38 Scientific American, November 2019

PRECEDING PAGES: FELIPE VILLEGAS

Humboldt Institute

F

at purple clouds had been gathering all day above cubará,

kicking up a dusty wind and cloaking the forested hills in shadow

and mist. When the rain finally came, it came as a torrent, ham-

mering metal roofs, overflowing ditches and transforming roads

into rivers. A team of biologists, freshly arrived from Bogotá,

could do little besides huddle on a porch in anticipation of their

mission: find and document as many bird species as possible.

Not since 1961 had such a survey been undertaken in this

remote northeastern Colombian town, primarily because until

a few years ago, it was simply too dangerous.

Cubará is in the center of an infamous no-go zone, an area

that was notorious for frequent clashes among guerrillas, para-

military forces and the Colombian army. In 2016 the govern-

ment signed a cease-fire agreement with the Revolutionary

Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel

group, bringing an end to the longest-running conflict in the

Western Hemisphere. Although gunshots no longer ring out,

memories of the violence are still at the forefront of many peo-

ple’s minds. As Cubará’s vice mayor told me when we met, “Con-

gratulations for making it. Just a small number of people come

here because everyone is afraid of visiting.”

Now that a delicate peace has arrived, Cubará—and thousands

of other Colombian towns like it—is slowly coming back to life.

The fighting’s end marked a new beginning not only for commu-

nities eager to rebuild but also for the scientists at the Alexander

von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, an inde-

pendent nonprofit group that hopes to finally take stock of its na -

tion’s formidable natural history. Sandwiched between two conti-

nents and two oceans and crossed by both the equator and the

Andes, Colombia contains 311 different ecological zones, from rain

forests and mountains to mangrove stands and coral reefs. Al -

ready researchers have documented nearly 63,000 species there—

a whopping 10 percent of global biodiversity. Only Brazil has more

species than Colombia, and it is more than seven times larger.

This abundance was obvious even while the team took shel-

ter from the rain. Tropical kingbirds flitted around a streetlight,

and invasive giant African snails inched along the porch. A bee-

tle as large as a human hand scuttled by, probably on the search

for a mate, and a grapefruit-sized toad lapped up dinner from a

cloud of termites. A strange wormlike creature that biologist

Orlando Acevedo-Charry snatched from the flooded driveway

turned out to be not a snake or a caecilian, as he originally

hypothesized, but a marbled swamp eel.

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance journalist and author of Poached:

Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking (Da Capo Press, 2018).

She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

IN BRIEF

Colombia has some of the highest biodiversity in

the world. But a half-century of conflict blocked

field research, and science stagnated. A 2016 peace

treaty opened up regions once inaccessible, and

biologists are racing to catalogue new species.

Scientists from Colombia’s Humboldt Institute are

in a unique position to show how preserving the

richness of biodiversity can be a core building block

of a sustainable economy. They are making policy

recommendations to the government.

Peacetime also ushered in rapid deforestation.

So Humboldt scientists are urgently promoting an

economy rooted in industries such as agroforestry

and ecotourism, which will help rural areas recover

and grow without destroying the environment.

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