Soon after he arrived in Madagascar in 1989 Steve Goodman, a research biologist at the Field Museum, had his nose rubbed in some hard truths about the country. He accompanied some visiting herpetologists to a remote forest on the island to search for reptiles and amphibians, and they collected several skinks previously unknown to science. The herpetologists went home and wrote up their discovery for a professional journal, then found they needed photographs of the skinks’ habitat. Goodman, who was still in the country, obligingly went back to the forest to take them, but there was nothing to photograph. The forest was gone. The article, which announced the discovery of a new species of skink, also had to announce its extinction.
These days Goodman makes only one trip a year to Chicago, and he hardly ever comes in the winter. “It was 38 or 39 degrees in the field last week,” he said when we met on a cold, rainy morning in December. He meant Celsius, or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He was in town to give a lecture and promote his new book, the 1,710-page The Natural History of Madagascar, which he coedited with Jonathan Benstead of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Photographer Harald Schutz gets equal billing on the cover, and his spectacular images are on display at the museum through July 5. The lecture and exhibits are part of the museum’s nine-month series of educational events being held under the rubric of “The Year of Biodiversity and Conservation.”
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Goodman and Benstead worked so quickly in part because they were trying to keep up with the mushrooming scientific knowledge about Madagascar. The number of amphibian species known to exist there has risen from 131 in 1991 to at least 230 today, and more discoveries are expected. Twice as many rodent species are known today as in 1990. In 2000 three articles in one issue of the International Journal of Primatology announced the addition of 11 new species of lemurs.
Less than one-sixth of Madagascar’s natural vegetation is left. Commercial loggers and subsistence farmers continue to cut and burn the forests, fragmenting the remaining stands, if not eliminating them altogether, and accelerating erosion. So much of the island’s red soil washes into the blue-green Indian Ocean that astronauts have identified the plume as “Madagascar bleeding.”
Isolation breeds uniqueness, and Madagascar’s varied geography bred multiplicity. The island stretches 1,000 miles north to south, and its mountains rise as high as 9,000 feet. It’s largely tropical, but some places resemble the Swiss Alps. More than 236 inches of rain fall every year in the northeast, fewer than 11 inches in the southwest. (Chicago averages 36.) The resulting habitats include rain forest, desert, grasslands, upland forest, and bare-rock highlands. Unique species would also have evolved on an isolated island that was, say, a tabletop prairie oriented east to west, but not nearly as many. “There is no other place in the world with this level of combined species richness and endemism,” write Goodman and two colleagues in their introduction to the book’s mammal section. Of 101 native species of nonflying mammals on Madagascar, not one occurs anywhere else on earth.
The Field’s Lawrence Heaney was on Michigan’s faculty then and spotted Goodman as an extraordinarily productive if unconventional worker who went his own way. According to a profile in Science, as a graduate student Goodman “was spending months at a time in North Africa doing field research funded by the American Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, he had published 23 papers on topics ranging from evolution and ecology to art history and anthropology, and he had co-written a scholarly book on the role of birds in ancient Egyptian culture.” But he wasn’t willing to concentrate just on finishing his doctoral thesis, so he left Michigan to work as an independent researcher in various countries. In the late 80s Heaney pushed the Field to hire him “to do whatever research he wants.”
What the 13 million Malagasy want to do right now is survive. They’re not ignorant, they’re poor. They know the forests that shelter the country’s rare species also shelter the watersheds that provide their livelihood. Goodman quotes a proverb in Malagasy, then translates: “When there is no forest, there is no water. When there is no water, there is no rice.” When a patch of forest is lumbered off or cleared so that farmers can grow rice, sediment washes into the local waterways and smothers rice paddies downstream. Worse, where the waterways were once relatively constant streams of water, they now alternately flood and dry up.
