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How Brazil Got Under My Skin

A Little Revenge from the Lost Forest

By Susan Ludmer-Gliebe

"What you can do," the doctor explained, "is to buy some cheap beef  steak and put raw pieces of it under your bandages."

Leaving his Park Avenue office I had an image: neighborhood dogs would start sniffing and then attacking me for my sirloin.  I wasn't amused. In fact I was sick. Sick and tired of things crawling,  literally,  under my skin, taking their own sweet time - it had already been three months - waiting to leave their host - me - and fly away. I had, several doctors concurred,  a very bad case of dermatobia hominis , otherwise known as bot fly.

The story began several  months previously when I had journeyed  to Brazil to write a story about a scientist, Alexine Keuroghlian. It was a scene far removed from the sidewalks of New York, or so it first seemed. 

The screech of macaws and  the sawing sounds of crickets created a background chorus above while leaf cutter ants and perfectly camouflaged  frogs romped  about on the vine -tangled forest floor below.  A fist-sized neon blue morphos butterfly flashed by  as Alexine Keuroghlian slogged  through the mud and small streams in this arboreal  wonderland, a semi-tropical forest reserve,  Caetetus Reserve,  which is surrounded by coffee plantations and pasturelands  located about 240 miles northwest from   Sao Paolo.

"This is a happening trail," said Keuorghlian  jocularly, as she whacked her way, machete in hand,  through the forest undergrowth, pointing to tracks and scat from various animals, noting how the  fruits and nuts littering the ground had  been gnawed at in different ways, touching  the bark of the scented cabreuva tree which, she explains,  numerous  mammals rub against as a natural tickacide.

For the past several years, with support from the Earthwatch Institute and volunteers from around the world,  Keuorghlian has  been exploring , observing,  and learning about this particular forest, a 2178 hectare reserve, once a private hunting site. The forest represents a fragment, a very small vestige,  of a complex ecological system known as the Mata Atlantica, which once stretched all the way from the coast into much of the interior.  It's distinct from the Amazon forest, having two  seasons (wet and dry) and containing broadleaf semi-deciduous trees. It's also one of the most endangered of all tropical forest ecosystems on earth with less than 4% of the original 1,000,000 km2 remaining.

Keuroghlian's work has focused on two rather distinct species of frugivorous (fruit eating) even -toed ungulates known as peccaries, which are distantly related to the pig family. "I think they're cute," she says. Cute or not the animals , who contrary to local lore and legend , are not aggressive,  are as blind as bats, mate year-round,  clack their teeth loudly when in danger…and smell like really bad rotting blue cheese. "It so strong it makes the eyes water," adds Keuroghlian.

There are some other interesting things about peccaries.  Male and females are the same size and their sex life is a bit of a mystery. They're  the only animals in the rain forest to form herds. The white lipped peccaries  (Tayassu pecari)  are  seasonal in their movements but not migratory and they and their kin, the collared, (Tayassu tajacu)  stay pretty much clear of one another.

Keuroghlian's project is the longest term peccary project  extant. One of the biggest questions she's trying to answer is how the white lipped peccaries are surviving in an area supposedly too small for them.

And even though she's been working to understand them better, to learn their  habitat requirements, and special characteristics, there's a lot more to learn. "You always discover new things," she says. Tracks and diggings, sleeping sites, mud bath locations and favorite bye-ways are all duly noted and mapped in great detail.

"Science work is repetitious and boring," Alexine says one day opening the freezer of a  refrigerator as she takes out zip-lock bags containing hundreds of  nuts produced by two different kinds of palm trees, jeriva and palmetto. This is part of her fruit census work. She's getting ready to place  these nuts at various locations throughout the reserve.

