All photos by Roger Segelken, Cornell University News Service, copyright © 1997 Cornell University. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce these photos with proper credit in a periodical or online publication.Click on an image to download a high-resolution copy (each approximately 1300x900 pixels, 700K)

Other photos are available in these related stories:
Students inventory rainforest for its medicinal benefits
Ethnobotany expeditions to Amazon, Yucutan

Eloy Rodriguez, the Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University, selects another plant for collection by student-bioprospectors working in the rain forest of Venezuela's Estado Amazonas (Amazon state).

An Indian-style dugout canoe brings Kevin Nixon, associate professor of botany from Cornell University's L.H. Bailey Hortorium, to foliage overhanging a tributary of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, where students and researchers seek plants with potential medicinal value.

Single-engine aircraft and river boats are the only means of access to Campimento Yutaje, site of Cornell University's quest for medicinal plants in the Venezuelan rain forest. Palm-thatched huts, in the background, provide the sleeping quarters and laboratory space for the Cornell expedition.

Cornell University students return to the laboratory with plant samples following an ethnobotany expedition by river boat to Manipiare, a nearby Indian village. Preliminary screening for potential medicinals takes place in the rain forest laboratory, before sending samples to more sophisticated laboratories at IVIC, the Venezuelan scientific institute in Caracas.

The twin cataracts of Yutaje Falls, one of South America's highest, appear through the windscreen of the only motorized vehicle at Campimento Yutaje. Cornell University has established a rain forest laboratory at Yutaje, in the Venezuelan Amazonas state, to conduct ethnobotanical seaches for plant-based medicines used by indigenous peoples. Indian legend says Yutaje Falls was named two young lovers -- from different tribes -- who jumped to their deaths from the mountain peak.

Dawn illuminates the Venezuelan sky over Campimento Yutaje, site of Cornell University's ethnobotany field station in the rain forest of Estado Amazonas (Amazon state). At left are the tepuis, or tabletop mountains, that surround the jungle outpost, and at right, the palm-thatched roof of one student "dormitory."

Caught in a mist net that orinithologists rigged in the rain forest understory, a bird is examined for evidence of nesting behavior. From left are David Rosane, ornithology researcher at Cornell University's Yutaje laboratory in Venezuela; Andre Dhondt, professor of ornithology; and Stephen Emlen, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell. The researchers added information to an ornithology database and released the bird unharmed.

Edessa Diaz, an undergraduate student in biology at Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, returns to the Yutaje laboratory (in the background) with an orchid collected during an ethnobotanical expedition by river boat to a nearby Indian village. Cornell students spend several weeks each summer at the rain forest laboratory in Venezuela's Amazonas state, collecting plant samples and testing for medicinal potential.

Not tropical drinks but tropical medicines come from the blender, operated by Patricia Luckeroth, a Cornell University undergraduate student in biology. Together with two dozen other Cornell students, Luckeroth examines plant samples for medicinal potential in the ethnobotanical laboratory that Cornell established in the Amazon rain forest of Venzuela. Chemical compounds extracted from the plants are tested against disease-causing organisms in the ongoing search for more effective drugs.