Narara Ecovillage Education is presenting Dracula Orchids, Mushroom Mimicry and Other Wonders of the Los Cedros Reserve, an evening with Professor Emerita Bitty Roy, University of Oregon, at Narara Ecovillage Hall on September 5.
It will be a benefit for the Los Cedros Biological Reserve in north-western Ecuador, one of the most biologically diverse and endemic habitats on Earth.
Roy is an ecologist who grew up in Colorado, where the Rockies have great flushes of late summer boletes which line the mountain trails like pancakes and contributed to her early interest in mushrooms.
Her PhD included the discovery of a rust fungus that mimics flowers, which she followed up on with a National Science Foundation Fellowship at UC Davis.
Her first professorship was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where she received tenure and continued her work on mimicry.
She moved to the University of Oregon in Eugene in 2001, where she has divided her research time between Oregon and Los Cedros.
Roy maintains species lists for Los Cedros for plants, mushrooms, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, amphibians and also a publication list and is author on 12 papers about Los Cedros.
Narara Ecovillage’s John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre have been working in Ecuador since the mid 1980’s including the Los Cedros Biological Reserve which they helped create in 1988 with the help of a substantial grant from AusAID.
Over the years, Los Cedros has been saved over and over from all manner of threats like illegal logging, poaching and colonisation so that it is now, in the words of Roy, the best forested watershed in western Ecuador.
The presentation is on from 7pm to 9pm and the coffee cart open from 6.30pm for drinks and treats.
Tickets from https://shorturl.at/TXc4z