Giant Otters in the Wild

I think you all know me well enough to know that, as delighted as I was to be able to touch and talk with and photograph a hand-raised giant Amazon otter, I yearned to see them in the wild in Guyana. Maybe it's my birder conditioning, but it just doesn't feel real until you see a creature in its habitat, unrestrained and wary. And so I strained my eyes as we boated the Rupununi river, looking for that seal-like bump in the water that might prove to be the rarest animal in the Amazon.

We saw their dens--several of them--called "holts" in otterspeak. From one to five cubs may be born in each litter, and they may stay with their parents for two or more years, helping take care of younger siblings. They can't swim until they're about three weeks old, and at three to four months of age they begin to travel with their family. They nurse for nine months--compare that to your dog, who was probably weaned at eight weeks!A giant Amazon otter den, or holt. Rupununi River, Guyana, South America.

The three Guianas--Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname--are the last stronghold of the Giant Otter. Population densities here are still reasonably good; habitat is mostly undisturbed, and waters are unpolluted for the most part. People haven't gotten around to destroying Guyana's rainforest yet, the way they've destroyed so much of Brasil's. Mining isn't yet ruining Guyana's rivers with siltation and toxic runoff. Logging is underway, mostly selective cutting rather than the clear-cutting that has so scarred much of the rest of the Amazon. Agriculture is almost nonexistant along the rivers of the interior. All these things impact water quality and fragment the forested riverine habitat that giant otters need. We may be sure that all these things are coming to Guyana. But they haven't happened just yet. And so there are still giant otters in Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname.

Survival of the giant otter in these three countries is vital to the survival of the species on this planet. Can ecotourism help? If it can be managed so as not to disrupt this diurnal mammal's life, perhaps. If you'd like to see a wild giant otter, you should go to Guyana, French Guiana, or Suriname and do that. You should do it soon.

A fantastic boatman--the best I've ever seen--spotted them first. I wish I had caught his name, had put on my portrait lens to grab a picture of him. I was too close to capture him with the telephoto, and too excited to switch lenses. I was enthralled by the river, the herons, the kingfishers, the possibility, however remote, of a wild giant otter. If I so much as felt for my camera, he'd slow the engine and sidle toward whatever he saw me studying. We were working in concert. He pointed, and said in a low voice, "There--on the log."
I couldn't see it in the brilliant light, but I focused on the log and prayed. And there it was, talking. My first wild giant otter.

Amazingly, it swam closer to the boat.
And there was another animal with it. And two more just downriver.
And they were squalling and calling and wailing and squeaking as giant otters do, and I was overcome.
Be careful, curious little one. Don't trust that every boat you see has only a teary Science Chimp in it.
Oh, thank you, suspicious goblin. You have made my year. Go in peace, and make more giant otters.

Chasing the Giant Anteater

One of the oddest things about the giant anteater is its huge, sail-like tail. It uses the tail as a sun shade and umbrella when it sleeps in shallow depressions during the day. Extremely coarse, strawlike hair sheds water, and the fine, velour-like hair on its nose and face protects it from ant bites and stings. An odd bit of information: Anteater hair is highly flammable, and the animals are vulnerable to grass fires. What an awful thought.
Though an adult's body is 3 1/2' long, its tongue can extend two more feet. It is detached from the hyoid bone and extends deep into the thorax to the breastbone! Coated with sticky saliva, the tongue lances into termite and ant mounds and instantly ensnares workers and larvae. It lashes forward and back, up to 150 times per minute, dragging the ants and termites to their demise. The anteater strikes and flees before the powerful soldier ants can mount an organized defense. As many as 30,000 insects may fall prey each day. No wonder a giant anteater's home range may cover more than 22,200 acres! Odder yet than its mobile tongue is its skull. The anteater has no jaws; its maxilla and mandible are fused into a single bony tube; thus it cannot open its mouth more than an inch or so. Imagine.

You can see his huge claws folded back along his wrists as he runs, mouth, such as it is, agape.

So as flabbergasted and delighted and agog as I was to have a giant anteater thunder right toward and then past me, I was immediately concerned for its welfare. The idea of routing it from its feeding or resting routine just so we could get a look at it didn't sit well with me. I couldn't see how this method of scaring up anteaters could be sustainable in the long run--wouldn't you drive them out of their habitat with such harrassment? I felt abashed that it had been so disturbed just for our entertainment. Imagine being forced to gallop on a hot morning, breathing through a snorkel, and you can see why we were so deeply concerned.

