Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate

by Jack Ewing

Change begins in changed minds. Changing minds has a domino effect, a cumulative effect that occurs when one event sets off a chain of similar or related events.

I had previously seen monkeys in zoos, but there is little similarity between wild and caged primates. It’s like comparing prison inmates with free people working and playing together.

The astronomical increase in human population and consumption of resources is creating a natural imbalance on our planet that precipitates many problems. These include global warming, the ozone hole, pollution, diminishing rainforests, melting ice caps and just about any other environmental problem you care to name. It is time we put some thought into doing something about the way we use the earth’s resources. Our own survival as a species may depend on our solution.

To some the tapir resembles a small cow and to others a large pig. As high at the shoulder as the waist of a tall man, with a mass equal to that of a couple of linemen from a Super Bowl team, this is Central America’s biggest land mammal.

When humans first appeared in the Americas sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago, many species of large mammals roamed these lands—creatures that now seem like legends. The hairy mastodons with their enormous tusks, the giant ground sloth that stood three times the height of a grown man, the giant bison, majestic animal of the plains, and the saber-toothed tiger all existed in ecological harmony for several million years. In a scant one or two thousand years humans eradicated all of these large mammals from the face of the planet. In Central America nothing larger than the tapir survived. With large populations that lived in extensive areas of inhospitable jungle and swamp, there weren’t enough people to kill them all.

Regardless of the exact date we can safely say that it has been over fifty years since substantial numbers of tapirs wandered freely through our region.

These poisonous snakes expend a lot of bodily energy producing the venom that they inject into their victims. Once they inject it, several days will elapse before it is replaced, and during that time the snake can’t eat, because it can’t kill or digest its prey. That’s the big reason why people are not in a high degree of danger from a venomous snake.

where the concept of making the polluters pay for the cleanup of atmospheric carbon was first proposed, the idea has been little more than talk for most of the world. But, while everyone else was procrastinating, tiny Costa Rica, with only a fraction of the earth’s land area and population and no political clout, was taking action.

In Costa Rica the program is called Environmental Service Payments. The way it works, in practice, is that people who purchase gasoline and diesel pay a special tax. The proceeds from that tax go to pay people who plant and protect forests. Since there isn’t enough of the tax revenue to pay everyone who is conserving forest, some areas have priority over others. Wildlife corridors are one of the highest priority areas for the distribution of these incentives. The program has been operating since 1997. It is still small and has numerous problems, but it is working and has an incredible potential for protecting forest and restoring wildlife habitat.

Inefficiency in the production and transportation of electrical power is such that it takes more than three watts of energy to put one watt of electrical power in your home. That means saving one watt of electricity in your home saves three or more watts at the power plant where your electricity was generated.

An average leaf-cutter colony with approximately five million ants is from 3 to 6 meters (10 to 20 feet) deep. Digging and moving the amount of earth necessary to create such a colony is a colossal task comparable to the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt.

It is a miracle that chestnut-mandibled toucans can even fly. That enormous beak sticking out in front causes them to fly in a position that looks like they’re about to take a nose dive.

It was determined that bird disappearances didn’t begin until after the disappearance of top predators such as the puma and jaguar. Once these major carnivores were gone, a rapid increase occurred in populations of their prey species, which included coatis and raccoons. Both of these omnivorous species are partially arboreal and often prey on birds’ eggs and nestlings.

The solution is simple. Let the predators do their thing. Their presence signifies a healthy ecosystem.

If isolated natural forests are connected together by corridors, the result is the ecological equivalent of one large forest.

By creating corridors we are giving a helping hand to the “bad guys,” the major predators, and thereby insuring the health of the entire system. Every species has its own niche. In nature there are no good guys and bad guys. They all play their part in the overall scheme of things and work in harmony as an intricately coordinated ecosystem with an infinite number of checks and balances. The only bad guys are those who have figured out how to beat the system.

Biologists have been amazed at the amount of biodiversity present in abandoned cacao plantations.

