Finding Biodiversity (and Chocolate) in the Forests of Ecuador

As a person who spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and teaching about endangered creatures and environments, I craved something hopeful.

Early morning mist billowed across the blue-green mountains near Mindo, Ecuador, as our rental car bounced up a dirt road. It was May 2019, and my friend Drew and I were looking for a hiking trail in one of the most biodiverse regions left in the world.

Mindo is known to be a place with one of the highest species counts and is therefore one of the most exciting places to bird-watch. In 2017, during the 117th annual Christmas count, Mindo topped the charts with 456 species recorded. The superstars of the Ecuadorian bird world often spotted in Mindo include the red-headed Andean cock-of-the-Rock; the yellow-throated toucan with its impossibly large bill; the perky, long-legged giant antpitta; and the iridescent golden-headed quetzal.

Over a cup of coffee earlier, a local resident had suggested that there would be “birds near the waterfall.” So we were headed in that direction.

I will admit that the prospect of seeing beautiful birds enticed me deeply, but I was also driven by my taste buds and my work. Chocolate, one of my main food groups, thrived here, too, due to the unique climate and presence of special pollinators of the genus Forcipomyia. After the hike, I wanted to visit a particular chocolate farmer named Ernesto Campo.

In part, I just wanted to be awash in something that felt like it hadn’t yet been destroyed by human enterprise. As a person who spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and teaching about pollinators and their decline, and their connection to all endangered creatures and environments, I craved something hopeful. I was working on a new book about insect/human relationships and wanted to see some of these still-intact biodiverse regions up close, to learn what exactly was at risk, and also what was being done to keep things thriving.

I knew that mining and industrial agriculture frequently present a threat to biodiverse regions like this one. Both of these enterprises denuded landscapes, resulting in total destruction of ecosystems. Mindo itself had been slated for potential open-pit mining because it was a region purportedly rich in metals like copper, silver, and gold. Additionally, many areas near here were being deforested and replaced with palm plantations. I had come to Ecuador to see what this “biodiversity” looked like first-hand and to meet some farmers who were interested in trying to preserve places like this by thinking about farming differently, specifically with a practice of agroforestry, one which did not destroy forests, but coexisted with them.

That morning in Mindo, the forest lived, breathed, pulsed around us. We made our way cautiously down a steep muddy trail we had found on the side of the road—at times no wider than my foot—marked by a tiny hand-painted sign that said “Tanager Reserve.” The air was thick and moist. Moss covered stones and roots. Epiphytic bromeliads grew impossibly out of branches without soil or any obvious water source. Leaves of every size, from the size of a sparrow’s eye to palm leaves large enough to nap on, trembled in the breeze. Vines coiled up and around trees, tendrils of baby ferns unfurled their magnificent spirals.

The many shades of green were punctuated by bits of brightness: tiny red blossoms as bright as nail polish; delicate fronds hanging overhead ending in pouch-like pale pink flowers that looked like ballet shoes, which earned them the common name “lady slippers.” A larger turquoise-winged bird flew up suddenly out of hiding and swooped through the overstory. We glimpsed its red belly and long black tail—an Ecuadorian Trogon, probably sallying for insects or finding a new source of fruit to eat.

At a place where a stream crossed the path, we encountered dragonflies of several kinds and a giant red millipede as wide as my index finger and twice as long. I knew all around us were larger animals unwilling to show themselves to us, among them the coati, the kinkajou, the capuchin monkey, and the armadillo.

Drew finally spotted a golden-naped tanager, a bird he had been dearly hoping to see, which is known to have a unique symbiotic relationship with the Cecropia gabrielis tree. The towering tree with glove-shaped leaves produces a glycogen-rich food source, which is important for the tanager’s diet. But the bird also eats the herbivorous insects that would harm the tree, so both benefit the other. There were also many species we could not identify. I understood why people hired expert birding guides.

So this was what one kind of biodiversity looked like. This rich web of connections among such a wide range of species was in danger.

A few weeks before my trip, the UN published a riveting biodiversity report. Around the globe, newspapers suddenly bore shocking headlines: “A Million Species at Risk of Extinction.” The report, produced by compiling the studies of interdisciplinary experts, globally, issues a dire warning:

The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20 percent, mostly since 1900. More than 40 percent of amphibian species, almost 33 percent of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10 percent being threatened.

Delicate fronds hung overhead, ending in pouch-like pale pink flowers that looked like ballet shoes.

These declines are unprecedented. And certain insects are in trouble, too, many of the ones we count on. In the fall of 2017, a German study reported a decline of 75 percent of flying insects over a twenty-five-year period. Pollinators, including honeybees and native bees, have been shrinking in number. Pesticide use, habitat destruction, and climate change all contribute to the problem.

Losing them will affect diversity and availability of food for humans and non-humans alike. Insects are crucial for much of what we eat, but industrial agriculture is one of the threats to insects. And insects are the foundation of every ecosystem. Here, in Ecuador, so much was at stake. There were so many species to be lost.

While Ecuador is heralded as a biodiversity hotspot––some areas even given a designation of World Heritage Site––the truth is that much of this land was preserved when the country was enjoying an oil boom by drilling in other parts of the country. In the past, the government supported programs that encouraged keeping forests intact and keeping wildlife areas in conservation status. The economy changed, however, and the country was now looking to boost its revenue.

One solution was mining. While some see mining as a great opportunity, others adamantly protest these plans because of the ecological riches, ecotourism dollars, and indigenous territories that will be lost. Maps of the proposed and current mining treaties have been drawn. There are dozens in protected rainforest areas, including the space we were standing in. Industrial agriculture was another big threat.

