from "The Tapir's Morning Bath"

A couple quotes from The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists who are Trying to Solve Them by Elizabeth Royte:

"Save the rain forest and all it contains because it is there. Because it is wondrous and interesting. Because it has a right to exist. The more I contemplated what the loss of such places felt like to me, the more I began to think that some of these 'higher' reasons for conservation might be just as utilitarian as the food and gas arguments. ... To contemplate things we don't understand, to conserve that which has no 'use' ... If the rain forest and its complexity disappeared, we'd be impoverished intellectually and spiritually, as well as materially."

And one of the more amusing examples of the rain forest research: "In 1981, two researchers working in Panama [where Tapir author Royte has been studying scientists] baited traps with human feces and came up with twenty-two species of dung beetle in one location. Human scat, far more than that of any other rain forest mammal, is the type most avidly sought by dung beetles -- in some locations, up to fifty different species have congregated on devoted researchers' samples -- and the type most quickly sequestered."

[A description of the dung beetle's sequestering process:] "Using her front legs, the beetle worked the stuff into a ball, then rolled it backward while walking toward the leaf's edge [this beetle was collecting monkey dung from high in a tree]. When the ball and beetle fell to earth, the dung beetle fortified herself with a few mouthfuls, then laid her eggs in the remaining ball so that the larvae had something to fatten upon when they emerged."