Organic cocoa is a specialty food that can be processed and marketed locally in our area. Before cocoa reaches you in the form of a Hershey Bar or Mars Bar, it undergoes substantial changes. Some of the natural components are removed and replaced by other substances. The biggest change is the removal of cocoa butter, a valuable ingredient used in the cosmetic industry, which is replaced with vegetable oil. Then sugar, milk and other ingredients are added. The end product is creamier, more heat resistant, sweeter, more attractive, a lot more fattening and a lot cheaper to produce. Everything that is added to cocoa costs less than pure cocoa. With other addictive substances, this dilution process is called cutting. Chocolate manufacturers would probably object to that term. Locally produced organic cocoa can be processed with the original cocoa butter still in the final product, that is, without cutting the addictive brown powder. Although high in calories, cocoa butter is poorly digested by humans and isn’t readily assimilated by the body. That’s right! Organic chocolate, locally produced, doesn’t make you fat. Listen up, all you chocolate junkies: You can indulge your habit without fear of breaking the bathroom scale.

Rabies epidemics aren’t common in Costa Rica, but when there is one the vampire bats play a major role in spreading the disease. Apparently they are naturally resistant to rabies infections, easily surviving the disease and from then on acting as carriers. Most domestic mammals are vulnerable to rabies, as are humans. When vampire populations are high, the danger of a rabies epidemic is much greater.

Soon after we quit farming rice the mosquito population diminished to a tolerable level. At the time I didn’t make the connection between rice farming and mosquito populations, but it’s really pretty simple. Fish, frogs, birds, lizards and bats all eat mosquitos. Conventional rice farming requires aerial fumigation that kills many of these natural predators. The fast-breeding insects develop a genetic resistance to the agrichemicals much quicker than their enemies, and mosquito populations skyrocket. When we quit farming and stopped the massive use of pesticides, populations of the mosquitos’ enemies rebounded. This, of course, was good news for us and bad news for the mosquitos. Nowadays at Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge, mosquitos are a very minor bother. Many visitors comment on the lack of them.

In more than thirty years of living in this region I have seen only nine grisóns, four pairs and one single. I know many local people who have never seen one and don’t know what they are. Those who have seen them usually don’t know what they are called. Those who do, call them musas. The grisón is considered rare and very little is known about them. Their scarcity has earned them a place in the CITES Appendix III, which protects them internationally, and they are also afforded protection under the Costa Rican endangered species law.

Notwithstanding its small size, the grisón’s manner reeks of arrogance, not unlike that of a bully who knows that nobody will mess with him.

Remember, the mustelids were here first. We are the invaders and should always respect our natural environment and look for ways to live in harmony with it.

Whatever you do, don’t cut down a natural forest so you can use the land to plant trees. This is tantamount to replacing a Van Gogh or a Rembrandt with a cheap print that you can buy for a few dollars at the corner bookstore. As silly as it sounds, there are people who actually do this. They feel entirely justified in doing so, because the lumber in the monoculture they plant is worth more money than the natural forest they destroy. In other words: “If it is profitable, it must be all right.”

(The term “living fences” refers to the fact that, in the most fertile regions of Costa Rica, the fence posts sprout into trees.)

The sloth’s slow manner gives the impression of laziness, and the word for sloth in many if not all languages means lazy. According to the book of lists, The Top 10 of Everything, by Russell Ash, sloths sleep about twenty hours per day, placing them second only to the koala in the rankings for the world’s laziest animals.

Considering the sloth’s reputation for slothfulness, it is rather ironic that they have a record of arriving first. Eight million years ago, when geological forces were forming Central America, the first South American mammals to set foot on the isthmus were two species of ground sloth that had to swim over 60 kilometers (37 miles) of treacherous ocean to reach the new land. They won the race five million years ahead of four other species of sloths and many other mammals that arrived later. At Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge when we started restoring natural forest habitat to land formerly used for crops and pasture, the sloths appeared in these corridors after a few short years, when the new trees were still quite small. A 2001 issue of The Dominical Current newspaper had a photo of a sloth in Dominical across the street from San Clemente in an area that was deforested over fifty years ago. That land had been regenerating into secondary growth for less than ten years. Wherever suitable habitat exists the sloths will soon arrive.

