A couple of weeks later we threw a barbecue potluck with my new California friends. Early on at the party and stimulated by the day’s preparty cleaning, Peggy went into labor. We handed off the hosting duties to a pair of Alaskan friends and headed to the Mountain View hospital. Just after midnight on January 22, 1989, Peggy gave birth easily to our daughter. We christened her Jasper Linda Dial, her middle name honoring my mother and her first name the muscular beauty of the Canadian Rockies.

Jazzy was a sweet, beautiful baby. Her features were tiny, her smile darling on minuscule tender lips, and her sparkling personality matched both her name and arrival into the world at a party. As expected, Peggy made an attentive, loving mother of two, although a mother at times overwhelmed.

Ph.D. programs are essentially poorly paid apprenticeships with a boss expecting constant, unpaid overtime. This left me unable to pull my full weight as a parent. Alone all day in the condo complex where we lived with no other young mothers nearby, Peggy felt isolated caring for a toddler and an infant. She took a low-paying job teaching movement classes to preschoolers at a women’s health club where she could bring our kids with her to work. She wasn’t about to let someone else raise them.

“Roman, it doesn’t make sense for me to work at the club. The kids are always getting sick there. And if I take another job, all the money I make will just go to child care. I’d rather stay home and raise them myself.” Her kids paramount, Peggy gave up the companionship of coworkers to keep Cody and Jazz healthy. We agreed that emotional wealth was worth more than money, so she focused on her role as housewife and mother, an arrangement that made everyone happy.

ARTICULATING A VIABLE Ph.D. project consumed my first year at Stanford; completing it took three more. Roughgarden’s NSF proposal had described the Caribbean’s common anole lizards as ideal organisms to study complex food webs in tropical rainforests. The small, colorful, and active creatures are abundant in the canopy, far above the jungle floor. At the time, scientists viewed the canopy as an inaccessible, unexplored landscape just overhead but far out of reach.

Most canopy studies cataloged life as seen through binoculars from a tower or the crotch of a single tree. Our research involved manipulative experiments in multiple trees sixty to one hundred feet above the ground. The protocol called for removal and exclusion of anoles from individual trees for nearly a year. Because anoles spend their lives in the canopy but hatch from eggs in the forest floor’s soil, we would keep the lizards out of the crowns following their removal with plastic collars around the tree trunks. Next, we would compare both the counts of bugs and the amount of leaves eaten by bugs in trees without lizards to the same counts in trees with natural populations of lizards. In this way, Roughgarden and I could measure the myriad impacts of an abundant predator on its environment. That was the idea of the experiment: to bump an ecosystem and quantify its response. To make it happen would require ropework, courage, and plenty of sweat and muscle. It sounded like my kind of challenge.

Before moving to Puerto Rico, I went down to scout for living arrangements and brought three-year-old Cody with me. This eased Peggy’s duties as she finished up with our move. It also provided my first real father-son trip with him. Together we explored a world new to us both: the tropical rainforest. We investigated giant land snails clinging to rainforest palms; watched bright green lizards do push-ups on buttressed trees; and tossed insects into the webs of hand-sized Nephila orb-weaver spiders. Cody displayed a child’s innate fascination with life—biophilia, a relic from the past when children’s interest in their environment made the difference between life and death. Some of us never outgrow it.

As a family, we had often visited California’s tide pools. Young Cody thrilled to the incredible diversity of invertebrates he found there: starfish, sea anemones, and amphipods, to name but a few. The Puerto Rican jungle offered a similar diversity, but with land creatures instead of intertidal ones. Like every three-year-old, our boy asked a bottomless barrel of questions starting with why: Why do lizards lose their tails? Why do birds sing? Why are flowers bright? I tried hard to nourish this insatiable curiosity on a trip that initiated our shared explorations across five continents and two decades.

Soon after Peggy and Jazz arrived, we settled into a condo a block from Luquillo Beach. With no car, we pedaled bicycles locally, pulling the kids in a bike trailer. Each morning after a mug of Puerto Rican coffee, I’d crank my mountain bike five miles and a thousand feet up into the Luquillo Mountains to work in the treetops. My old climbing partner Carl Tobin, himself a grad student in ecology, came for a month at the start. During January 1991, we strung horizontal traverses and vertical access lines in the forest using a mixture of mountaineering and arborist techniques I’d learned from Mike Cooper, my best friend from childhood.

Mike had started an arborist business after college. The autumn before I left for Puerto Rico to start the project, he showed me the ropes in my parents’ front yard, where we went up, across, and down tall white oaks and tulip poplars. Mountain and tree climbing both use harnesses and ropes, but their use and design differ. Arborists hang from harnesses on thick-sheathed ropes meant for pulling across limbs. Their techniques for tree climbing rely on sliding ropes and clever knots, rather than hardware. Arborists move around for pay, unlike mountain climbers, who go straight up for thrills.

Mike’s rope tricks allowed Carl and me to move around inside each tree’s crown. With access throughout the canopy, we could mark every lizard we saw with our paint guns; it was good fun, squirting droplets of blue, pink, and yellow paint from up to twenty feet away for mark-remark statistics to estimate anole abundance. We used blue paint the first day, pink the second, and yellow the third, recording how many lizards we saw in each tree with each color scheme each day. One-color animals were seen only once; two-color twice; and three-color three times. We then applied a statistical model to calculate how many lizards we missed, based on the chances of painting we observed. Summing all these observed animals and the single “guess” gave the estimate of total lizards in a tree. We even authored a scientific paper on the arborist techniques, then unknown to the canopy science community. Among other things, we illustrated how to go from tree to tree, enabling a multiday, canopy-level forest traverse without touching the ground—a sort of “canopy trek.”

Down in Luquillo, Peggy and the kids spent most days at the beach. Playing in the warm water and collecting seashells left them tanned, blond, and barefoot. Cody delighted in watching colorful reef fish through a kid-sized snorkeling mask. He stood in the shallows, bent over and holding his breath, exploring the watery world at his feet. Yards away on the beach sand, Jazz gathered foot-long tropical seedpods washed ashore by gentle waves.

Inspired by visits to my study site, Cody decided to establish his own in our yard of low shrubs and fleshy ornamentals. Marking its corners with surveyor’s tape, he’d catch and release the anoles that lived there.

“Dad, I made a map of my study site!” he said, running up to me, home from my day in the jungle. He had watched me labor over my study-site map, then worked hard on his own in crayon and colored pencil. “Do you want to see it?”

“Yes! Of course, I want to see it!” I said, both delighted and impressed my four-year-old son had made his own map.

“Well, here are the corners. They have orange flagging.” He pointed to squiggly orange Xs. “And here is where I caught a cristatellus in this bush.” He moved his pudgy little finger to a green scribble that marked where he’d caught the brown anole with the orange dewlap and tail crest, an animal he recognized by its scientific name, Anolis cristatellus.

“And over here a grass anole lives by the fence. I caught him and let Jazzy hold him, too. She was careful, Dad,” he assured me. Both kids knew to hold the delicate animals by a toe with the creature perched on their fist. “And here”—he moved his finger to two parallel lines—“here is where the Ameiva lives. He’s big!” Unlike the svelte anoles that spend their time in trees or bushes, the fat-headed ameiva with its striped sides is a ground lizard that prowls the leaf litter for insects like a tiger prowls for deer: stopping, looking, moving on.