Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
When researchers began cataloging dragonflies in Guainía, a remote region in eastern Colombia, the scientific record contained only about 10 species. By working with Indigenous communities, they’ve found nearly 120.
“When we started, very little was known,” Yiselle Cano, biodiversity leader of the Dragones Guainía project, told contributor Manuel Fonseca for Mongabay.
“I think we must be close to 120 species by now,” Cano said. “It’s a hugely diverse group, because it includes dragonflies native to the Orinoco, Amazonas, and dragonflies that are endemic to the Guiana Shield.”
The diversity makes Guainía a hotspot for dragonflies and damselflies. It may also provide insights on what is happening to the region’s water. These insects depend on healthy freshwater ecosystems, and their aquatic habitats are coming under growing pressure from mining, deforestation, poorly managed waste, and rapidly expanding tourism.
Cataloging the insects was only part of the work. Once the researchers had begun filling gaps in the scientific record, they held workshops to share their findings with local communities. There they encountered another gap: the language of biology meant little to people whose understanding of the landscape had been formed outside scientific taxonomies. Some participants didn’t speak Spanish at all.
Community leaders invited everyone, from young children to elders who retained ancestral knowledge. As researchers displayed the dragonflies found around puddles, streams, and rivers, participants tried to identify them in their own languages.
“This is something that sometimes leaves us speechless,” Delio Suárez, a Tucano Indigenous leader of the multiethnic community La Ceiba, told Mongabay. “This leaves us with the task of recovering their names, of looking back and asking the last remaining wisdom keepers that we have.”
Sometimes the words could be recovered. Sometimes they had to be invented. In the community of Remanso, members of the Puinave tribe created names in an ancestral language that is itself at risk of disappearing. Tucano and Curripaco communities have also begun naming the insects while working to recover their languages.
Communities are now developing their own means of monitoring dragonflies and, through them, the condition of the water on which they depend.
A male dragonfly from the genus Perithemis, also known as amberwings. Image courtesy of Jenilee Montes.
Read the full story by Manuel Fonseca here.
Banner image: Guainía, also known as the land of many waters, is a remote biodiversity hotspot at the meeting point of the Amazon Rainforest, the Orinoco River Basin, and the Guyana Shield. Image courtesy of Jenilee Montes.