Ecotourism is in its infancy in Guyana, and having run with lightning speed over rough terrain and sent the anteater practically into our arms, our guides glowed with pride that they were able to give us such a thrilling experience. I couldn't fault them; they gave us what they thought we would want. They were great guys.The nuances of watching wildlife without disturbing it have yet to enter into the equation in the isolated case of Karanambu's giant anteaters. (Everywhere else we went, wildlife was approached cautiously and with a great deal of respect. I suspect this driving approach is viewed as the only surefire way to give tourists a decent view of a reclusive mammal). How much more preferable it would have been for us to view the anteater at a distance, perhaps from an elevated platform with a spotting scope, than to stress it this way! Having no scope, the guides resorted to herding it. I can't think about my first, and perhaps only, sighting of this rare animal without a pang of guilt and shame. There has to be a better way. Individually and as a group, we expressed our distress to the trip organizers, pleading the anteater's side of things.

Baby giant anteaters crawl up their mother's legs immediately after birth, to ride clinging to her chest, or astride her like a tiny jockey. Having no jaws with which to pick the baby up, the mother depends on the baby to position itself, and waits for it to cling to her before moving away. This photo from the National Zoo depicts a baby born there on July 24, 2007. Oh my goodness. OK, do they nurse? My sources say they do, but how, if their tongues are long and snaky and they have no jaws? Arrggh. Need to know. Having just viewed some of the amazing giant anteater videos at Arkive.org, and seen the anteater's oral apparatus up close, I'm less concerned. I can imagine even this snaky-tongued youngster mustering up a pretty good vacuum with its tiny mouth. (Thanks, rmharvey!)  Various sources have the young nursing from two to six months, riding on mama for up to nine months. Giant anteaters are thought to live up to 15 years in the wild, and have lived to 26 years in captivity.

Seaworld and Busch Gardens have a wonderful website , from which I garnered the following bit of animal trivia: 

As an outcome of their diet and lifestyle, anteaters have relatively low metabolic rates. As a stark example, the giant anteater has the lowest recorded body temperature of any placental mammal--90.9 degrees F (32.7 degrees C).

When I read that, my heart sank. What do we know about the giant anteater's metabolism? What do we know about what happens when you chase a cool-blooded giant anteater around in stifling heat? Nothing. We know that that's a good way to get a close look at it. But...we also know that they're disappearing throughout their range; I've seen one estimate that places the global population at 5,000. We had seen one of that sadly dwindling number, and we had done him no good. Here comes the pang again.
Like many wondrous animals, giant anteaters are disappearing, and are listed as Threatened/Vulnerable under CITES. At the very least, we owe it to them to admire them from a distance, to observe them living their lives undisturbed, to respect their dignity and their place on the planet, and leave them unharmed by our interest.  May their glorious oddity, and our curiosity about them, not prove to be their demise.

Kaieteur Falls, Guyana

The falls held us in its thrall as we wolfed down the best meal of the trip-homemade Indian curry wraps, still piping hot, wrapped in foil. Nothing tastes better than good hot food, outdoors.
Life IS good. Even at 90 degrees and who-knows-what humidity. It was SO HOT.

Kaieteur Falls is not just beautiful. It's also a brewery for biodiversity. Think 20,000 species of plants on the Shield. No wonder I had not the faintest clue what I was looking at most of the time. I think these tiny purple jobs were orchids, but...who knows what this little grassy but not grassy pompom thingy could be? It's weird for a Science Chimp to look at something and not even be able to get it down to family, much less genus or species. Caryophyllaceae? Beats me. Bignoniaceae? Dunno. Pretty vine, though.

It's also sort of fun to be forced to shrug and appreciate a strange plant without naming it...for awhile. This one was blooming, innocent of leaves or anything but a golden flower, on the forest floor. Huh?My inner Chimp was fretting badly on this trip, wanting to know, wanting to know. Dunno. Arggh. A huge rhododendron-like shrub with very un-rhody flowers, reminiscent of those of the mayapple. For all I knew I was looking at something that occurs nowhere else.

Like these CARNIVOROUS BROMELIADS. Yes. I mean, what gives with a carnivorous bromeliad? See how it's yellow-- has very little, if any, chlorophyll? Doesn't need it--it's eating bugs. I think I was told that they occur nowhere else in the world. How cool is that, to see such a rare endemic, that makes its living like no other bromeliad?

