Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  We would have to get a new boat tomorrow, she said. Dianne and I could sleep at the Project office. We stowed our groceries, in flimsy plastic bags that were already splitting, at the boathouse, where I was sure they would be eaten by rats. We carried the four precious frozen chickens back with us to the Project office, which had a freezer, and got ready for bed.

  Dianne took a sleeping pill. But before falling asleep, she had, as usual, spread much of the voluminous contents of her bags over our small room for a final inspection. This is why my 11 P.M. rat report so roused her: the rat might run over her clothes.

  She launched out of bed to help herd the animal into the bathroom. Unfortunately, the door wouldn’t close, a fact we had earlier noticed as clouds of mosquitoes rose from the shower drain and poured into our sleeping quarters. Maybe the rat would vanish down the drain. We waited a minute, and then Dianne allowed the door to spring open a crack. The rat saw its chance to rush out. With admirable speed and force, Dianne pulled the door shut. When the door sprang open again, the rat lay motionless on its side. Blood oozed from its snout.

  “You killed it!” I shrieked, horrified.

  “I killed the bastard!” she exulted.

  “You fucking killed it!” I cried ungratefully.

  “I killed it! I killed it!” she shouted in glee, and then loosed a laugh like a pirate.

  We went back to bed, leaving the rat dead in the bathroom.

  Five minutes later, the scuttling began.

  “He’s not dead,” came Dianne’s voice, disappointed, in the dark.

  But when I turned on my flashlight, I saw this was a different rat: a much bigger rat, with prominent testicles. It was peering at me from the foot of my bunk.

  We herded this one, too, into the bathroom. This time we tied the door shut with a bandanna stretching to the knob of a nearby dresser. I took one of Dianne’s sleeping pills. If more rats came into my bed that night, at least they didn’t wake me.

  The next day, equipped with a new speedboat, we arrived within the hour at a little village, Vila Alencar, to pick up the second Antonio at his wooden, tin-roofed house there. Next we stopped at the floating house at the intersection of two rivers, a place called Boca, which means “mouth,” to say hello to the gray-haired watchman, Joaquim. Miriam and the Antonios chatted with him perhaps forty-five minutes as the skies grew darker and darker.

  “Chovendo?” I asked. (“Rain?”)

  “Não, não, ” chorused the Antonios.

  “Should we leave early and avoid the rain?” I asked Miriam, unconvinced.

  “No—they say it’s not going to rain.”

  “My poncho is in your boat somewhere—should I dig it out?” Dianne asked me.

  “No,” I assured her. “They say it’s not going to rain.”

  We got in our boats and pulled away from Boca. Almost immediately, the downpour began.

  Rain pounded all around us—big opalescent drops, heavy as stones. Thunder and lightning exploded everywhere, a battle of water and fire. I remembered something Vera had said the night we’d dined at the open-air restaurant, as lightning crashed all around: “In my whole life before coming to the Amazon, no one died of lightning. But here it is not rare. I know of three at INPA who have died.”

  The rain stung my skin like buckshot. I averted my face and stared at the floor of the boat. Helplessly, I watched it fill with a shallow lake of rainwater—disintegrating the flimsy plastic grocery bags, reducing our bread to sodden Kleenex, turning our crackers to paste, thawing the frozen chickens, and drowning our luggage—luggage in which Dianne’s poncho was irretrievably embedded.

  Twenty minutes later, we staggered soddenly into our floating house. The chickens, completely thawed, dripped blood over everything. Dianne’s lips were blue. Miriam looked miserable. The Antonios seemed frozen. I had one thought: get hot drinks into them, now. I raced into the little kitchen to light the gas stove. My hair, hands, and clothing dripped water onto the matches, extinguishing one after another. Finally, one stayed lit long enough for me to turn on the burner. The gas blew the match out.

  “You go through a box of matches every time you light it,” said a voice with a British accent behind me. I turned around and noticed for the first time, and to my horror, that our floating house was already inhabited.

