Tropical Climates and Biology^ 



By G. S. Carter 



Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England 



[With 4 plates] 



FoRTT years ago, wlien I was young, our elders often told us that a 

 zoologist's education was not complete until he had visited the Tropics 

 and worked on a tropical fauna. The richness and variety of animal 

 life in the Tropics are so great that they felt that a man who had not 

 experienced tropical zoology could have no more than a very incom- 

 plete idea of the animal world and its distribution. It is my thesis in 

 this address that work in the Tropics is still of great value to zoolo- 

 gists, though not for exactly the reasons that led our predecessors to 

 think so. 



Today, zoologists are not interested so much in describing new forms 

 and recording their morphology and distribution; most of us are 

 more interested in the general biology of animals — in trying to under- 

 stand the interactions between animals and their environments, physi- 

 cal and biological, how they manage to live in face of the often 

 antagonistic conditions of their environments, what controls their 

 distribution and evolution, and so on. If we do not go outside tem- 

 perate climates such as our own, we tend to think that the conditions 

 we find here are general, or at any rate normal, for animal life, and 

 to neglect the fact that elsewhere in the world animals live in very 

 different conditions. More than this, the range of conditions in a tem- 

 perate climate is midway between the extremes of heat and cold to 

 which life is exposed in other countries, and knowledge of the means 

 by which animals survive in conditions nearer the extremes of the 

 viable range often helps toward understanding their life in our own 

 climate. In some ways study of arctic faunas shares these advantages 

 with tropical biology, but in cold regions the fauna is so restricted, 

 and investigation is so difficult, that I cannot believe that arctic biol- 

 ogy can ever rival that of the Tropics in value to the biologist. 



1 Address delivered to Section D (Zoology) on Sept. 1, 1960, at the Cardiff Meeting of 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Reprinted by permission from 

 The Advancement of Science (London), September 1960. 



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