I knew these were sundews and damselflies. Whew. Good to know something, no matter how small. I just wanted to put a name on everything. Is it any wonder daughter Phoebe's middle name is Linnea, for Carolus Linnaeus?

From the air, I saw the strange golden leaves of a bizarre plant, and wondered aloud what it could be, growing in such profusion near the falls. Fortunately we were able to ground-truth the sighting with a good hike through the odd low forest around the falls. The mystery plants were tank bromeliads Brocchinia micrantha, only the world's largest bromeliad! Yeeps! They were beyond huge. Here are some people for scale. And they grow only here, at Kaieteur Falls.

But it got better. In the rainwater caught in the bromeliad's leaf junctions were tiny frogs--here's a female or juvenile. They were golden poison-dart frogs Colostethus beebei. These entrancing creatures live their entire lives in the pools in tank bromeliads--egg, tadpole, adult; egg, tadpole, adult. Amazing. Because it showered several times during our hike, I understood how they could accomplish this. The enormous slick bromeliad leaves channel the rainwater down to their bases, where it sits and accumulates all kinds of detritus along with frog tenants. This is what nourishes the plant. I watched in fascination as the leaves caught rain and ran it into their "tanks." Every plant had at least one frog, some many more. How I wished Liam and Phoebe had been along to find frogs in each plant--it would have been like an Easter egg hunt for them. But don't touch--they're highly toxic! How can something so appealing be so poisonous?

About thirty miles up the river live 500 members of the Patamona tribe. The falls is named for Chief Kai, who, legend has it, went over the falls in a canoe, sacrificing himself to the gods, to save his village from invasion. The Patamonas will likely be instrumental in any ecotourism that goes on in this undeveloped, pristine place. It was amazing to me to see such a stunning natural wonder, such a diverse ecosystem, left so unspoiled and untrammeled. There are no developed roads; you can only get there by plane. And the single accommodation near the falls is just an open shanty with a few hammocks hanging in it. You can see its red roof in this picture. No skyscrapers, no casinos, no condos...just a shanty. That made my heart sing, but I also wondered how this place would be preserved if people can't get to it to appreciate and study it, to stay there and soak up its beauty and wonder. We were on the ground floor, no, the basement of ecotourism here, looking at what might be. I felt like an early explorer beholding Yellowstone for the first time, knowing that people would want to see it, and in the next thought wondering what would become of it when they did.

Kaieteur Falls Magic

On the second day of our journey (I know...I've gotten what? eleven posts out of the first day!) we went up and away in a teeny tiny plane. A solitary sandpiper teetered at the airport, saying good bye.
Georgetown, Guyana's capital city, from the air. It is not particularly cosmopolitan, as you can see.
A leper colony, now defunct. The graveyard was on the little island in the foreground. I thought of all the suffering that had gone on there.
I could hardly take my eyes off our pilot who looked so much like Chet Baker's foster father David that I wanted to give him a hug. Well, I would have enjoyed giving him a hug even if he didn't look like David's lost twin...but enough from the Invisible Woman.

Today, we'd take a much-too- brief excursion to experience the magic of Kaieteur National Park. Designated in 1929, the park is huge--242 square miles of almost- unbroken rain forest.
When I spotted these denuded mountains from the air, I assumed they'd been deforested. Isn't most of Latin America thus scarred? But no--I was told that these are natural savannahs, formed because the soil is too thin to support trees. Amazing. Kaieteur National Park sits on the Guiana Shield, a two billion year-old bit of the earth's crust that spans 30,000 square miles between the Amazon and the Orinoco. The falls itself is the world's tallest single-drop waterfall, at a dizzying 741 feet. Our birdwatching tower on top of our house is 41 feet tall. Just add 700 more feet and you have the potential to brew up some serious acrophobia. I took this from the air, as our skilled pilot banked to give us a good view of the falls. The river just kind of pokes along, widens out and then... Yikes!We walked and walked, getting closer to the falls with each overlook.
OK, that's probably plenty close. Eeeeek. Tannins stain the water a cola-brown.
There were rainbows in the mist.
Two by intrepid two, we crawled to the edge to look down into the gorge. Here are Terry and Judy Moore.
I was fascinated by the cushiony plants on the gorge walls. A biologist once lowered himself down on ropes and spent a very cold, uncomfortable night in the gorge, collecting plants and checking out the bizarre life forms down there. I'd love to know what he found.
But I was more than content to spend my time at the top of the gorge. No ropes, thank you.