A SOLITARY SCIENTIST PROBES AMAZONIA
By Jane E. Brody
THE setting in the Cuyabena Nature Reserve in Ecuador is a biologist's paradise: more than 500 species of birds, spiny palms that are the center of a self-contained ecosystem, vines like the ones Tarzan swung on, jumping piranhas, blind river dolphins, elusive manatees, quicksilver squirrel monkeys, iridescent- blue morpho butterflies, indefatigable leaf- cutting ants, 400-pound fish, frogs, snakes, lizards, turtles, wild pigs, giant rodents, jaguars and prehistoric caimans that fill the night air with plaintive territorial grunts. ''It is said that the rain forest has more eyes than leaves,'' remarked Eduardo Asanza, who has lived at Cuyabena for six years, studying caimans, and knows most of the animals by their sounds and the traces they leave on land and water. Dr. Asanza, the only scientist working full time in this lush region of the Upper Amazon Basin, is known among citified Ecuadoreans as ''the crazy biologist'' for having chosen to live like a jungle boy in the remote rain forest, a full day's ride by motorized dugout canoe from the nearest road. When his mother died last year, it took five days for a helicopter to find him. He eats like a native Indian: mainly bananas and manioc boiled and mashed into a milky porridge, papaya, grapelike cecropia fruits, fish, and occasionally the meat of wild animals like monkeys, pigs, capybara, snakes and caterpillars.