Predators I Have Known by Alan Dean Foster Page B

many. I got to the woman before her bare fingers could close around the shell. She looked at me in surprise when I grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away. Some concepts are easy to convey underwater, others less so. I couldn’t draw a finger across my throat to indicate my concern because underwater that’s the signal for someone who is out of air. So I had to settle for shaking my finger at her confused face, pointing down at the shell, grabbing my throat with both hands, closing my eyes, and arching backward to drift limply in the water. That particular pantomime sequence is not in any diver’s manual, but it got the point across. She looked at the shell, then back at me, and nodded, eyes wide behind her mask.
    Back on the boat, I took the time to enlighten her as to what had inspired the brief but serious melodrama.
    “It was so pretty,” she murmured, “and it looked harmless.”
    I nodded. “Sure. That’s what makes it so dangerous. A lionfish looks dangerous, so nobody tries to grab it. Same with a spiny sea urchin. In contrast, a shell is just—a shell. Except when it’s a live cone shell.”
    She nodded back at me. “Maybe I’ll just stick to collecting shells on the beach.”
    “Good idea. And while we’re on the subject . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “Just in case the occasion should present itself, you should avoid trying to shake hands with any pretty little octopuses, too.”



V
JEALOUS ANTS, MILLIONS OF ANTS, AND REALLY, REALLY BIG...ANTS
    Southeastern Peru, May 1987
    THERE MAY BE NO OTHER place in the world as magnificently wild and biologically diverse as Manú National Park in southeastern Peru. At 3.7 million acres, approximately the size of the state of New Jersey, Manú encompasses within its boundaries 13,000-foot Andean heights, spectacular untouched cloud forest, and glorious unspoiled lowland Amazonian rain forest. More than 15,000 kinds of plants have been found in Manú, more than 625 varieties of tree can inhabit a single acre, and the park is home to more than 800 species of birds, almost as many as in all of North America.
    Only a small part of this extraordinary example of still intact Amazonia is open to the public. Another somewhat larger section, mostly along the Alto Madre de Dios River, has been made available by the Peruvian government for mixed use. The great majority of the park is maintained in its original, natural, untouched state and is open only to scientists and government-approved explorers. Within its boundaries can be found perambulating spectacled bears, the raucous cock-of-the-rock (Peru’s national bird), innumerable snakes, macaws, parrots, primates, giant otters, giant catfish, rare black caimans, piranhas of varying size, species, and disposition, towering trees, entangling vines, the dreaded candiru, at least two human tribes that have essentially no contact with the outside world, and potentially thousands upon thousands of undiscovered, unnamed, and unstudied creatures of every order and genus.
    There are also an awful lot of ants.
    I first visited Manú in 1987, the year it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. At that time, there was no place close to the park’s boundaries where interested visitors could stay, and certainly nowhere within them. Besides the single primitive ranger station precariously situated at the edge of the Manú River near the entrance to the park, a single scientific station was located much deeper inside the park boundaries on the shores of Cocha Cashu, a small oxbow lake. Quite properly, this facility was and still is closed to non-researchers. In charge of its supervision was the eminent ecologist John Terborgh, whose book Requiem for Nature , set largely in Manú, I highly recommend.
    Asking around the modern Andean city and ancient Inca capital of Cusco (or Cuzco, or if you want to really be a stickler, Qosqo in Quechua) about the possibility of visiting Manú, my traveling companion Mark and I were told to try and