  Paul Sterry, forty-three, a renowned nature photographer, gallantly lit the stove for me. Young Lee Morgan was a student at Royal Holloway College, University of London, studying the behavior of ringed kingfishers. Andrew Cleve, elegant and graying, was the warden of the Bramley Frith Study Centre near Basingstoke in the U.K. and the author of more than twenty-five books on natural history and biology; for his service to the environment, he had been given a medal by the queen. Peter Henderson, forty-four, a professor of evolutionary biology at the Animal Behavior Research Group of University of Oxford, had been studying the fishes here since the reserve’s inception seven years ago; he probably knew more about the dolphins’ underwater environment than anyone alive.

  As we sipped hot coffee around the big dining table of the spacious central room, Peter told us about his early days here. “When I first saw this place, I thought, How on earth can I possibly work here?” Though blond and blue-eyed, he reminded me of Gary, with his encyclopedic knowledge and gift for storytelling. “It seemed like hell at the time.”

  He had lived with Márcio Ayres, the uakari researcher. They had felt marooned, living on houseboats and an abandoned floating house, spending weeks without setting foot on land. Márcio could hardly find his uakaris; Peter had no idea how to sample the fishes. The place swarmed with mosquitoes and biting horseflies called mutucas. The only diversion was to visit Tefé, back then (before the government stationed 5,000 soldiers there, to guard against the dreaded “internationalization of the Amazon”) a fishing town with only four cars and no restaurants, where dogs slept in the streets and people slept on their porches. “We wondered,” Peter said, “whether we’d made the biggest mistakes of our lives.”

  Twice, Peter was nearly killed while working here—both times by creatures he never thought to fear. One day a sloth fell out of a tree and nearly hit him. It looked him in the eye, rolled over, and died. Another time, a plant or insect poisoned him. To this day, he doesn’t know what touched or stung him—only that his eyes swelled shut, his hands were paralyzed, his scalp went stiff, and finally, while vomiting, he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he found himself in a clinic in Tefé, breathing oxygen from a tank marked “for industrial use only.”

  Yet he comes back every year, often with eager colleagues. For him, the place exerts the primal pull of a sea. In fact, many of the creatures here would seem more at home in an ocean than a lake: There are spotted freshwater stingrays with poisonous tails, oceanic fishes like sole, goby, and herring, four species of crab, and of course, dolphins. “It’s as if the scale of the freshwater is so great it almost becomes like an ocean,” Peter said, his blue eyes shining.

  Mamirauá is a place of oceanic scale. It is half the size of the country of Belize, and possibly the world’s richest aquatic system, with 499 lakes in the central study area alone. Besides the largest protected flooded forest on earth, Mamirauá is also Brazil’s largest conservation experiment: in 1996, six years after the state governor created the Mamirauá Ecological Station at Márcio Ayres’s urging, the area was proclaimed the nation’s first sustainable development reserve. Instead of being evicted, the 2,500 people who live in and around the reserve were not only permitted to stay and use its resources, but to serve as its guardians—a bold attempt at protecting wild land and helping people at the same time. It was an experiment so novel that the creation of the reserve forced Brazil to alter national conservation legislation: never before were local residents allowed to fish and hunt in areas declared reserves.

  Mamirauá is a huge natural experiment as well. In the sealike lakes and along the snaking rivers, forest and water merge, giving birth to hybrid creatures that seem to d
efy possibility. There are fish that nest in trees, fish that hunt in air, and fish that incubate as eggs inside the father’s mouth. Sloths swim like athletes, their long, claw-tipped arms crawling through the rivers. Whole meadows of grasses flower, floating, atop the water; and 150 shape-shifting pink dolphins cast nets of sonar as they hunt in submerged treetops.

  Peter has found at Mamirauá an unrivaled laboratory of evolution. In a place like this, where the world as we know it was born, the world still re-creates itself anew. “These flooded forests are the habitat from which terrestrial groups evolved,” he explained, “yet, though this habitat has been around for millions of years, nothing here is very permanent.” The water rises and falls, carves new channels, builds new islands. Half the floodplain here has been entirely resculpted in the past millennium. The lakes are actually only a few hundred years old. Dredges have unearthed shards of Indian pottery from the lake bottoms, remnants of a thriving Omagua civilization whose language, now gone, gave this place its name: “Mamirauá” means “Calf of the Manatee.” Everything here is in transition, in the process of becoming something else. Trees evolve into weeds, like the cecropias, and weeds into trees: the ephemeral herb along the banks, Acoitis aequatorialis, belongs to the plant family Melastomaceae, almost all members of which are trees. Creatures assume an astonishing spectrum of forms to exploit new niches: Lily pads grow into three-foot-round giants as well as miniatures just .04 inch long, only root and leaf. The fishes have evolved in staggering array. Peter and his colleagues have catalogued 312 species here, 80 species of which they have caught from the front porch of this house. By comparison, all the species of fish in Peter’s native England number only 30.

