Tron Larson
Appearances
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
The very first night after arriving, I wolfed my dinner down, and I was so eager to get out on the trail into the forest, get my headlamp on, and see what might be out there, things that I'd never seen before.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Just a few minutes after walking into the forest, I look around and I'm looking in the vegetation and just about chest height is this small, bronze, beautiful salamander on a leaf with stubby little legs and a stubby tail, robust, chunky tail. And it was just so exciting because salamanders in the tropics are very rare to see.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
You wake up every day, it kind of feels like Christmas. Well, what am I going to find today? You know, we set out traps to catch things and you go and, you know, revise the previous day's traps and what am I going to find? And you get these incredible new discoveries. So every day there's unexpected things.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
We were very surprised by the number of species we found. We documented over 2,000 species over this time period, which is a shocking number. Finding so many species of vertebrate animals, of mammals, four new species of mammals, that's almost unheard of on an expedition like this.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
You know, they're among the rarest groups of mammals in the world. On this expedition, we were really lucky to find an individual in this small patch of swamp forest. It's a kind of mouse that has partially webbed toes because it lives a lot of its life underwater where it swims and it hunts and preys on aquatic insects.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
The Altamayo is this lush valley surrounded by mountains. You have a high diversity of different soil types, different vegetation types, and microclimates as you change in elevation. And that creates this really dynamic and vibrant mosaic with all different kinds of life.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
There's also significant human presence. It's very much a human-dominated landscape.