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I’m sure that my wife Marcia’s women friends consider her to be a saint. Who else but a saint would put up with a field biologist who annually disappears for months at a time and who from time to time asks his entire family to pull up stakes and move to a new location for a year? To be fair, Marcia didn’t necessarily know that this was going to be our lifestyle when we were married in the summer of 1965. But she received a strong preview of our coming life when I flew off to Panama without her four months later. By now, after over thirty years of my itinerant lifestyle, she is resigned to my absences. But she is still is not thrilled with them and all the domestic responsibilities they place on her. Who can blame her? I wish that, like me, she had been bitten by the “El Duende” bug early in life. Then perhaps she could understand why the lure of foreign creatures and places is so strong for me. We were barely settled in St. Louis when we again packed up all of our belongings and stored them with family and friends,sold our car,took a leave of absence from the University of Missouri, and moved to Costa Rica for 52 3 Along the Río Corobici Jamaican fruit-eating bat in a balsa flower. Redrawn by Ted Fleming, with permission, from a photo by Merlin D. Tuttle, Bat Conservation International. fourteen months.In the spring of 1970 Emmett Hooper and I received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue my study of the population ecology of tropical rodents.This time my objective was to explicitly test predictions of the MacArthur-Wilson r and K selection theory, which, as we’ve seen, was the reigning theory to explain the evolution of life history strategies in plants and animals. This theory predicted that species living in strongly seasonal environments have higher reproductive rates and lower survival rates than those living in weakly seasonal environments. Using the same field methods as in Panama,Hooper and I planned to compare the demography of closely related tropical rodents living in habitats that differed strongly in climatic seasonality. These habitats included tropical dry forest, located in the northwestern corner of Costa Rica, and tropical wet forest, located in the Atlantic coastal lowlands. Our proposed site in Guanacaste Province received about one and one-half meters of rain annually but had an intense six-month dry season (see map 2). The site in Heredia Province, in contrast, received about four meters of rain annually and had a modest dry season lasting no more than two months. Given these strong climatic differences, we were confident that our sites would harbor species whose demographies differed to a much greater extent than the sites I had studied in Panama. I went to Costa Rica expecting to find evidence for r selection in Guanacaste and K selection in Heredia.This is what I eventually found,but along the way I also discovered that I enjoyed working with bats, especially plantvisiting species, much more than rodents. My ecological studies in Costa Rica thus marked the beginning of my becoming a bat man and not a rat man. And in Costa Rica, Marcia and I found a foreign setting in which we felt perfectly comfortable. So comfortable that I would spend the next sixteen years conducting research almost exclusively in that country. If knowledge about the natural history and ecology of Panamanian mammals had been scanty when I began working there in 1966, the situation was even worse in Costa Rica.To be sure,European naturalists had been living and working in Costa Rica for about a century, but most of them were “Victorian collectors,” in the words of Luis Diego Gomez and Jay Savage (1983). Extensive knowledge of the kinds of plants and animals occurring in Costa Rica was now at hand, but little was known about their natural history and ecology. The first modern account of the mammals known or suspected to occur in Costa Rica was written by George G. Goodwin, of the American Museum of Natural History, and appeared in 1946. Goodwin’s study was based on the examination of dry and dusty museum specimens and contained little of the first-hand “feel” for the country and its fauna Along the Río Corobici / 53 [18.217.208.72] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 18:10...

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