But you don’t have to go into the forest to find diversity.

The research station has a kilometre-long airstrip, and its borders are thick with climbing squash vines descending from the trees. A team of scientists led by Marty Condon from Cornell College collected some 3,600 flowers from these vines, all belonging to just two species. They found entire worlds.

The flowers were home to 14 species of fly, which lived nowhere else. “When we go out in the field, we collect every flower, fruit and stem of this group. These particular flies have only come out of these two plants,” says Condon. Most were even restricted to either the male or female flowers of their chosen plant.

There was