Penn couple's biggest legacy: A forest in Costa Rica

Amid the thousands of obscure tropical specimens piled in a University of Pennsylvania office - silvery moths, wasps the size of a speck of dirt, butterflies with more patterns than a fabric store - a lean, bearded fellow marches on a treadmill.

Daniel H. Janzen and his wife, Winnie Hallwachs, brought the insects here from Costa Rica. He strides on the treadmill while working at an elevated desk - logging nearly 20 miles on a good day so he can stay in shape to go back for more insects. For many years to come, they hope.

"I think I'm good to 100, and I'm 73 now," he said.

Optimistic? Janzen has no time for doubts. When you have won international acclaim for three careers' worth of accomplishments, it helps to get the most out of every minute.

The husband-and-wife ecologists spend half the year in northwestern Costa Rica, living on the grounds of a vast forest preserve that is more than four times the size of Philadelphia.

They are known for pathbreaking research on how insects, the most numerous animals on the planet, interact with nature.

They also are known for collecting vast numbers of insects. The duo and their Costa Rican colleagues have contributed hundreds of thousands of specimens, more than any other scientific team, to the Barcode of Life - a global effort to gather DNA from every kind of plant and animal.

Yet their most visible legacy is the forest itself, a sprawling expanse called the Guanacaste Conservation Area. The couple would be the first to deflect credit, but if not for their advocacy and fund-raising efforts, the tropical preserve almost certainly would not be there.

"I don't have many superheroes, but Janzen and Hallwachs are them," said Paul Hebert, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and scientific director of the DNA bar code project.

"They're kind of, in some ways, a single organism at this point," said Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University.

There is something of the wild about Dan Janzen, rangy and bristle-haired, more at home leaping across a ravine than putting on a tie for an awards ceremony (though he has been to plenty of those).

Same goes for Winifred Hall-wachs - Winnie to all who know her - a woodland sylph who revels in the rats, lizards, scorpions, and snakes that wander into their imperfectly sealed house in the tropics.

She is 15 years Janzen's junior, just a student of his in 1978 when he was already a leader in the field, but she has matched wits with him from the start.

"Winnie thinks, I talk," Janzen said. "Well more than half of 'my' good ideas, either she thought up raw, or she came up with after hearing some half-baked thought of mine."

Their shared life in the tropics has its roots in 1952, when Janzen was in the ninth grade in Minnesota. Janzen's father, also named Dan, was the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and he had to use up two months of accumulated federal leave. Where to go?

Young Dan, already a nature buff, had just seen an exhibit of tropical butterflies at a natural-history museum and yearned to go south. He suggested Mexico, offering to contribute his savings from delivering newspapers and trapping muskrats.

Into the family sedan they went. It took four days to reach the Texas-Mexico border, and young Dan was smitten.

He went on to study biology at the University of Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1976, he has been at Penn, where his lectures are so popular that other faculty members have been known to attend, said biology department chairman Greg Guild.

His insights on evolution were celebrated for their plain-English clarity and remain staples of the field. One early classic, from 1967, explained why diversity in tropical mountains was greater than in temperate zones - a finding that inspired new research as recently as this year. Another seminal paper, in a 1977 issue of the American Naturalist: "Why fruits rot, seeds mold, and meat spoils." The answer, in brief: the microbes that outcompete larger predators.

"I would liken him almost to Darwin of the rain forest," said William F. Laurance, a longtime Smithsonian biologist who is now at James Cook University in Australia.

Hallwachs went to work for Janzen the summer after she took his course. They became full-fledged research partners, and life partners, not long after, though they did not get around to marriage until a few years ago. They found that they thought alike.

"Tropical ecology, at least the way we do it, there's always a childlike, experimental, keep-your-eyes-and-ears-open component to it," Hallwachs said. "Dan has never grown up. I like to think I'm a little more mature."

But by 1985, they became increasingly worried by the pace of agriculture, logging, and development in northwestern Costa Rica. They realized they could keep racking up scientific papers and acclaim, but if they did not do something about the forest that produced those papers, it would be gone.

A national park in the area contained 25,000 acres of dry forest - so named because it gets almost no rain for half of the year - but even that terrain was in need of restoration. The two ecologists proposed a much larger conservation area, and set out to raise money to buy the surrounding farmland and other terrain.

As described in William Allen's 2003 book Green Phoenix, many in the environmental movement resisted the idea at first, preferring instead to preserve existing forests. They feared that if Janzen and Hallwachs went around saying that the forest could grow back, then society would be less concerned about destroying it - and less willing to donate funds to save it.

Yet the pair gradually won people over, giving lectures, meeting with donors in living rooms, knocking on doors of foundations - and with the help of many others, they have raised a staggering $87 million to date through various nonprofits, most recently the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund.

Most important, they enlisted support from officials in Costa Rica, already known for its gorgeous park system, though initially there was resistance from some of them, too. Although fluent in Spanish, Janzen was too forward at first, not realizing that as a foreigner in Latin America, he needed to work more discreetly.

Today, the Guanacaste preserve measures more than 400,000 acres, including dry forest, rain forest, cloud forest, and ocean and is internationally recognized as a model. Little by little, pastures are being reclaimed by trees. It will never look quite as it did before humans arrived thousands of years ago, but in 200 more years, only a biologist will be able to tell the difference.

The preserve is an economic engine - a source of tourism and jobs for more than 150 local managers and scientists, some of the latter trained by Janzen and Hallwachs. Staffers also teach basic biology and science on site to 2,500 schoolchildren every year.

Crawford Hill, a former Episcopal Academy biology teacher who now leads expeditions to Costa Rica and other locales, said the locals treat the ecologist couple with adoration.

One of Hill's Costa Rican guides, upon seeing Janzen at one of the research stations, became teary-eyed.

"He said, 'Other than the birth of my child and my marriage, this is the finest day of my life,' " Hill recalled.

Rodrigo Gámez Lobo, president of INBio, a nonprofit research and conservation group, is a longtime fan of the couple.

"I cannot say I know someone else like Dan in the sense that he is absolutely devoted to his work," Gámez said. "There are no holidays. There is not time to spare."

As they take turns marching on the treadmill at Penn, the pair are continually firing off e-mails, editing manuscripts, and checking the preserve's website (www.acguanacaste.ac.cr), using a laptop mounted on a stand-up desk.

Why do it? The two ecologists could rest on their laurels, holding court at Penn and living year-round in West Mount Airy, instead of spending six months every year in a shack in the tropics.

They know there are people in comfortable America who would not get it. Accustomed to such queries, Janzen has a ready list of reasons that the preserve is important:

It provides jobs, stores carbon, acts as the Earth's natural water filter, and is a potential source of pharmaceuticals. It is home to 375,000 species of plants and animals, about as many as in the entire United States.

But for Janzen, the real magic lies in allowing humans to experience the environment in which their ancestors evolved. Sure, you can live in a city somewhere and enjoy a few trees outside. But without the wildlands, humans are cut off from what truly makes them alive, he is fond of saying.

In 1988, in the journal Science, Janzen wrote of humankind:

"It is as though they are losing their color vision and most of their hearing. . . . Wildlands play the same societal roles as do libraries, universities, museums, symphony halls, and newspapers."

So whenever he and Hallwachs are in Philadelphia, they feel the tug of their natural laboratory to the south. Time, as always, is at a premium.

Which explains the newest piece of equipment added to the house in Guanacaste, just like the one in the office at Penn:

A standup desk with a treadmill.