Making biology tropical

This dissertation traces the role of research stations in the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of tropical biology in the United States during the early twentieth century. My study centers on the community of tropical biologists that formed around two stations administered by the Harvard zoologist Thomas Barbour from the 1920s through 1940s: Harvard's laboratory and garden at "Soledad," an American-owned sugar plantation in Cienfuegos, Cuba, and Barro Colorado Island, a field station and nature reserve in Gatun Lake in the Panama Canal Zone. My analysis of these sites of scientific practice illuminates how the experience of living and working in Caribbean environments transformed American ideas about tropical nature. Historians of science have proven the importance of stations in shaping the discipline of biology within the US.

By following American biology into the tropics, however, I also raise important issues in the history of science and empire not confronted by the existing historiography. The colonial and neocolonial context of twentieth-century tropical fieldwork aligned US biologists with expanding US economic, military, and political networks in the Caribbean. This alignment had material effects not only on the places where biologists chose to work, but also on the patronage structures available to scientists and the organization of station labor. Fieldwork at tropical stations, however, did not simply serve corporate interests, but also raised unique intellectual questions for biologists. Americans had long imagined the tropics as luxuriant and rich in species, but their knowledge was limited to expeditionary science and taxonomic collections. Station science transformed understandings of tropical nature by allowing long-term, place-based investigations.

This new approach reoriented research toward the ecological and evolutionary causes of tropical species richness. Both in its contributions to the concept of species diversity and in its approach to diversity as a resource, tropical biology has also played an under-appreciated role in the formation of the "biodiversity" discourse.