Paul Rosolie: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy, and we’ve had very limited access to the canopy for all of history. If you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or with scientists, when I was a kid, I always used to see them with the slingshots or the bow and arrows. They would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then do the Ascension thing. And then you’re up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by wasps. You’re trying to do science up there in that environment. It’s incredibly hostile and so having canopy platforms… I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the broccoli of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes, whatever. Just take specimens from the canopy. That’s how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons. And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, it’s starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we’re beginning to log more data. We’ve even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world, we’re seeing lizards that we don’t see on the ground, lizards that have never been documented on this river. We’re seeing snakes where they’re saying, “We saw this snake inside a crevice, on that tree, in the strangler fig, and we don’t know what it is. ” It’s just people haven’t been up there. And that’s where a lot of the monkeys are.…

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