Cocoa pollination in Cameroon, Africa
After searching for several years, Alma Sánchez Quiñones found an ideal place to earn her doctoral degree. Now, she is trying to answer the question: Who are the cocoa pollinators?
Sánchez took the videocall at her house. These days have been unusually hot in Durham, England, where she is studying. I can see that she is very content to talk about her work, but she also seems a little tired. She confesses to me that she has been working overtime in the laboratory.
She is a Mexican biologist working at Durham University on a project trying to determine who the pollinators of cocoa crops in Cameroon are, a question that researchers had been trying to solve for decades. One of the big obstacles to answering this question is that the size of the pollinator is very small, and the reproductive part of the cocoa flower is hidden, making it difficult to observe.
She believes that she can help solve this mystery by using molecular methods and techniques such as environmental DNA, which consists of the indirect collection of DNA samples from the environment, like soil, seawater or, in this case, from pollinated flowers. When insects land on the flower, they leave traces of saliva or feces, and DNA can be extracted from there. “This DNA technique, it’s what you use to solve a crime scene.” Sánchez said.
Once the samples are obtained, the Metabarcoding technique is used in the laboratory to determine which species are present in the sample. In this technique, a small, conserved DNA sequence “barcode” is used. Being conserved means that they are specific for the same species, in this case insects, and the sample can be separated between species of interest and the rest.
Sánchez is also trying to resolve other questions: if there is competition between pollinators, if birds or bats consume this pollinator, and for this, feces from these organisms are also being analyzed.
The project has a social purpose too. Once the species involved in pollination are determined, it will be possible to help preserve them. For this part, a series of surveys will be carried out on farmers to find out how much they know about pollination, show them which species they should conserve and guide them in the creation of microecosystems for the pollinators.
For Alma, moving to this laboratory was a long process. After finishing her master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in 2012, she had to return to Mexico because her scholarship demanded it. All that time she had in her mind to finish her degree, “Studying the PhD was in my plans. I’m not doing it for just for the degree, it´s simply because I don’t want to stop doing science.” she said.
She travelled to Durham in early 2020, having no idea of the upcoming pandemic. She had arrived with the idea of doing field and laboratory work and traveling to Africa was on the plans. It wasn’t ideal, but the lockdown helped her focus on reading papers and decide on the question she was going to solve. “I couldn’t believe they didn’t know. It was very shocking. With so many studies that have been done, so little is known. I was more pleased when I realized that with my skills and my experience I can, perhaps, provide a solution to the problem of elucidating who is the pollinator.” Alma said.
With the pandemic, her mental health was affected and made her fall behind in her research, which now makes her work at full speed. In addition, she was unable to do field work, which affected the perspective of the research. She had to train field biologists via Zoom, to collect pollinated flowers in Cameroon and send them to her laboratory. That was a great challenge because only 5–10% of the flowers are pollinated.
Outside the laboratory, she enjoys playing the ukulele, doing yoga, swimming, and taking long walks. Since her laboratory work requires her to sit for hours, it causes her back pain, so these activities help her reduce pain, stay active and de-stress.
Being 42 years old and about to graduate, she says she doesn’t regret doing it. “It doesn’t matter if I waited because I’m doing something that I really like. I’m very happy. Sure, I can be stressed and tired, but this is something I always wanted, it took me a long time to choose a project that I liked.” Sánchez said.
For now, she has preliminary results pointing to two families of insects, but she still has more flower samples to process. “I am satisfied to be able to use the tools in an innovative way, techniques that I learned in Mexico to resolve a question that no one has answered yet.”
