While this lasts, it has me fully in its grips. The feeling is like being in love. Captivated. There might be all sorts of scary things happening in the wider world, but I am fully here. Flinging myself at this moment of light, with abandon.
I am at a research station in the Ecuadorean cloud forest called Los Cedros. By the time visitors arrive here, after the hour and a half hike up to the station, no one can be in any doubt that they are in Wonderland: hyper-diverse, extraordinary, dripping, gleaming, enchanting, teeming. The ornamentation of every surface in the forest with infinitely variable life. Over 300 tree species per hectare, enormous trees with buttress roots, soaring up through multiple levels of understory. Whole universes of life: fungi, orchids, bromeliads, lichens, mosses, vines, lianas. Strangler figs like cages from some dark fairy-tale. Strange and massive fruits casually strewn about on your path… You get the picture. And this is before you even get to the creatures.
I’d known about Los Cedros for a while. It has an almost mythic status around the world for people trying to figure out novel ways to conserve nature. It is famous for its astounding diversity, for sure - (I mean the place has its own rainfrog* that changes from spiky to smooth and back while you look at it!) - but even more so as a sort of poster child for the Rights of Nature movement. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to change its Constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. But this law remained untested until eleven years later, when José DeCoux, the man who founded Los Cedros, went to court to defend it against mining incursion using this new law. Amazingly, in 2021, the case was victorious. In one move, the Ecuadorian Supreme Court’s verdict turned the Rights of Nature from a constitutional idea into a practical reality. Los Cedros, though still vulnerable to threats, glows bright in the firmament of nature conservation.
Two decades ago, before I had children, I spent years studying spectacled bears in a cloud forest in Bolivia. So I was prepared for a lot in the way of the magic. But on our first night here, by about an hour after dark, it became clear that this was magic of another order of magnitude. The moths here, (a typo made that “The mothosphere”, which I love), both in numbers and diversity, are beyond anything I have ever imagined. Sometimes in places of high biodiversity it can all feel a bit theoretical. Here it is laid out right before your eyes in the most spectacular fashion with the moths.
The research station at Los Cedros has a small generator and there are a few LED bulbs providing light in the evenings to the open pavilion-style building where people congregate. The bulbs are mounted on wooden posts which hold up the roof. Around these bulbs, for reasons still unknown to science, plays out a drama so familiar we don’t really question it: moths are attracted to the lights.
As they do all over the world, they form a frenzy - whirling dervishes, seemingly intoxicated by the light, battering and exhausting themselves - some to death. Positive phototaxis. (It is thought that moths navigate partially by maintaining an oblique angle to the moon, but their attraction to lights remains a mystery.) Whatever the explanation, when the moon is in a dark phase, the light is irresistible.`
I’ve always liked and been interested in moths. Nine of ten members of the Lepidoptera are these shadowy creatures of scent and of the night, leaving the showy butterflies to soak up all the sunshine, and the love of humans. (There are on the order of 160 thousand species of moths in the world, but the damage to wool and other fibres caused by a handful of species has ruined the reputation of the whole lot. So to me they’ve always had a sort of underdog, under-loved appeal.)
And I love how they are slaves to scent - to the sex pheromones, usually, but not exclusively emitted by the females to attract the males. (It is very charming to me that while the females produce their pheromones at the top of their abdomens, the males do it in what are called “hair pockets”). I love how not only can they produce their powerfully alluring pheromone, but also another one specifically to cancel the first should smelling like a sex-god not be convenient for whatever reason.
Each species has a blend of compounds that makes up the their signature scent. The exact recipe has been worked out for over 500 species, the first being the silk worm, Bombyx mori, in 1959. Most of the compounds in the blend are synthesised from scratch by the body of the moth, but it can be more complicated than that.
There are moths with symbiotic relationships with specific microbes who manufacture other compounds for their pheromones inside the moths’ bodies. Accept that, and then imagine a creature evolving over tens of millions of years to create the perfect scent to drive their intended lovers wild with desire. Then imagine that somehow this moth discovers that they can make use of the particular toxins of a certain plant, not only to add exquisite notes to their signature pheromone, but also to repackage those toxins as a “nuptial gift” to give to that lover, who will then use said toxin to coat their eggs as a protection against predation.
So when I am looking in amazement at the scores and scores of moth species flying around and spangling the posts around the bulbs at Los Cedros, I know that I am looking at not just the warp, and the weft of the fabric of nature, but at the intricate embroidery thereupon. The intense, long-morphed and calibrated inter-relationships of scent, of light, of pollination, of symbiosis.
When I went to bed that first night at Los Cedros, all I could think about were the moths. I had never seen anything like it. With Andean bears, you see one, once and count yourself lucky for a lifetime. With birds you see one and then another, maybe occasionally a mixed flock at migrating time, or a handful of species of waders for example. But here were literally fifty to a hundred species of moths all on one post - every imaginable variation. (Wings like stained glass in a cathedral? Another example. Pompoms on the feet? You think that’s weird? Hold my beer...)
