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What is it like to work in the remote forests of Papua New Guinea? Biologist Vojtech Novotny knows better than most. He tells Rowan Hooper about dealing with disease and warring tribes in one of the most linguistically and biologically diverse regions on Earth

Tell me about your work in Papua New Guinea.
We鈥檝e built a research station on the northern coast of New Guinea, only 50 kilometres from Astrolabe Bay, where Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, the first modern biologist and anthropologist to work in New Guinea, spent more than a year in 1871-72. After almost 150 years, there are still great forests and coral reefs we can study. New Guinea is also the most linguistically diverse place on the planet and there are more than 20 different languages within a 20-kilometre radius of our station.

About 5 per cent of all species live in New Guinea. With the Amazon and the Congo, it is one of the three largest areas of rainforest still left. As well as that, I鈥檝e never seen such potential for close interaction with local people. And they actually own their forests, unlike in most other tropical countries.

Your approach is remarkable because of the level of integration you have with local people. How does it work?
We have a team of what we call paraecologists. These are people we train up in scientific methods and pay to work with us. The villagers are perfect for this. They not only have an intimate knowledge of the local geography, they also have an extensive knowledge of taxonomy, especially of the trees. We connect the Latin names with their local language names and then can say that we need caterpillars from this list of trees, could you get them for us?

Once we were studying tiny larvae that bore tunnels in leaves. I put a fairly high reward for every live insect. We were expecting that they might earn 拢5 a day, which is reasonable by New Guinea standards and by our budget. But embarrassingly, they found so many that we had to lower the rate because otherwise we would have gone bankrupt.

Does the financial reward cause problems?
New Guinea has a history of tribal wars, which are occasionally still going on, and yes, the money can cause problems. For instance, once we were working with three different tribes, so we had to try to balance the financial rewards that each tribe received. In the end we had to close that field station because there was a real danger of violence in the village.

Are there risks for you personally or is the violence restricted to the tribes?
We had a laboratory in a highland village where the tribe had a long-term rivalry with a neighbouring village working on a conservation project. The paraecologists from the neighbouring village decided to attack and completely destroyed the lab.

These sorts of competitive interactions are a bit different to what people in academic institutions in the west might be used to.

But the tribal wars are not a problem for researchers, because they are an internal affair. There are violent killings but people don鈥檛 really target outsiders. However, crime is common, mostly in towns, which can be a problem.

Sounds like you鈥檝e had experience with this.
We鈥檝e had men with homemade guns rob our lab. The problem in New Guinea is that you can be sure this will be repeated unless you can defend yourself. So we got some security guards and installed an alarm system. But criminals broke in, overpowered the guard and tried to break into the main door. That woke me up. I could have pressed the alarm button to summon the armed response, but this would only mean that the criminals would try again another time. In New Guinea you really have to restore balance. So what I did is鈥� I took the bush knife next to my bed and waited for them. At the moment they broke down the door I charged them with the bush knife.

鈥淚 charged them with the bush knife. They were extremely surprised鈥�

You鈥檙e crazy!
But they were extremely surprised. They fled. Since then we haven鈥檛 had a second attempt. This probably established our reputation of not being a typical non-governmental organisation: if there is this danger of expats going after them with bush knives, it鈥檚 a sign that there is something strange going on.

How do you communicate with local people?
Papua New Guinea has about 800 different languages, a really amazing diversity. Because different tribes speak different languages, they also speak one universal language, pidgin English. Once you learn that 鈥� and students can do so in one to six months 鈥� you can speak directly to the villagers. This is socially very rewarding. Both sides have fun, because there is a tribal culture and high-level academic culture which are coming together.

How has your presence affected the villagers?
Again, it is blending different traditions. If they get sick, we鈥檒l get medical help, which they don鈥檛 resist. They realise penicillin or whatever will cure them, but at the same time they have their sorcery investigation in the village to discover the cause of the illness.

How does this collaboration with local people help your research?
It opens up possibilities that others don鈥檛 have. For instance, we have contacts with people who own the forest that they cut down for their subsistence, slash-and-burn agriculture. We always like to shock our fellow biologists at conferences by describing how we are cutting down tropical forests so that we can survey insects from the canopy. But that鈥檚 exactly what we are doing.

What have you found?
When local people were clearing their part of the forest, we worked with them, slowly taking the forest apart, collecting caterpillars, ants, everything. We have devised a 3D structure of insects and plants in the forest. . Even for us ecologists, this is mind-boggling complexity. However, we ecologists also tend to get overexcited by the huge diversity we see in rainforests and extrapolate it to unrealistic numbers of species for the entire planet.

So your work has effectively reduced the species diversity of the planet?
Previous estimates put the number of insect species worldwide at 30 million. We put it at six million,, although in mitigation they were only hypothetical ones! We found that a tree species has about the same number of insect species feeding on it whether it grows in New Guinea or Europe: tropical forests are so rich in insects only because they have so many species of tree. We鈥檝e also been running experiments where we exclude ants from the forest.

Completely excluding ants?
We used special traps which only ants can access, laced with bait containing insecticide. We managed to remove about 80 per cent of them. We鈥檙e now analysing the data to find out what happened, ecologically. Nobody knows how the rainforests would look without ants, but soon we will know.

You鈥檝e worked in New Guinea for 15 years. It doesn鈥檛 sound as if you鈥檙e in a hurry to leave.
New Guinea changes people. Some decide to leave immediately, others will never leave.