I’ve spent years walking Mashpi’s trails almost every day, and the forest still never stops surprising me. But what I want to share today isn’t a story from the field: it’s a scientific finding that confirms something we had suspected for a long time — the Mashpi-Tayra Reserve is the most biodiverse place on the entire planet.
I’m not saying this out of hometown pride. A newly published scientific study corroborates it, and I want to explain, in plain language, what was found and why it matters so much to us.
What Exactly was Found?
In a study recently published in the journal Scientific Data, part of the Nature group, researchers documented that, at a single site within the Mashpi-Tayra Reserve, they found more than 8,000 distinct genetic units of flying arthropods — a number scientists consider, in practice, roughly equivalent to distinct species. Of those, 7,848 are unique: they haven’t been found anywhere else in the world.
Let’s take this step by step, because I know it can sound very technical.
Let’s Start with the Basics: What is an Arthropod?
An arthropod, in this case, is simply an insect. And “flying” speaks for itself.
Insects are the largest and most diverse group of animals on the planet, both in number of individuals and number of species. They are, quite literally, the foundation that sustains life on Earth. Bees pollinate, dung beetles recycle nutrients, woodlice clean the forest floor, ants build soil… and hundreds of other species each play their own role.
What’s fascinating is that many of these functions overlap between different species. That redundancy is exactly what sustains biodiversity, allows larger animals (us included) to exist, and gives the whole ecosystem its stability and resilience. The greater the variety of insects filling these roles, the healthier and more resilient the forest is.
A Bit More Science: What is a “Genetic Unit”?
Here’s the most novel part. In this study, species were not identified by looking at their shape, size, or behavior, as has traditionally been done in taxonomy. Scientists identifies species through their DNA.
Every organism carries a kind of genetic fingerprint, known in science as a BIN (Barcode Index Number). Today, DNA can be sequenced automatically and at massive scale. With the help of computational analysis, distinct genetic units can be identified based on how different their genetic code is from one another.
This lets us see biodiversity at a different scale, and much faster than the traditional approach. That’s why most of these 8,000 genetic units still don’t have a name and haven’t been formally described by science. We know they exist, we know they’re unique, they have a BIN number, but for now, their genetic fingerprint is literally all we know about them.
Our Team’s Valuable Contribution
These results come from just one year of sampling, between 2020 and 2021, and were made possible thanks to the work of Mashpi’s Research and Biology team, which kept the monitoring going even during the Covid-19 pandemic. It wasn’t an easy year to do fieldwork, which is why this result carries special meaning for all of us.
And the numbers speak for themselves: Mashpi surpassed the records of sites as iconic as Guanacaste, in Costa Rica, and Barro Colorado, in Panama — two of the most studied places in the entire Neotropics. That places us among the most relevant biological sites for understanding what we call “invisible biodiversity”: all that tiny life that sustains the forest and usually goes unnoticed.
In Ecuador, the same study was replicated at the Pululahua Geobotanical Reserve, in Pichincha, and at Cerro Blanco, in Guayas along the Pacific Coast, all coordinated by INABIO (Ecuador’s National Institute of Biodiversity).
Science Done as a Team, with Global Reach
The methodology used here is part of the Global Malaise Trap Program, an initiative led by the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada, which brings together sampling sites in nearly 50 countries. What’s interesting about this program is that it standardizes how samples are collected and automates the processing of results, to understand how insect communities change over time in the face of environmental transformations around the planet.
The study was led by Ecuadorian entomologist Ana García-Ruilova, together with a large team of Ecuadorian co-authors. Ana oversees the entomological collection at INABIO, which serves as the bridge between our country and the Canadian institutions that lead this program globally and contribute the technological component. All the data is freely available through the international platform Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD), so that researchers anywhere in the world can access genetic sequences, images, and georeferenced records.
What this Means for us
As Mashpi’s Director of Research and Biology, I can’t help but feel enormous satisfaction seeing these results. They confirm, with hard data, something we’ve believed all along: that this forest holds an exceptional richness of life, much of it still waiting to be discovered and described.
As Roque Sevilla, founder of Mashpi Lodge and president of Fundación Futuro, put it so well:
“These results are incredible, and they reinforce our commitment to keep caring for this magical forest. They push us to study the region further, and to keep building on our model of collaboration, of engagement based on mutual interests, to understand and protect life.”
— Roque Sevilla, founder of Mashpi Lodge, president of Fundación Futuro
This is only the beginning. We will keep monitoring new traps, keep collaborating with national and international institutions, and keep sharing with you everything this forest continues to teach us.