For the time being, and I hope this will change soon, there are cats resident here, and they take a terrible toll on the stunned and exhausted moths. There were the bodies of these beauties littering the floor, not quite dead. There was one particular moth that was close to collapse, and I kept using a piece of paper to lift it to places to rest where the cats couldn’t get to it. My secret hope was that if it didn’t live to fly back into the forest where it belongs, it would be dead somewhere safe from the cats, so I could collect its exquisitely beautiful wings. I am not proud of this desire to possess, but it hardly marks me out as unusual. (I used to do taxidermy for the biology lab at Guilford College, and the collecting of specimens seems very natural to me.)
By the time I came for breakfast, the floor had been swept and there were no moths’ bodies anywhere to be seen. Crest-fallen, I volunteered to be on sweeping duty from then on, and have been up early every morning since to sweep and search for evidence of their brief magnificent little moth lives. There is a small display of wings taped into my notebook - in no way as beautiful, but a memento. A memento mori. Memento mothi.
Moths serve as important nocturnal pollinators, and many species have larval food plants upon which they depend exclusively. You know the cycle: the eggs are laid on particular leaves; the hatching larvae eat the leaves; the larvae turn into larger caterpillars (which are often more spectacular than the adult); the caterpillar eventually makes a cocoon in which their bodies turn to soup and are somehow reassembled as the adult moth which bears no relation to the form of the caterpillar. An inconceivable miracle.
Moths actually helped me with a metamorphosis in my own life. I had been working at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology since I finished my PhD. It is a wonderful place, and I am still very proud to be associated with it, but when I had my second child it became clear that academia wasn’t the right fit for me.
In a local junk shop in my town, I saw a set of four pretty wooden chairs, made by a wonderful old English company called Ercol. The back of each chair was comprised of three pieces of carved wood with holes, known in the trade as ‘pierced splats’, surmounted by a curved plain piece. For some reason the shape of the pierced splats reminded me of the life cycle of moths. I set about choosing twelve British moth species to depict, all the way from the eggs and larval food plants, to the perfect flying adults.
Underneath I painted all sorts of information about moth conservation. This set of chairs led me to be discovered by a company who displayed them in London and then commissioned me to paint a piece of their furniture for the big interiors show, Decorex. (That one on Fungi.)
Et voila, with the help of the moths, I managed a rapid metamorphosis from conservation biologist into someone far more creative - an artist of sorts, in my own nature-obsessed conservation-focussed sort of way. So I owe them.
Liz Downes is an activist conservationist from Tasmania who has been supporting Los Cedros for many years. She arrived at the research station a few days into our stay here and has matched my moth-delight “ooo” for “ahhh”. Liz has a moth expert friend who, via WhatsApp from Tasmania, was able to help us with a few queries. For example, Liz found what she thought was a rectangular moth and was instantly set straight that this four-cornered shape was actually two triangular moths, mating, one on top of each other, top to tail. (The mechanics of this position I don’t begin to understand, but I love how you can see the antennae of both partners rotating in an alternating beat, one clockwise, and the other anti-clockwise).
There are probably thousands of moth species at Los Cedros and certainly a great many are undocumented, undiscovered, and new to science. There is strong encouragement here to upload all images of moths, as well as other species, to iNaturalist to help up the numbers of species found here. This helps science and helps justify the preservation of Los Cedros, always vulnerable to threats of invasion from mining and subsistence agriculture. The speed with which specialists jump on iNaturalist to aid in identification is incredible. Both the moth intel from Tasmania and the iNaturalist community were positive examples of the other moth metaphor that has been playing on my mind.
The attraction of moths to light, how it destabilises them, makes them crazy, makes them forget what is really important - it all makes me think of how we humans are so easily hijacked by these glowing rectangular devices we all now have. How, to use a metaphor from this new cyber-dominated world we now inhabit, they hack our operating systems.
It is remarkable to me how contented, engaged, simply happy I feel, surrounded by this nature, from the micro-moths to the moss to the mountains themselves. None of us here have been snacking, using our phones, even listening to music. We don’t feel we’re missing anything. Research into how Nature boosts wellbeing (see studies by my friend, the amazing Zoe Davies, for one) has never been my particular area of interest, and I know I am already a card-carrying nature lover, but wow is it profound in me. It just restores me to factory settings (to borrow another cyber metaphor) and that natural state is reverential and full of the joys. I feel held, one molecule amongst infinite numbers of molecules, in a colloidal suspension, where the molecules are free to move but in a close relation and communion with each other - with more than human life.
Coincidentally, for the conclusion of this post about moths, I have to tell you about the following: many of the people involved with Los Cedros are part of the The More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project, based at NYU. Lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, designers, artists, all trying to find ways to bring the more-than-human world, the “web of life that sustains us all”, into the centre of social, moral and legal concern.
The MOTH (More than Human) Festival of Ideas kicks off tomorrow in NYC. It’s a lot of travelling, but I’ll be there. Cosmo Sheldrake, who composed a beautiful piece of music about Los Cedros, lyrics by Rob MacFarlane and further artistic input by the forest itself, will also be performing. (So much to tell you about - but you can read more about the legal bid to have the forest recognised as song co-creator here and check out Song of the Cedars). It’s all just irresistible. After all, moths can be brought together by minute amounts of pheromones, across a kilometre of dark swirling forest…
If you are interested in visiting Los Cedros, and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, please be in touch with them - all details on their website.
This is a joy to read and imagine . Loving the textile references too ! Oh that I could visit !!
Well this was a delight to read!