tralian birdwatcher who had a pet frog- 

 mouth, and who saw it sit during the day 

 with its mouth open, snapping its mouth 

 shut when an insect flew in. Since no fiir- 

 ther information came to my attention, all 

 I could do was to mention the behavior 

 briefly in a book on New Guinea highland 

 birds that I published in 1972. 



There the matter rested until last month, 

 when my Ketengban guide, Robert 

 Uropka. was lecturing me on the habits of 

 birds. He eventually described a big, noc- 

 turnal bird with a large mouth, convinc- 

 ingly imitated the call of the Papuan frog- 

 mouth, and called it sume in the 

 Ketengban language. "And by the way," 

 he said, "the sume sits during the day with 

 its mouth wide open and" — 1 held my 

 breath — "Binatang masuk sendiri!" he 

 concluded in Indonesian ("insects fly in of 

 their own accord!"). 



Does flie Papuan frogmouth really se- 

 crete a chemical insect attractant and fly- 

 catching paste on its palate? If so, I'd in- 

 vest my pension in the stock of the 

 chemical company that isolates and manu- 

 factures the attractant and paste. Or did 

 Paran and Robert and the Australian bird- 

 watcher all misinterpret the frogmouth 's 

 behavior? And did Paran misinterpret the 

 paste on its palate? I've done what I can as 

 an ethnobiologist; it's now up to a chemi- 

 cal ecologist to confirm or explode the 

 "Case of the Living Flytrap." 



We think of human knowledge today as 

 undergoing explosive growth. In many re- 

 spects, that's true. Laboratory biologists, 

 for instance, are learning more about a few 

 species that are superabundant — lab rats. 



lab mice, fruit flies, the bacterium Es- 

 cherichia coli. and Homo sapiens. 



In other respects, though, our knowl- 

 edge is shrinking. Over the course of mil- 

 lions of years, humans throughout the 

 world have built up a knowledge of their 

 local natural environment so extensive 

 that not even professional biologists can 

 hope to capture more than a small fraction 

 of it, and other members of urban and in- 

 dustrialized societies can scarcely imagine 

 it. At the end of the twenty-four days that I 

 spent with the Ketengban people, I felt 

 like a Philistine because I had so often 

 nudged the subject back to birds when 

 they began to talk of anything else. Even 

 for very rare bird species, such as New 

 Guinea's leaden honey-eater and garnet 

 robin, they rattled off the altitudes at 

 which the birds lived, the other species 

 with which they associated, the height 

 above the ground at which they foraged, 

 their diet, adult call, juvenile call, seasonal 

 movements, and so on. Only by cutting 

 short the Ketengbans' attempts to share 

 with me their equally detailed knowledge 

 of local plant, rat, and frog species could I 

 record even fragments of their knowledge 

 of birds in twenty-four days. 



Traditionally, the Ketengbans acquired 

 this knowledge by spending much of flieir 

 time in the forest, from childhood on. 

 When I asked Robert Uropka how, lacking 

 binoculars and the sight oif one eye, he had 

 come to know so much about a tiny, dull- 

 plumed warbler species that lives in the 

 treetops, he told me that as children he and 

 his playmates used to climb trees, build 

 blinds in the canopy, and observe and hunt 



FROZEN NO\j'ELTIE.£ 



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up there. But all that is changing, he ex- 

 plained, as he pointed to his eight-year-old 

 son. Children go to school now, and only 

 at vacation times can they live in the for- 

 est. The results, as I have seen elsewhere 

 in New Guinea, are adult New Guineans 

 who know scarcely more about birds than 

 do most American inner-city dwellers. 

 Within a decade or two, drug companies 

 carrying out chemical prospecting will 

 have to go in blind, lacking guidance as to 

 which of tens of thousands of species to 

 collect or what to test each species for. 



Compounding this problem, education 

 throughout Indonesian New Guinea is in 

 the national language, not in Ketengban 

 and the 300 other indigenous languages. 

 Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and 

 government also use the Indonesian lan- 

 guage. While the reasoning behind such 

 decisions is, of course, understandable, the 

 outcome is that all but about 200 of the 

 modem world's 6,000 languages are likely 

 to be extinct or moribund by the end of the 

 next century. As humanity's linguistic her- 

 itage disintegrates, much of our tradi- 

 tional, mostly unrecorded knowledge base 

 vanishes with it. 



The analogy that occurs to me is the 

 final destruction, in a.d. 391, of the largest 

 library of the ancient world, at Alexandria. 

 That library housed all the literature of 

 Greece, plus much literature of other cul- 

 tures. As a result of that library's burning, 

 later generations lost all but the Iliad and 

 Odyssey among Greek epics, most of the 

 poetry of Pindar and Sappho, and dozens 

 of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides — to 

 mention just a few examples. 



The ongoing loss today that draws most 

 public attention is the loss of biodiversity. 

 In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, 

 humans as the villains. But there is also a 

 parallel loss in which humans are both vic- 

 tims and unwitting villains. Not only are 

 species going extinct, but so is much of 

 our information about fliose species that 

 survive. In the future, no children will 

 grow up in the forest, where they could re- 

 ceive or rediscover that knowledge. Cer- 

 tainly, professional biologists don't have 

 the necessary time — I count myself lucky 

 if I can spend one month every year or two 

 in New Guinea. It is as if we are burning 

 most of our books, while the languages of 

 those books that remain become as lost to 

 us as the undeciphered Linear A of ancient 

 Crete. 



Jared Diamond is an evohttionary biolo- 

 gist and physiologist at UCLA Medical 

 School. 



12 Natural History 2/94 



