Dracula orchids, mushroom mimicry and other wonders of the Los Cedros Reserve

An evening with Bitty Roy, Biology Professor Emerita, Institute of Ecology & Evolution, University of Oregon. 7 till 8.30, Thursday Sept 5 at the Narara Ecovillage Village Hall.

DRACULA ORCHIDS, MUSHROOM MIMICRY AND OTHER WONDERS OF THE LOS CEDROS RESERVE -  "a kind of travelogue with lots of pictures about how I decided to do research there (on Dracula orchids that mimic mushrooms), what doing research there was like, how we (me and my students and Michael) fell in love with the place, and what we did to protect it when it came under threat."

A benefit for the Los Cedros Biological Reserve in Ecuador, sliding scale $5 to $100

Bitty is an ecologist who grew up four miles from the town of Aspen, Colorado, back before it was discovered and ruined by movie stars and lots of money. The Rockies have great flushes of late summer boletes, which line the mountain trails like pancakes, and contributed to her early interest in mushrooms. Her PhD included the discovery of a rust fungus that mimics flowers, which she followed up on with a National Science Foundation Fellowship at UC Davis. Her first professorship was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the ETH, in Zürich Switzerland, where she received tenure and continued her work on mimicry. She moved to the University of Oregon in Eugene in 2001, where she has divided her research time between Oregon and Los Cedros. She maintains species lists for Los Cedros for plants, mushrooms, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, amphibians and also a publication list (see: https://loscedrosreserve.org/los-cedros-reserve-species-lists/). She is an author on 12 papers about Los Cedros.

By way of background …. From John Seed:

The Rainforest Information Centre and I personally have been working in Ecuador since the mid 1980’s and one of our projects is the Los Cedros Biological Reserve which we helped create in 1988 with the help of a substantial grant from AusAID. Over the years we have “saved” Los Cedros over and over from all manner of threats like illegal logging, poaching and colonisation so that it is now, in the words of Bitty Roy, Professor of Ecology from the University of Oregon, “the best forested watershed in western Ecuador.”

In 2016 we discovered that a mining concession in Los Cedros had been secretly granted to a Canadian mining company. Further investigations revealed that this was the tip of a vast iceberg and Los Cedros was one of over 40 Bosques Protectores (protected forests) covering 750,000 Ha which had been surreptitiously handed to international mining companies. A million Ha of indigenous territories had been similarly conceded. Australian companies including BHP and Gina Reinhardt are among the “beneficiaries”.

Here is the  story I wrote 5 or 6 years ago which was published by The Ecologist and about 30 other publications worldwide.

Since then our court case against the Canadian mining company which set up operations at Los Cedros wound its way up to the Ecuadorean Supreme Court. Ecuador is the first country in the world to include the “Rights of Nature” in its constitution so our case was based on this. For the first time ever, 3 years ago, the court gave this clause teeth by ejecting the mining company setting a national and worldwide precedent (see The Guardian story) . Based on this precedent, several other natural areas have since ejected miners when lower courts utilised this precedent.

Photo: Los Cedros frog https://www.instagram.com/murr...