  Even now, as we watched the rain clear as we sat around the dining table of the floating house’s spacious central room, the land was changing almost before our eyes. No longer was this the luxuriant, brimming wet season, as we had witnessed at the Meeting of the Waters and along the Tahuayo. The water here had dropped twelve feet in the three months since May, Peter told us. Along the riverbank across from our front door, we could see where the ebbing river revealed holes the size of croquet balls—dens excavated by catfish in the wet season. Several species of fish here dig dens: the giant pirarucu, ancient fish whose bony tongues are covered with teeth, use their chins, fins, and mouths to gouge nest holes in the mud of shallow waters, and male and female together guard the hole, like birds. Another fish, the goby, nests in sponges that grow in the curved leaves of submerged trees.

  But the season of nesting was long over. The dry season is the killing season. “Everything that’s in the water here very quickly goes into a body,” Peter said. “Here is a sort of killing zone, where the feeding is going on intensively.” Piranhas evolved in the Amazon’s flooded forests, Peter told us. “They are a great innovation,” he said. They are mainly scavengers, like hyenas, he told us, and generally don’t attack healthy animals. Like hyenas, piranhas are social animals, traveling together in groups of individuals who are probably related, and vocalizing all the time to stay in contact. “Piranhas have a stinking reputation in Brazil,” he said. “Prostitutes are called piranhas of the land. But I think we should make the piranha the symbol of the Amazon, for they are one of the fish that truly molds the ecosystem. As an animal, I find them very elegant and very impressive indeed,” he said—although, he confessed, “I don’t like handling them.”

  At the moment, the piranhas were having a field day. At high water, they have to hunt mainly at river edges, where fish may have become stranded, while in low water, the fish are so concentrated they can attack anything that moves. For the dolphins, too, this was a time of ease and plenty. At the edges of open water like that in front of our house, fish were as densely packed as five per cubic meter, as measured by Peter’s sonar. “Every cast of the line, you bring up something,” Peter told us—although often it was only a head, the rest of the body devoured by piranhas. Later, when we would throw our dinner scraps overboard, the waters would boil with piranhas.

  Every five or six seconds, we would hear a splash. Often it was a kingfisher plunging, spear-billed, into the water. No fewer than nineteen ringed kingfishers have established territories along the 1,600 feet of bank directly across from our front door, Lee had found. Fish are so concentrated that the birds were probably not defending the fishing rights to their territories, but instead, he suspected, defending the rarer, shady perches on which they remove the spines and scales of their prey.

  The splashes signaled not only birds plunging into the water; as we watched, we realized fish were also leaping out of it. Sometimes they leap to escape underwater predators, Peter explained. Others skim the surface like stones. Many other fish come to the surface to breathe. Some can breathe no other way. The giant electric eel, the pirambóia, or lungfish, and the giant pirarucu must surface every ten minutes to gulp air, for long ago in their evolution their gills ceased to function as organs of inspiration. Still other fish leap into the air to hunt. The lithe, smooth aruana swims near the surface with chin whiskers forward, the tops of its eyes projecting out of the water or just near the surface; the eye is divided horizontally, so it can see above and below the water at once. When it spots its prey, it erupts from the water, sometimes launching more than six feet into the air to seize beetles, spiders, and other creatures from branches, vines, and trunks. Occasionally, an aruana will take a small bird or bat perched on a limb above the water. Michael Goulding reported a case in which a large aruana, over three feet long, took two newborn sloths from their mother’s arms.

  Later, on the water, we would see fish surface and leap into the air beside our boat. Their scaly, prehistoric faces leered up at us, unblinking, like images from the subconscious surface in dreams. At the water’s edge, we would see aruana hunting. The fish seemed to hang in the air, a long silver ribbon, before falling back into the water. And almost daily, to our amazement, dolphins would surround our boat. It seemed, at last, that the waters would finally open for us. And they did. But, as we were to find, it was not in the way we expected.

  By midmorning, the skies had completely cleared, but one of our boat motors had died. Miriam needed one boat to return to Tefé in the morning, and Dianne and I needed the other. What to do? Miriam suggested we try to borrow a boat from her colleague Ronis, the way one might ask to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor. Ronis da Silveira, the caiman researcher, lived with his wife, Barbara, at the four-room floating house nearest to ours, ten minutes away.

  Ronis had married his slender, smooth-browed sweetheart, an agronomy student, just one year before. They were wed in a ceremony at the Manaus opera house. Then they had come here, to drink rainwater collected in a barrel, shower in water pumped from the river, and fall asleep to the weird, wet calls of birds and frogs that Barbara had never before heard. It was her first time in the Amazon jungle.

  A recent issue of the international Crocodile Specialist Group newsletter reported on the couple’s honeymoon: Ronis, his new bride, and his assistant Edejalma had tackled a fifteen-foot black caiman. After wrestling with them for forty minutes, the giant reptile had tired sufficiently to allow the trio to drag it beside the aluminum canoe back to the floating house at Boca. While they were affixing the transmitter to its scutes, the caiman saw an opportunity to escape. It hoisted its tail six feet out of the water, grazing Barbara’s face with its horny scales. The bride’s tender face, however, deflected the tail sufficiently to cause it to miss the boat when it came down. Were it not for Barbara’s face, the boat almost certainly would have overturned.

  A giant black caiman skull, its jaws propped open by a blue and red basketball, greeted us at their door. It had belonged to an animal thirteen feet long. “Killed by jaguar,” Ronis told us; it had been one of his radio-tagged study animals. A jaguar, I thought, was probably the only other creature besides Ronis who could have subdued a caiman that size. Muscled and macho, with dark Latin eyes, the torso of a bodybuilder, thick black hair tied back in a pon
ytail, and a heavy beard evident even when he shaves, Ronis reminded me of the comic-book hero Conan the Barbarian. (Lee had said he looked exactly like the star of a British strip called The Slayer.) In fact, Ronis does read Conan the Barbarian comic books, and jokes that he does so to psyche himself up to go catch black caiman—the largest predator in the Amazon, which grows to sixteen feet, and is more numerous in Mamirauá than anywhere else in the Amazon. But in reading the comics, Ronis also pursues a more scholarly goal. Once, at a time when a visit from important American researchers was pending, Peter found Ronis poring over his comic books with great concentration. Ronis looked up from the pages at Peter. “English,” Ronis said earnestly. “Must learn!”

  “That’s the kind of guy Ronis is,” Peter had told us earlier; “he looks macho, but he’s a true gentleman.”

  And this he proved to be: Not only did he loan us a boat, but he also promised, to our delight, to take us out one night with him looking for caimans.

  But our days belonged to the dolphins, and we wanted to make the most of the telemetry equipment. We realized, to our horror, that the equipment alone wasn’t enough. We did not know the dolphins’ radio frequencies. Each animal has its own; to search for any tagged individual, you essentially “dial up” your dolphin by plugging its three-digit number into a receiver box, attached with a cable to an antenna. You hold the antenna vertically, moving it in an arc, to scan for that particular signal. A kissing sound on the earphones indicates the dolphin is within range, and the sound grows louder the closer you approach.

  Happily, Miriam told us, Vera’s dolphin frequencies were recorded here at Mamirauá. They were marked, she said, on the receiver box at the top of the telemetry platform at the entrance to Lake Mamirauá—ninety feet up the apuí tree with the giant, biting ants.

  The apuí was a stout, welcoming creature, with wide-open arms like an apple tree. Red and green painted boards nailed to its trunk provided sturdy hand- and footholds. As we climbed, following Miriam, we watched carefully for the biting ants. We saw them almost immediately: inch-long black and gray insects with prominent mandibles. “Ants!” we chorused. There were seven to ten of them every square foot or so. They did not march in columns, along a scent trail, but patrolled as if at random, which made them more difficult to avoid. If we crushed one, it would release a chemical siren summoning the rest of its clan, who would rush in bravely to attack us. This fact of ant behavior, and not the basic reverence for life, we now realized, was the reason that Vera made a point of never killing them.