A Curiosity Moment for Tropical Biology?

摘要

I was truly amazed by the remarkable feat that nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pulled off in landing the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. But it leaves me wondering whether we have ever spent a billion dollars examining any part of Earth's tropical rainforest. We remain ignorant of even the most basic properties of Earth's equatorial forests, such as the number of large mammal species (or invertebrates, fungi, and microbes) in a forest, and their life cycles. The information that we do have is biased toward small intensively studied areas, whereas the vast intervening areas remain largely unexamined.