Leaving the cloud forest behind, we drove to the coast. As the elevation changed, forests became less dense and the landscape less vertical. We passed roadside stands selling bananas, mangoes, and coconuts. Small towns made up of one-story cement block buildings with metal garage doors that opened up to stores offering everything from platano chips and brooms to auto mechanic services. We also passed hillsides that had been scraped clean of any growing thing. Some fields were still strewn with dead trees that had been cut down, but not yet been dragged from the fields, which struck me suddenly to be so much like fallen bodies after a horrible disaster.

Beyond these were billboards promising a palm paradise, and then we saw the vast acres of the palm plantations. The mono-crop was a landscape I knew well from driving past miles of cornfields in the midwestern US. Nothing between the rows. I thought of Mindo’s birds and insects. Each species had specific needs and played specific roles. Simplified chemical-dependent landscapes designed to grow only one plant or tree were antithetical to biodiversity. I couldn’t wait to meet the farmers who would teach us other ways of doing things.

In wetter weather, a river poured over the road to Ernesto Campo’s place, making it impossible to reach by car. We crossed a makeshift bridge and walked for an hour in the hot late-morning sun toward the small farm. Still drying out from the rains the night before, damp patches—left behind as puddles evaporated—covered the road. These patches attracted butterflies of every size and shape. Pewter blue, sky blue, bright yellow, white, orange, dark brown! Clouds of fluttering wings lifted into the air as we approached.

A simple arbor made of logs draped in magenta bougainvillea marked the entrance to Ernesto’s place. We walked down through a corridor of trees and flowering bushes to a clearing where he’d built his house. He and his daughter Lourdes greeted us with smiles. His vitality belied his eighty-four years. We sat on the porch of the house as they told us about their farm and the reasons for their organic, agro-ecology methods.

This farm did not conform to my ideas about farms from living in the midwestern US. There were no rows, no obvious division of species or types of tree or plant. And yet, he explained, his farm produced guava, coconut, bananas of many kinds, plantains, limes, passionfruit, pawpaws, oranges, mangoes, coffee, and chocolate. Many of these required insect pollination, and native insect species were abundant.

Behind the house, as some bananas––still in their peels––cooked over a fire, Ernesto showed us some trays of cacao beans, which require “5 times of sun” to dry out before they could be ground into the bitter cacao we would recognize. A few chickens poked the earth nearby for bugs.

Pewter blue, sky blue, bright yellow, white, orange, dark brown! Clouds of fluttering wings lifted into the air as we approached.

Ernesto and Lourdes are part of a group of farmers along the coast aligned to rehabilitate a forest corridor. The Corridor project, supported by an environmental group called Ceiba, was essentially maintaining and rejoining forest lands, so that habitats and soils would remain stable. The coast is home to a very unique ecosystem called a tropical dry forest. The integrity of a forest like this is often disrupted by logging, mining, and industrial agriculture. The agro-ecology model allowed the indigenous and local people to continue to obtain food from the forest while also keeping forests intact.

Lourdes walked us through “the farm,” which was essentially a forest. We walked past coffee plants and all kinds of fruit trees––banana, mango, pawpaw––until she stopped at one. This was the type of tree that supplied me with dark chocolate, hot cocoa, flourless chocolate cake, mole sauce. She wielded the machete she’d kept at her side with a decisive chop and sliced off a thick pod. Cut open, it was filled with oval seeds the size of quarters covered in a thick milky substance.

She directed us to put them in our mouths and suck them. The taste was sweet and subtle and tasted nothing like chocolate to me. These were the seeds that Ernesto would put in trays to dry in the sun. After they dried, they were opened, and the center was ground into a paste I knew to be unsweetened chocolate.

Chocolate plants have a special secret. Chocolate has a unique relationship, a beautiful symbiosis with one insect, upon which they are completely dependent for pollination. Cacao plants and their insect partners, the forcipomyia or chocolate midge, provided one powerful example of the co-evolutionary partnerships of certain plants and insects.

Without this specific type of midge, there would be no chocolate. While chocolate was thought to have been cultivated first in Mesopotamia, recent studies published in Nature Ecology and Evolution Journal, suggest pre-Columbian use of the plant. The human relationship with chocolate in Ecuador is thousands of years long, but we don’t often talk about our non-human conspirators, the midges.

The flowers of the cacao plant are incredibly fussy and very small, 1-3 millimeters, so small that most other pollinating insects will not be able to access the delicate parts important for pollination. The midge is small enough, measuring 2-3 millimeters, and very, very hairy––its antennae look like witches’ brooms––and this is good for these finicky flowers.

The midge is also good at navigating the complex anatomy of the somewhat chaste chocolate flowers. Strangely, the tallest, most erect parts of the flower, the staminodes, are not pollen producing. The pollen-producing male parts of the flower, the anthers, are hidden by hoods that must be uncovered by the hairy midges. The styles, the female parts, which want the pollen, are located in the middle of the tower of staminodes. The midge is the only insect who has successfully evolved to satisfy this coy plant.

These midges only thrive in a very specific climate, one with lots of shade and moist soil. As we face a warming climate and radical shifts in ecosystems due to industry and agriculture, these are insects at risk. But a place like Ernesto’s provided everything they needed to survive.

Maybe if enough of us shift our habits, if farmers like Ernesto and Lourdes were supported, if we could be more thoughtful before cutting forests down and made conscious decisions about what we consume, maybe then we could keep earth’s intricate and fragile kaleidoscope of living beings intact.

After eating some roasted bananas to sustain us on the road home, Drew bought a bag of cacao and a bag of coffee, while Ernesto told me about his plans for his next birthday, which would include lots of dancing. His great health, he claimed, was from eating organic food and refusing to eat red meat. His huge grin and merry eyes were convincing enough for me.