explore the various ways that technology is being used to assist scientists in developing a better understanding of our oceans.’(3) I came away with the sense that display is actually little more (and no less) than a bid to pull in the fabled punters by way of what the industry might describe as an ‘interactive’ exhibit—in this case, a game involving the equivalent of remote-controlled submarines.

This perspective is not as cynical as it might seem at first glance. Attendance figures in visitor attractions such as the NMA tend to fall as more and more people in the own catchment area become so familiar with the attraction that they stop coming for additional visits. In such a context, something has to be done to generate extra visits. If the institution can afford it, it must build a new display, or at least upgrade an existing display, every two or three years. However, unlike a large exurban zoo that can simply build a new facility in an unused portion of its land, the NMA would only have been able to use its existing building to produce a new display. Whatever other objectives were proposed for the project, the interactive Exporeoceans exhibit must have seemed like the best way of reactivating the institution’s appeal, and this in a way that maintained interest over time.

My own research certainly attests to the popularity of the so-called ‘interactives’ in zoos. Young children tend to love to engage with exhibits that involve what I describe as relations of ‘secondness’—dynamics of action and reaction. The problem is that the NMA not only removed the naturalistically landscaped starting point for the overall site—the river exhibit was located at the very top of the building—but replaced it with a technological behemoth that arguably contradicts the naturalistic style of the overall facility, and also some aspects of the institution’s own conservation ideals.

A technological behemoth: Exploreocean is dominated by a massive glass-sided tank with a small theatre-like space at one end, and the control panels for the manipulation of the ROVs at the other. People are meant to sit and watch as the contestants attempt to guide the ROV’s through the tanks’ underwater ‘assault course’. On the day that my friends and I visited, a staff member was shouting down a PA system in a vain attempt to encourage a small crowd to cheer the action on. The original design for a start in a serenely landscaped space was replaced by the kind of attraction that one would expect to find in the Brighton, or perhaps the now defunct Weston-Super-Mare pier. I’m actually a great fan of such piers, and of their arcades; the point is not to be a snob about such attractions, but to point out the jarring nature of an arcade-like game in the light (and indeed calm shadows) of the original context.

A contradiction of conservation(ist) ideals: if the problem were simply one of ’style’ or of ‘taste’, then there would not be much point in critiquing Exploreocean. However, an expert in museums and interactivity gave a presentation about interactive exhibits at the 2004 International Zoo Design Symposium in Paignton, and her talk seems particularly pertinent to the NMA’s Exploreocean. During her seminar, Michelle Henning considered the popularity of interactives from the point of view of what might be described as the unconscious, or better yet, ‘un-selfconscious’ messages that might be produced by the use of such machines in zoos. As Henning put it, there are ‘possible conflicts between modes of attention appropriate to the zoo, and those produced by some computer-based interactives; filling the zoo with buttons, consoles, touchscreens and kiosks may help to pull in the visitors, but may invite or produce forms of attention and forms of behaviour that are at odds with the greater message of the zoo’(4). I would argue that very similar, if not identical issues could be raised with respect to an interactive such as Exploreocean in the NMA.

One might, for example, wish to consider the message that can be generated when visitors are encouraged to uncritically embrace simulacra of undersea technologies. Does Exploreocean not tacitly invite visitors to regard all undersea technologies as being beneficial for the marine environment? Then again, what is the evidence for suggesting that a game such as the Exploreocean’s is conducive to pursuing a career in ‘scientific exploration’, let alone to science education? Last but not least, is the kind of activity associated with an ROV race really congruent with, say, the pedagogy of observation that is arguably required for the successful promotion of a conservation(ist) ethos? The point is not to oppose science and technology, or technology and conservation, but rather, to warn of the dangers of conflating these different elements.

No doubt aquariums and zoos face significant challenges when it comes to designing displays that not only attract visitors, but are congruent with the ideals of a conservationist ethos. On occasion, the challenges may involve ‘do or die’ situations in which managers and designers have to take radical steps to save an institution from closure. I have no idea whether this is what led the NMA to introduce Exploreocean. It does, however, seem clear that the organisation has compromised the overall design of the attraction, and may have scored an own-goal from the point of view of what I described earlier as the pedagogy of conservation.

References

1) see http://www.cmcee.org/case_studies/new_zoos.html.

2) see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1626966.stm, accessed October 10, 2008.

3) http://www.national-aquarium.co.uk/explorocean.aspx?m=thingsToSee, accessed October 10, 2008.

4) “Making things happen: interactivity in zoos and museums”, in A.B. Ploughman and S.J. Tonge (eds.) Innovation or Replication: Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Zoo Design. Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust / Paignton Zoo Environmental Park, 2005, p. 86.

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved.