Hidden Riches

Dan Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania is the Don Corleone of what has been called the ‘rain forest mafia’. Ever since he professionally anchored in Central America in the 1960s, he has been as all-round a tropical biologist as he possibly could. Simply studying the ecology of the 9,000 moth species of northwestern Costa Rica – and receiving the prestigious Crafoord Prize for it (the ‘Nobel prize’ for sciences for which there is no actual Nobel prize) – was not enough for him. Together with local conservationists, he created the 110,000-hectare Guanacaste Conservation Area, a patchwork of natural dry, rain, and cloud forest embedded in a matrix of regenerating woodland. His many successful ideas range from the profound (that the coexistence of rainforest tree species is maintained by their specialised herbivores; see Chap. 7) to the outrageous (to dump truckloads of orange peels in a nature reserve). And among his almost 500 published papers and book chapters are such intriguing titles as ‘Why mountain passes are higher in the Tropics’, ‘Two ways to be a tropical big moth’, and ‘How to be a fig’.