The first clue came from the discovery that dart frogs of all species lose their toxicity when kept in captivity in a terrarium. Suspecting that a variation from their natural diet might be the cause, biologists began to pay close attention to what the colorful amphibians eat in the wild. It turned out that a high percentage of their natural prey was ants. In fact, the least toxic genera of dart frogs, Colostethus, consumes the fewest ants, while the extremely poisonous Phyllobates eats them almost exclusively. Moderately toxic Dendrobates is somewhere in between, with a diet containing 50 to 70 percent ants. Knowing that ants tend to contain a high level of alkaloids and that dart frog toxins are primarily alkaloids, biologists have come to the conclusion that these amazing frogs have “learned” how to concentrate the alkaloids that they acquire from eating ants in the toxic mucous secreted through glands in their skin.

Then one day some European sport fishermen decided that the lake needed a good game fish. It was no fun to catch all the “trash fish” that the locals fished for food. So they released a non-native species called the Nile perch, a real sport fish, into Lake Victoria. Now they had a fish that was fun to catch, a strong fighter that could reach the length of a tall man and twice the weight. A voracious eater, the perch ate its way through the cichlids like a hungry young boy in a cookie jar. In half a century the Nile perch has eaten over 200 species of Lake Victoria cichlids into extinction. The algae eaters were some of the first to disappear, and possibly none of them are left. Lake Victoria became choked with algae, which consumes much of the oxygen, leaving less for the fish and causing many to die. The rotting plant material accumulated and the decomposition process took even more oxygen, and soon the bottom-feeders died too. Later the shallow portions of the lake became choked with water hyacinth, another non-native species, this one from the Amazon. The thick mats of broad pads of this invasive species are so dense that local fishermen can’t force their boats through them. Malaria carrying mosquitos breed in them as does a snail that carries a terrible parasite called Bilharzia. Three million people who live around the lake have been deprived of their livelihood, and it all began with the introduction of the Nile perch. Lake Victoria has been called the worst ecologic...

When a species is removed from its native environment and placed in a strange habitat within its preferred range of temperature, humidity and altitude, there are often few, if any, other species that can keep it under control. That’s when the problems begin.

Can you imagine what the roadside would smell like if the vultures weren’t around to play their role as cleanup crew? What the beach would smell like if the dead fish just lay there and rotted? As disgusting as the vultures’ habits may seem to us, they have a key role in nature’s scheme of things, cleaning up the rotting flesh and recycling it back into the ecosystem. The acid in their digestive system is so powerful that no bacteria can survive the trip through the vulture’s stomach and intestines. This allows them to eat things that would kill a human and make many carnivores sick. It has even been said that the acid in a vulture’s stomach will dissolve a fish hook.

Raccoons and coatis are classified by biologists as opportunistic predators.

Nature, however, knows no bad nor good. Everything simply is. Every living thing must eat, or die. All animal food comes from other life forms. Nature is an intricate matrix of checks and balances in which food is intertwined with population and genes. An abundance of prey attracts predators. The least fit die first. More genes get passed on from female coatis that do a good job of hiding their nests and from those that forsake the papaya treat when danger lurks. Try to observe nature, not judge its players. It makes more sense that way.

It seems as though the world is advancing so rapidly that thoughts of a time twenty or fifty years into the future are almost nonexistent. But perhaps even more important, we appear to have forgotten the lessons of the past. Homo sapiens possess the unique intellectual ability to learn from mistakes, make amends and prevent future errors of a similar nature. Unfortunately, we use this ability sparingly, especially when economical considerations are at stake. Quick profits usually take precedence over long-term stability.