Our knowledge of the limnology of the waters situated, roughly, between the tropics of cancer and of capricorn, has depended for a long time on the expedition-approach, and therefore developed in a rather irregular, haphazard way, with the personal incentive of a small number of individuals as the main driving force. Things slowly started to change in the 1950s, and at an accelerating rate in the 1960s and 1970s. The IBP, and later the SCOPE and MAB programs, whatever their shortcomings are or may have been, promoted in-depth research of a small number of tropical lakes. For one thing, they...