a notebook and jotted down his observations
about the abundance of leaves, flowers, and
fruits. He rates each of the trees he surveys on a
scale of one (sparse) to four (abundant).
Nearly every month for the past 25 years,
Dimoto has hiked through patches of forest at
Lopé to monitor its trees, which bear a spectac-
ular variety of fruits ranging from avocado- to
watermelon-size. In his very first week on the
job, a gorilla charged him. The experience was so
terrifying that Dimoto told his colleagues, “I’mturn seems to be causing forest elephants to
go hungry. Some are so undernourished that
their bones poke into their thick hides. Because
certain tree species depend on the animals to
survive, the struggles of the elephant population
could jeopardize the long-term sustainability
of the forest.
“Even in a place like Lopé National Park,
where we have very little human pressure and
very low density of population, wildlife cannot
escape the impact of human activities—that
being climate change,” says Robin Whytock,
an environmental scientist at the University of
Stirling in Scotland and one of the authors
of a 2020 paper describing these findings in
Science magazine.
ON A SUNNY, HUMID MORNING, I joined Edmond
Dimoto, a field researcher with Gabon’s national
park agency, on a hike through a lush forest on
the slopes of a mountain called Le Chameau,
since it’s shaped like a double-humped camel.
Dimoto, a man of muscular build, had
swapped his shoes for knee-high rubber boots.
Treading carefully on a trail still damp and slip-
pery from the previous night’s rain, he snipped
tendrils and vines in his path with a pair of prun-
ing shears. The forest hummed with the sounds
of insects and trilled with birdsong.
Stopping by a tree, Dimoto pointed out ants
crawling on the trunk. Their bites were horribly
painful, he told me: “Your arm will swell up like
a balloon for a day.” We decided to move along,
stepping over branches and fallen logs as we
climbed. He showed me an elephant’s footprints.
Still fresh, the markings showed that the animal
had slipped in the mud.
Dimoto came to a halt in front of a tree known
as an Omphalocarpum procerum, which was
dotted with doughnut-shaped fruit sprouting
out of its trunk. The fruit has a tough shell that
makes it unpalatable for every animal species
except elephants. They use their head like a
battering ram against the tree to shake off the
fruits. Then, with stunning dexterity, they pick
one up with the tip of their trunk, cradle it in a
crook of the trunk, bring the fruit close to their
mouth, and finally pop it in with a deft push
from the tip.
Sweat trickling down his neck, Dimoto peered
through binoculars at the canopy above. He gazed
up and down, doing a quick count of the number
of fruits. After a couple of minutes, he took out
JUST AS ELEPHANTS
DEPEND ON THE
FOREST, MANY OF
LOPÉ’S TREES RELY
ON ELEPHANTS
TO DISPERSE SEEDS.110 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC