ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SCIENCE ON AN ISLAND:: HOW A FRAGMENT OF TROPICAL FOREST HOSTED A CENTURY-LONG EXPLOSION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SCIENCE ON AN ISLAND:: HOW A FRAGMENT OF TROPICAL FOREST HOSTED A CENTURY-LONG EXPLOSION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

In 1924 biologists interested in the tropics set up a field station on Barro Colorado Island — isolated from the mainland ten years earlier when the central part of the Panama Canal was being formed. Leigh first visited the island in 1966 and became a full-time scientist there since 1972. He had a front-row view of the development of scientific understanding of the island. This grew from fascinating natural history — the successive steps by which a spider decides what to do with a prey item that got snared in its web, the differences in behavior between the three species of bird that follow army ant raids to catch insects flying off to escape the ants — to settling grand questions such as why there are so many kinds of tropical trees and what were the first steps enabling social behavior with division of labor to evolve in bees. In this book, Leigh indicates what research on this 400-acre island has taught us and suggests what factors privileged the island to host research that taught us so much.