Karen Warkentin escapes from the sticky tropical heat into one of the few air-conditioned rooms in Gamboa, a quiet town on the banks of the Panama Canal. The biologist shares the first floor of a schoolhouse-turned-laboratory with other visiting scientists, students and an unwelcome orange tabby cat.
“My lab extends from the canoe to the wall of boxes full of egg cups,” Warkentin says.
In the middle of the room, part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, biology student Sonia Pérez Arias sits before a clear plastic box filled with colorful wires. A hollow plastic tube juts toward her from one end. Warkentin hovers behind her as she presses a black button, and with a faint whir, the tube begins to rotate like a spit over a fire. Pérez peers through the lens of a camera, magnifying the mouth of the plastic tube. Inside the slowly spinning tube, the big eyes of a red-eyed tree frog tadpole stare back.