"I can walk for days here," she says while we plodded on the P1(for palmetto) trail.  In fact much of her work over the past several years has been precisely that, walking for miles in the forest, trying, with the help of radio telemetry, to track the whereabouts of the (radio-collared) peccaries who roam the forest reserve. "It's high effort and low return," she notes adding that she didn't even see her first peccary during  the first few months she spent here and when she did they flashed by rather quickly.   "You have to walk and walk. Days can pass before you get a signal." At present about 200 peccaries are in the reserve.

Although hunting is basically illegal in Brazil over the  years poachers have entered the reserve, which like many protected areas in Brazil is minimally staffed with wardens. 

In the past some indigenous native groups ,  like the Mataco,  feared peccaries, believing that they brought toothaches; but for many others,  peccary  meat, roasted or smoked,  was a delicacy.  The decimation of peccary  numbers in South America as a whole, however, is not a result of their being used for food sustenance. Rather, peccaries have been hunted for their hides, which are used to make wallets, shoes, belts and especially gloves. "Peccary leather is prized for its softness and durability, two qualities that are rarely found in a single leather," explains Richard E. Bodmer of the Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation and Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  " During WWI peccary gloves were used by the flying aces. Afterwards, they were used extensively for automobile driving, which is still the most important use of peccary gloves to this day." From the years 1946-1973 over four million peccary pelts were exported from the Peruvian Amazon alone. 

One day, in a remote corner of the reserve we came across an empty bottle of  cachaca , the local hooch (sugar cane whiskey), and a recently-tossed pack of Brazilian cigarettes. A few years ago Alexine and her husband, Don, found themselves face-to-face with hunters pointing guns at them and they have lost one radio collared peccary to a poacher who left them a collar to tell them that he was there.  Searching after elusive rotting-blue-cheese-smelling animals isn't for everyone, certainly.

I had to admit that during my stay at the reserve  I had gotten frustrated as well. Neither hide nor hair (nor photo op) of the peccaries were to be found, which was not really surprising given their nature. 

And, in retrospect,  neither was it really  surprising then, that on the next to last day of my visit,  while walking  through a cow pasture contiguous with  the preserve,  I most probably was bitten , opportunistically, by a mosquito or two. The mosquitoes normally would be pestering  the  cows nearby who were grazing on the stunted grasslands, which, not that very long ago were lush, diverse tropical forest.

What I didn't know then, but what became clear shortly, was that these bloodsucking  mosquitoes had transferred  the deposited eggs of the adult bot fly whose  larvae can survive only in vertebrate tissue. The bot fly needs a host and I was it.

That's what finally  led me to my doctor's door (he was but the latest in a series) and  propelled me to consider  applying  raw meat to my multiple lesions. After months of the larvae (each now 1/2 an inch long and 1/4 inch wide)  feeding off my body,   and increasingly sleepless nights because of them crawling under my skull and skin - something I could feel as they got bigger - I was at wits end.

The meat treatment was standard but too weird for words … or  the stares of fellow subway riders. So,  later,  I asked my physician for the smallest calipers he had. Those in hand I returned to my apartment and telephoned  my closest friend. Scrubbing our  hands and tiny instrument in good Scotch - and taking a nip ourselves - we began applying  dollops of petroleum jelly to each and every crater-like hole the larvae had made. We were doing so to smoother the larvae, the idea being that they would  eventually come up for air . When they did my friend dexterously caught them in the tiny forceps and pulled them ever so slowly out of my body. This procedure took several hours (one of the reasons  no  physician was willing to do it). But eventually we got each and every one, almost. If we hadn't done so the larvae would have eventually erupted through my skin, left their  big cocoons behind,  and eventually flown into the New York air as adult flies, exotics in their new environment.

In my closet you'll find a  test tube filled with formaldehyde and 10 bot fly larvae (one broke off). I keep it there because I think it holds an important ecological moral, a cautionary tale.

And who knows maybe the meat I was wearing on the subway came from a Brazilian steer that had grazed on pastureland that had been created by the destruction of the tropical rain forest?  Like they say, "What comes 'round, goes 'round."

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