In 2017, when Vincent Deblauwe joined the Cameroon-based Congo Basin Institute (CBI) to study African ebony (Diospyros crassiflora) — economically valuable pitch-black, dense wood — the Indigenous Baka people accompanied him on his field trips. As they sat around campfires and trekked through the rainforests, Deblauwe tapped into their knowledge of flora and fauna, especially about ebony trees and their dispersal. They all told him that one animal was responsible for the ebony tree’s future survival: the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). Deblauwe observed that in forest patches without elephants, young ebony saplings were few and far between. Over the last three decades, relentless poaching, fueled by the insatiable demand for ivory in China and Southeast Asia, has plunged African forest elephant numbers by a whopping 86%, pushing them perilously close to extinction. However, the long-term impacts of this mass slaughter on the region’s trees remained largely unknown. In the years that followed, Deblauwe and his colleagues braided the Baka people’s knowledge about ebony and elephants with spatial, genetic and experimental data on ebony trees, providing the first convincing evidence of a mutualistic relationship between the two species, now published in a new study in the journal Science Advances. The researchers teased out why elephants play such a vital role in maintaining ebony trees in the forests. When elephants eat the large, pulpy ebony fruits and excrete the seeds, their dung protects those seeds from rodents and other animals that would otherwise eat and destroy them. Ebony fruits, with fibrous pulp…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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