LEO STERNBERG'S TROPICAL WORLD, REAL AND IMAGINED

Drawing Conclusions

ut in the field, studying the root systems of tropical plants in Brazil or the uptake of water by saplings in an Amazonian forest, University of Miami biologist Leonel da Silveira Lobo Sternberg is solidly rooted in the immutable realities of botanical science.

But when the grant is written or the finals graded, Sternberg enters the realm of imagination. With his colored pencils, drawing upon his undergraduate training as an artist, the ecologist brings his dreams and fantasies to life in surreal scenes. One piece, drawn to illustrate work by his brother, Canadian poet Ricardo Sternberg, shows bees as honey-powered rockets flying into the petals of a sun-like flower. Another, inspired by a dream, shows a rhinoceros traveling on a savanna, a large butterfly on his back.

“It is more illustration than anything else,” Sternberg says. “The closest style would be folk art, and there’s definitely a Latin American influence.”

The recent winner of a prestigious Guggenheim Award, Sternberg is a native Brazilian who came to the United States at age 14, eventually settling with his family in Berkeley, California. Although his graduate and postdoctoral work focused largely on desert ecosystems, he was eager to join the University’s biology department in the College of Arts and Sciences, which was building a reputation in tropical biology.

“Here was an opportunity,” he recalls, “to study the wonderful ecosystems I had known in my childhood.”

This summer, Sternberg returned to Brazil to begin his Guggenheim-sponsored field work to determine whether tropical plants with roots growing in the huge mounds created by “leaf cutter” ants fare better or worse than plants in undisturbed soil. The minute pieces of leaves carried by these persistent ants have been labeled with stable nitrogen isotopes and will eventually become part of the nutrients taken up by surrounding plants. Sternberg will map the route of the isotope through the anthill, root system, and plant. Understanding how plants assimilate nutrients, he says, may help improve reforestation efforts.

At first glance, surreal art and research on subterranean root systems seem at odds. Not at all, Sternberg says. Both deal with the “unknown world.” Just as stable isotope studies reveal what is unseen in the physical world, surreal art reveals what lies below the conscious mind.

As a high school student, Sternberg recalls being fascinated by an art form in which a geometric object was hidden behind darkened glass in a pinball machine-like structure. Only by shooting metal balls at the artwork and seeing where they bounced could the observer deduce the shape of that object.

“Root work is like that,” Sternberg says. “You can’t look directly at the roots because if you pull the soil away, it will kill the plant. Instead, you introduce isotope-labeled material into the plant and start deducing the formation of the roots from where the isotopes show up.

“It’s a hidden world,” he says. “And you have to know special techniques to find out what is in the hidden world.”

— Joan Cochran