Sofo Partners With Stony Brook to Present a Film About Madagascar Rainforest

In 2016, Stony Brook University’s Dr. Patricia Wright, acclaimed primatologist, anthropologist and biologist, was introduced to an amazing parcel of land in southeastern Madagascar.

Wright, a conservationist and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow whose specialty is lemurs, has spent decades doing scientific research in the country. She is the founder of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE) which operates a number of research sites, including Center ValBio at the edge of Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park.

But on that day in 2016, it was a different part of Madagascar that she was introduced to — and she was totally unprepared for what she saw there.

“I got a phone call from a woman from Madagascar who had just finished her degree in ecotourism, and she wanted me to look at this site in her hometown,” Dr. Wright explained in a recent interview. “She talked about a cave that’s there, and she had seen bats and thought it would be a good place for tourists.”

Ecotourism is an important part of life in Madagascar. It supports local communities and fosters conservation near places like Ranomafana National Park, but upon seeing the cave in question, Dr. Wright felt that it would not be especially tourist friendly.

“Then I said to her, ‘You had mentioned a forest — can you take us there?’ So she took us to this big cliff and we looked down — and there was all that green.”

What Dr. Wright saw that day is Ivohiboro — 5,000 acres of untouched rainforest isolated atop Madagascar’s 4,921 foot Crystal Mountain. The rainforest is an island, both metaphorically and physically, surrounded by arid grasslands that are prone to frequent burns. But somehow, the forest has remained intact, thanks to its steep location which is not suitable for agriculture. In fact, Ivohiboro is likely one of the last primary forests on Earth and for Dr. Wright, it’s a mystical sanctuary that’s been hidden and untouched by time.

“It was shocking. I was with my guides from Ranomafana, they were crying and laughing. Then we heard those ring-tailed lemurs, it was so exciting,” she said. “I came back to Ranomafana and wrote to National Geographic and got the first grant, and we went back in the first six months, looked at the birds and plants and lemurs. But it’s a big area to cover on foot and we only saw a small part of it.”

It’s amazing that as late as 2016, there would still be a pristine rainforest virtually unknown to science. In the years since her first glimpse of Ivohiboro, it has become a major focal point of Dr. Wright’s research.

“From the scientists I’ve talked to, they had sort of seen it on a map, but they have never visited it,” Dr. Wright said. “We were the first to go. It was such a shock to see this vibrant forest and biodiversity.”

The story of that discovery is shared in “Ivohiboro: The Lost Forest,” an hour-long documentary by French filmmakers Laurent Portes and Fitzgerald Jego that follows Dr. Wright and a team of international young scientists who, in 2023, traveled by foot to the forest for an expedition to document every form of flora and fauna that they could find.

“We went into the tops of the canopy and into the streams and explored every aspect — not just one or two taxas,” Dr. Wright said of the expedition, which included herpetologists, ornithologists, entomologists and botanists, among others. “If you’re going to spend all the money to do that, you might as well get as much information as possible.”

On Saturday, April 26, at 11 a.m., Sag Harbor Cinema will screen “Ivohiboro: The Lost Forest” at an event presented by the South Fork Natural History Museum’s (SOFO) Young Environmentalist Society, in partnership with ICTE, and it will be followed by an in-person Q&A with Dr. Wright.

In a recent interview, Frank Quevedo, executive director of SOFO, explained that the screening came about thanks to Dr. Wright’s friendship with East End-based ecologist and author Carl Safina.

“Mare Dianora, who runs our young environmentalists group, reached out to Patricia to see if they could have the film shown here. She agreed, and we felt the cinema was the place to see it,” Quevedo said. “I can’t tell how honored I am to be a part of this and to be part of our organization and the Young Environmentalist Society. It’s kids taking leadership of the next generation and it’s pretty rewarding.

“This film has been seen at different documentary festivals and has won some awards. This is our first opportunity to show it to our local community,” Quevedo said. “This documentary is about a rainforest in Madagascar, but it’s also connected to the biodiversity of here on Long Island. They talk about insects being the foundation of biodiversity. It’s the same thing here – if we remove these insects, we’ll interfere with our life here.”

Dr. Wright is now 84 years old, and like all of the scientists on the Ivohiboro expedition, she had to hike up steep terrain to reach the rainforest where the group set up camp in tents at its edge. The film notes that she was more than seven hours behind her younger counterparts.

Then the scientists got down to work. Depending on their specialties, they rose at dawn to count the bird calls at first light, work the overnight hours in search of frog species or use fine mesh nets to capture a range of insect species. They also set 100 traps in the trees and other areas that were checked daily, and would bring their finds back to a tented research station to document their specimens.

One of the main issues impacting the expedition’s early days was a lack of rain, another effect of climate change, which made it impossible to find certain species that thrive under wet conditions.

Wildfires are also a threat to the region during dry conditions and a tense moment in the film comes when a large grassland fire breaks out near the northern edge of Ivohiboro. Beginning in 2019, Dr. Wright, in partnership with The Phoenix Conservancy, an organization of scientists who restore endangered ecosystems, had hired local villagers to dig a firebreak around the entire perimeter of the forest to protect it from burning. Alarmingly, the fires erupted near the last section where the firebreak had not yet been completed.

But fortunately, the heavens opened up, not only dousing the fires, but also providing researchers with the conditions needed to find Ivohiboro’s more water-loving species.

When asked to talk about the biology of the arid grasslands that abut the rainforest, Dr. Wright explained: “This is a very special place. There are only three villages at the bottom of the mountain where there are rice paddies and some cows. The reason why there is so much wasteland is this is an invasive grass. There’s no endemic species, no biodiversity.

“I’m convinced there used to be forest there, but the soil eroded and it is not rich,” she continued. “We’re encouraging the three villages to have better farming practices. They know that all the water they need comes from the forest. Because of that, they’re really willing and happy to protect the forest.”

Giving the villagers financial incentives to help protect Ivohiboro has changed their relationship to the forest and helped them take ownership of it.

“So now, we’re paying the villagers to create nurseries of tiny trees. Botanists collect seeds and it’s a whole different lifestyle for them,” said Dr. Wright, who explained that the goal is to use those tiny trees to expand the footprint of the forest. “The fires are of no economic benefit for them. We’re also going to do agroecology. We’re growing the trees and putting vanilla — a high value crop — inside the forest. We also found a special kind of high-value peppercorn. This black pepper is for the high end market and we had it tested by the black pepper association, and it came up as the highest quality in the world. So we’ll bring it to market.”

Now, thanks to a $1 million from the Rainforest Trust, the whole region around Ivohiboro is protected — a first for the area, which is about the size of Rhode Island. A committee, including Dr. Wright, now determines who may go into the forest and the villagers who live near it are fully invested in keeping it safe and healthy.

“It’s a community-protected area,” Dr. Wright said, “So have such great pride in it.”

It’s estimated that up to 90 percent of Madagascar’s forests are already lost, and those that remain, like Ivohiboro, are home to diverse populations found nowhere else on Earth. In terms of potential future ecotourism to the area, Dr. Wright says it’s a possibility, but only on a very small scale.

“You could maybe have high-end tourism and might want to charge them a bit more,” she said. “But it’s such a fragile place. You don’t want 30,000 tourists a year at this tiny forest. We want some guests who are willing to make some contribution — it’s a very fragile.”

Despite the fire danger that threatened the process, the scientific expedition, by all accounts, was a great success and Dr. Wright shared some of the team’s most spectacular findings.

“We found three new species of frogs,” she said. “That’s really important. Frogs are the canary in the coal mine. Because they live on water and land, they’re important climate change indicators – it’s nice we have these new species.

“We also found a new species of rosewood tree. That’s so important because it’s a precious hardwood.”

For Dr. Wright, personally exciting is the discovery of two new lemur species — a mouse lemur and a dwarf lemur — to add to the 107 lemur species already known to exist in Madagascar. Also found was the Lemur catta — the ring-tailed lemur — which is supposed to be found in the desert.

“To find them there was a surprise,” Dr. Wright said.

“We’re in the process of discovering the dwarf lemur,” she added, explaining that in order to name a new species, 20 different individuals must be identified in the field. The film shows Dr. Wright documenting the first one. “My post-doc student got a Fulbright to make sure we’re documenting all the individuals we need.

“It’s very important we recognize that not everything has been discovered yet,” explained Dr. Wright, who heads back to Ivohiboro on June 2, where she will remain until August to continue her research at a camp at the forest’s edge. “We have to put effort into exploring places like the lost forest. We have to think about taking those biodiverse places and expanding them. Protect them first and then expand them, but in a way that works with communities and makes it better.”

Quevedo argues that this documentary is very relevant to what’s happening on Long Island, given what the English settlers saw when they arrived 400 years ago, which was much different than today.

“We had in indigenous population, we had a different biodiversity that’s not here now. We had bear, wolves, bobcats, mountain lions and they controlled the core system here, there was a more healthy ecosystem here since the ice retreated,” Quevedo said. “When you run out those apex predators, it unbalances the ecosystem. We lost a lot of our prairie lands, maritime forest, the eel grass, pine barrens. It’s not here anymore.

“In this documentary, you can see how all the animals rely on each other for sustainability purposes,” he said. “It’s an untouched rainforest on an island that was once connected to the mainland — It’s an island on an island.”

Not unlike the East End.

“Our habitat is the same. Coyotes are wonderful swimmers. They’re filling the void that hasn’t been here for hundreds of years since the settlers wiped all the predators out. It’s a natural expansion of wildlife, which I love to see because we need those predators.”

In fact, Quevedo believes it’s inevitable that coyotes will one day populate the East End. He notes that last fall, a lone coyote was captured crossing in front of a wildlife camera on the trails behind SOFO in Bridgehampton.

“Predators rule from the top down,” he said. “They’re so important for the state of stability and I think you would see an upgrade in the health of the ecosystem if they were here.”

“Ivohiboro: The Lost Forest” will be screened at Sag Harbor Cinema on Saturday, April 26, at 11 a.m. Admission is free and the film is presented by the South Fork Natural History Museum’s Young Environmentalist Society (YES), in partnership with the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE). It will be followed by a Q&A with primatologist and conservationist Dr. Patricia Wright. Admission is free, register at info@sofo.org. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor.