This is the best summary I could come up with:

The smell of damp earth and vegetation rises as Alan Rockefeller takes slow, careful steps, scanning the forest floor with an ultraviolet light.

Mandie Quark kneels in the wet, spongy earth, carefully digging her fingers around the entomopathogenic fungus to unveil the insect nestled beneath the surface: a thumb-sized beetle.

Rockefeller and Quark carefully collect data by photographing and cataloguing each specimen for submission to the national herbarium in Quito and eventual DNA sequencing.

They work alongside the Indigenous Sacha Wasi community, who have invited the scientists to operate on their land, exchanging information on different fungi species and their culinary or ecological potential.

The pair’s methods include macro photography with focus stacking, a technique that captures every intricate detail of a mushroom, as well as recording the microscopy of the spores and generating DNA “barcode data”.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

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