The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man (19 page)

Conde found the process transformative. “The first time I looked into the eyes of a jaguar changed my life forever,” said Conde.

Conde works with the Mexican NGO Jaguar Conservancy and the
National Autonomous University of Mexico to save the Mesoamerican forest, which runs from Panama to Mexico, the largest remnant of rain forest outside of the Amazon in the western hemisphere. And they are doing this by preserving the jaguar, an animal with a lot of cachet in Latin America.

She was trying to pinpoint specific areas of forest with high populations of jaguars, to make sure they were connected to areas where populations were low. On the boat ride back from the island zoo, Conde said, “With so little of the forest left, the connectivity between the patches is critical. We have isolated populations of jaguars in a sea of human land use.”

The habitat of the jaguar, which once ranged from the southern boundaries of the US all the way to Brazil, has shrunk by 80 percent in the last one hundred years. Now the jaguar is alive, though threatened, in the Maya forest, a tract within the Mesomerican forest of about four thousand square miles of tropical rain forest that extends over the adjoining borders of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, where most of Conde’s work is focused. The Maya forest comprises a number of national parks and protected zones. In order to save the jaguar, one had to save the forest.

Conde’s work was part of a bigger plan to build the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which would allow jaguars and other animals to migrate all the way from Panama to southern Mexico. The project was supported by the Central American nations and the investment of $400 million by the Inter-American Development Bank. The problem was the Inter-American Development Bank was also simultaneously investing $4 billion in the construction of more than 332 dams and 4,000 square miles of roads that could, ironically, very well negate the efforts behind the corridor.

Conde was attracted to the jaguar not only for its nobility but because it was a top predator. If you save the jaguar, you also save all the other species that are beneath it on the food web, which are a part of its ecosystem. Plus you save the tropical forest, which is important not only to local species but to North American migratory birds as well.
At least 333 species of birds exist in this region, and the Nature Conservancy estimates that 40 percent of the migratory birds from North America stop in the forests and marshlands of this area during their travels. Natural ecosystems tend to be interrelated.

Jaguars are known to take down a number of medium-size animals including white-tailed deer, smaller local red brocket deer, collared peccary (wild pig), Baird’s tapir, agouti (a large rodent), armadillo, and coatimundi (a relative of the raccoon). Jaguars are ambush predators, hunting along paths in the forest, mostly in the night, overcoming their prey with powerful teeth and claws. But in doing this the jaguar is helping the populations of these animals, culling the sick and the weak, a natural process that makes these populations stronger. The predator plays an important evolutionary role in keeping wildlife populations fit and healthy.

Jaguars mostly stay away from people. But they do take an occasional cow, goat, or chicken, possibly putting them at odds with local ranchers and farmers. Conde and other biologists tried to get the governments of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala to create jaguar insurance whereby they would pay biologists to remove problem jaguars and take them to areas where they would do less harm.

Unfortunately, Conde’s studies have been limited due to the costs of jaguar collars ($4,000 to $7,000 each), but the data she has retrieved has given her a vital look into the type of habitat jaguars need. Though the animals would travel through secondary forests and developed land, her collared jaguars spend most of their time in primary or pristine forest. Conde said this showed the jaguar needs undisturbed areas.

Deforestation in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala is having devastating results. On a cloudy day during the rainy season in Petén, the frontier region of northern Guatemala, I accompanied Conde and Lucrecia Masaya, the research and conservation director at Defensores de la Naturaleza, in Guatemala City, into Laguna del Tigre National Park. According to Masaya, her group was interested in a number of environmental causes and “the healthy populations of jaguars
are one way to tell if the things we are doing are working or not,” she said.

The dirt road we traveled on was only two years old, yet slash-and-burn agriculture had already destroyed wide swaths of tropical forest along its path. The group took a boat up the Río San Pedro to the Macaw Biological Station. At dusk, we climbed a tower on a nearby knoll, gazed at the surrounding rain forest, watched tropical birds fly by, and listened to the monkeys in nearby trees. The following morning, I accompanied Conde as she showed Masaya a map of the new roads that the government of Guatemala has planned to attract tourism from the Yucatán to the Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The plans called for thirty-nine-foot-wide (twelve-meter) paved roads. Conde referred to the deforestation the group saw on the road leading into the park: “And that was along a dirt road. Can you imagine the devastation that will come from paved roads?”

In the past fifty years,
Guatemala has lost two-thirds of its original forested area and the biodiversity that it held. According to the United Nations’ figures, since 1990 about 133,000 acres (54,000 hectares) of Guatemala’s forests have been lost each year.

The importance of that forest, and how its fate was interconnected with man’s, was on display when
Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in 1998. The storm formed over the Atlantic and moved toward the central Caribbean Sea in late October. As the storm drifted over warm water, it quickly intensified to a category 5 hurricane with 180-mile-per-hour (290-kilometer-per-hour) winds, then stalled just off the north coast of Honduras, below Guatemala and Belize. The hurricane slowly weakened as it inched southward toward the shore, then westward over Central America. Eventually the heavy rain (36 inches, or 91 centimeters) in Choluteca, Honduras, caused flooding and landslides, killing more than 19,000 people and devastating the entire infrastructure of Honduras and parts of Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Whole villages and their inhabitants were swept away in torrents of floodwaters and deep mud.

Landslides were particularly virulent on hillsides cleared of vegetation for agriculture. Without the forest to anchor the soils, the rapid runoff from the rains formed rivers of mud. In areas where land had not been cleared, fewer landslides occurred. Even plots of land farmed with crops like coffee and cocoa under the shade of canopy trees did much better than cleared land. Natural and diverse landscapes fared far better than manicured ones.

Mangroves are great buffers against storm damage—more effective than the best concrete dikes, because they capture sediments and build mounds with their roots that keep up with the rise of the sea level. But, since 1950,
Guatemala has lost about 65,500 acres (26,500 hectares) of mangrove forests, representing 70 percent of its historic area, according to the Nature Conservancy.

Mangroves can stabilize coastal lands and provide a strong buffer to coastal storms, even hurricanes. Nature has the ability to evolve with change in general, something man does not always appreciate.

For many, Las Vegas, Nevada, with its abundance of neon lights, swimming pools, and wildly decorated hotels might be one place where the concerns of nature could take a backseat to man, but this is not the case. I arrived in Las Vegas after a long day of driving through the desert. I’d come here to see if this neon city ran independently of nature or if its fate was much more intertwined. I checked into my hotel on the main strip and headed out onto Las Vegas Boulevard. It was 11 p.m. on a Thursday, but the city was still very much alive.

The hotels that lined the boulevard looked like amusement park rides. The New York-New York Hotel & Casino was a three-story replica of the New York City skyline and the Statue of Liberty. The Paris Las Vegas had a slightly leaning Eiffel Tower in front of it. The Bellagio looked like Venice, with more than 1,200 dancing fountains that moved to music on a lake of more than 8.5 acres of water.

Charles R. Marshall, an ecologist whom I visited at the University
of California, Berkeley, several months before, said, “It’s so spectacular, out of control, and extreme. It’s one of my favorite places, though that usually horrifies most people I know.”
Marshall, who grew up in Australia before coming to the US, was married in Las Vegas. His father was, too.

Gambling is king here. My mother once rolled eleven consecutive wins at the craps table at Caesars Palace, and the crowds gathered around the table four or five people deep. They don’t get that excited about nature.

Though many visitors see only the man-made side of Las Vegas, it does have a natural history. In the late 1800s, Las Vegas was just a stage stop on the Santa Fe Trail. It had two freshwater springs.
Las Vegas is Spanish for “the Meadows.” In 1900, the population had grown to around thirty, which didn’t even make the census.

But in 1904 the town was picked as the ideal layover spot for crew change and service on the Union Pacific train that ran from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, and the town started growing. The state of Nevada long embraced permissiveness, and Las Vegas ran with that idea. It allowed gambling, prostitution, quickie marriages, and relatively quick divorces.

Four days before Christmas in 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing $175 million for the construction of the Boulder Dam (later rechristened the Hoover Dam) outside of Las Vegas, and the town went wild. Nevada lawmakers made their state the only one in the nation to allow legal, wide-open casino-style gambling. Then they lowered the divorce residency requirement from six months to six weeks and that got Hollywood’s attention.

Bugsy Siegel, head of an underworld coalition known as the Syndicate, came to Las Vegas in the 1940s. He was immediately enamored of the whole “Sin City” scenario, built himself the Flamingo hotel, and started palling around with Hollywood stars, including his rumored “old friend” George Raft. But Siegel ran into trouble with the Syndicate, and in June 1947 got a bullet in the eye as a reward.

On January 27, 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission tested the
first of a series of atom bombs outside Las Vegas. Soldiers were purposely exposed to the tests to gauge the effects of radiation on human beings. Vegas didn’t seem to mind, though the first test left a trail of broken glass across the city. Eventually these tests were moved underground. Over the years Las Vegas has decorated all of its casinos with neon lights—perhaps to make up for the loss of nuclear illumination.

The following morning, I drove a couple of miles off the strip to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), and met with Stan Smith, an ecologist. He showed me some of the desert landscaping that had made the campus famous right outside his office door. The school advertises itself as an arboretum that includes the entire 335-acre campus. Smith had been studying how plants adapt to stress. He’d also looked at how climate change would affect the structure and function of desert landscapes and ecosystems.

An amiable man with wavy silver hair and lots of anecdotes, Smith was raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but spent time in Reno, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona, before coming to Las Vegas. He was quite familiar with the Southwest desert, although he claimed most Las Vegans were more familiar with the gambling. “You see slot machines all over—at the airport, at the end of the line at the grocers. People in Arizona and California utilize their desert for recreation. But when I was last on jury duty, the other members were comparing coupons from different casinos to see which ones gave the best rewards. Though there are true outdoor enthusiasts here, most people just aren’t that interested,” says Smith.

Las Vegas casinos keep their curtains closed so you don’t look outside. They don’t have clocks on the walls, and the lighting is such that it is difficult to tell if it’s day or night. Hotels like Caesars have elaborately decorated moving sidewalks to get you inside the casino, but once you are there it is really hard to find the exit sign. And when you manage to escape, it’s usually into a parking lot or curbside area that is a lot less friendly than that moving sidewalk you came in on.

The outdoors may not impress the majority of its Las Vegas citizens and its fortune-seeking visitors, but
nature is the real treasure here. Though the desert shrubs cover only about 20 percent of the desert floor, they are the crucial habitat of lizards, snakes, mice, and birds. Birds and bats are important seed dispersers, eating desert fruits during the wet season and spreading their seeds through droppings. These flowers are essential to the health of migrating birds and raptors. The mountains around Las Vegas contain bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, desert tortoises, and bighorn sheep. Near Lake Meade on the Colorado River just outside Las Vegas, I stood one hundred yards away from a watering hole at midday and saw twenty bighorn sheep, several with large curling horns, as they came to take a drink.

Though it goes unnoticed by most, among the most important natural elements here are the crusts that cover much of the desert in the Southwest. Biological soil crusts form in open desert areas from a highly specialized community of cyanobacteria, mosses, and lichens. Crusts generally cover all soil spaces not occupied by plants, which can be up to 70 percent of open spaces.

Biological and mineral crusts help keep soil stable, reports Jayne Belnap, a US Geological Survey research biologist in Moab, Utah.
A well-developed biological crust is nearly immune to wind erosion. “It’s tough as nails against all wind forces,” she says. “Tests in wind tunnels of undisturbed crusts in the national parks show that biological crusts can withstand winds up to one hundred miles per hour.”

But once these crusts are broken, they become dust sources and can fuel powerful dust storms. That dust can travel quite a distance. Biologists have tracked dust storms over Africa spreading all the way to the Amazon in South America. Dust storms over China have been tracked all the way to the US and out over the Atlantic.