“A Magic Web is as subversive as a camouflaged Morpho butterfly. One moment you are looking at the dead leaf on a page, the next moment, you are chasing brilliant blue flashing wings through the forest and the next, you find you have learned all the fundamental principles of rainforest ecology."
— Alison Jolly, author of Lucy's Legacy
A Magic Web
The Tropical Forest of Barro Colorado Island
by Christian Ziegler and Egbert Giles Leigh, Jr.
Designed and packaged by Lisa Lytton
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
In A Magic Web, photographer Christian Ziegler and evolutionary biologist Egbert Giles Leigh, Jr., invite readers to enter the marvelous world of Barro Colorado Island. This book is a unique combination of spectacular photography and clear, authoritative text written by an active scientist who has spent half a lifetime trying to understand the tropical forest. Luscious photographs of the forest reveal the wonderful diversity of its inhabitants and show many of the activities that give it its character and lend structure to its community. Drawing on decades of work on Barro Colorado Island, Egbert Leigh explains how the forest works: how plants and animals compete with but also depend on each other; how the solitary lives of cats contrast with the intricately organized lives of armies of ants; the variety of ways plants struggle for a place in the sun; and how these plants attract animals to pollenate their flowers. Finally, the book shows the importance of tropical forests to the people living near them, why they matter to the world at large, what we can learn from them, and how they differ from temperate-zone forests.