- Although used for centuries by the Cacua Indigenous people in Colombia, the táam palm was, until recently, unknown to science. During fieldwork in the village of Wacará, two botanists were offered to eat a fruit they had never seen before, so they set out to discover what species it was.
- With help from the Indigenous community, they were able to find the palm and collect samples in line with the Cacua people’s approach to conserving the plant.
- Lab tests showed that táam was a palm species previously unknown to science that researchers named Attalea taam. After the discovery, the botanists returned to the community and started a participatory process to study the palm’s ecology and distribution.
- Several members of the Cacua community co-authored the scientific paper describing the new species. By relying on Indigenous knowledge and mapping, the researchers say they have obtained better results than through using just a Western scientific approach.
In 2025, botanists Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Juan Carlos Copete embarked on a two-hour boat ride down the Vaupés River in the Colombian Amazon, followed by a two-hour hike to the village of Wacará, where about 140 Indigenous Cacua people live in relative isolation. They were aiming to study the medicinal plants used by this Indigenous group, one of the smallest in the country.
But their plans changed as soon as they had their first meal in the village of thatch-roofed houses, when some children offered them a yellowish-brown fruit the Cacau called táam. Although the duo had been studying tropical plants for more than a decade, they had never seen that drop-shaped fruit before.
Initially, they thought the fruit might be from a palm tree introduced to the region from nearby Brazil. However, as they spent more time with the community, they realized it was likely an entirely new species of palm that had not yet been described by scientists.
“We knew most of the plants we would encounter in the forest, so when we saw that fruit, we were extremely shocked and surprised,” Cámara-Leret, a professor in tropical plant diversity and ethnobotany at the University of Zürich, tells Mongabay.
Discovering new palm species in the Amazon is rare, even more so one that is tall-stemmed and used in the human diet like the táam. Palms are among the most well-known species of the region and were extensively studied by European naturalists who explored the jungle between the 16th and 19th centuries. So Cámara-Leret and Copete were eager to collect material to describe the new plant. However, unlike their predecessors, they also decided to involve the local community in the process, learning from them and formally acknowledging their contributions.
“Historically, Indigenous and local peoples have been super important for botanic studies, helping scientists to find and collect specimens, but they rarely receive recognition for their knowledge or appear in papers as authors,” says Copete, a botanist and Ph.D. student at the University of Zürich. “This was the perfect opportunity to change things.”
Guided by a hunter and three elders, the researchers ventured into the dense forest to search for the palm tree that produced the sweet-and-sour fruit they had tasted. After walking a few kilometers, they found the 20-meter- (65-foot-) tall trees with their large crown of erect, long green leaves.
Together with the Cacua, they collected and preserved some fruits, leaves, flowers and other plant parts to bring to the lab to confirm whether it was really a new species. Since for the Cacua, it is indispensable to wait until the fruits are mature before eating them, the team collected only one fruit cluster that had fallen onto the ground, leaving the young ones untouched.
Analyzing the samples under a microscope revealed the palm was indeed unknown to science. Unlike other palms of the Attalea genus, they have a stem with well-marked orange-brown ring-shaped leaves and their flowers have little hairs on the petals and only three stamens (the pollen-producing filaments inside the flower).
Despite being very common and abundant in the region, the palm likely remained unnoticed by scientists until now, perhaps because there hadn’t been many plant collections in the area inhabited by the Cacua, the researchers say. At first sight, the species can also easily be mistaken for other palm species already catalogued locally. Collecting its material for study is also challenging, as the táam can be more than 20 m tall, with leaves up to 12 m (39 ft) long.
“It was totally amazing to have these results because it was the combination of traditional and scientific knowledge that made it possible,” says Copete, noting that to the Cacua, this was not a discovery of a new species but the recognition of their wisdom.
In late 2025, the researchers returned to Wacará with the news and were ready to engage the community in the research. They started a participatory process to study the plant, including its ecology and distribution.
Throughout the year, some Cacua people conducted their own hikes to photograph and map táam’s distribution and found six populations previously unknown to the community. Later, in a communal workshop with the scientists and an illustrator, Cauca locals of all ages contributed their knowledge to draw a detailed map of their village and the palm’s distribution.
The map, published alongside the species description in the journal Phytotaxa, presents a geographical depiction based on the Cacua’s perspective of their landscape, as many of the rivers and hills in their territory lack conventional names or are not registered on official maps.
“Had we relied on conventional national cartography, this would have been a dry GIS map with a dot in a landscape of unnamed hills and unnamed creeks,” Cámara-Leret says. “The Cacua-led map, and the whole process for that matter, shows that scientific Western knowledge together with the traditional knowledge of Indigenous and local people leads to better results.”
The manuscript describing the new species was also translated into Spanish and Cacua and shared with the villagers for insights or, as Cámara-Leret called it, an “Indigenous peer-review” process. The Cacua suggested several corrections and added new information, such as the animal species that consume and help disperse the plant. Four Cacua people were featured in the paper as co-authors, and the palm was named Attalea taam, in reference to its Indigenous traditional name.
For Aida Shafreena Ahmad Puad, a botanist devoted to tropical plants at i-CATS University College in Malaysia, who did not participate in the research, the study represents a genuine partnership rather than the usual mere consultation with Indigenous peoples.
“It is really remarkable,” she tells Mongabay in a video interview. “This should become the standard model for biodiversity research conducted in Indigenous territories. When Indigenous communities are involved not only as guides but as co-researchers and co-authors throughout the process, including manuscript development, it strengthens both the scientific integrity and the ethical foundation of the work.”
As far as the scientists and Cacua villagers know, the taám palm grows only in the region. For centuries, the Cacua have been harvesting the fruits of the palm to eat its meat and seeds as well as using its orange-brown leaves to build thatched-roof houses and its stems to build raised racks where they dry cassava.
“It’s a very important plant for us because we all eat it,” says Samuel López-Perez, a Cacua farmer and co-author of the study. For Perez, who has been eating the taám fruit since he was a kid, the plant was common and ordinary until the researchers showed interest in it. Since the collaborative research, however, he and other villagers have begun seeing the plant with new eyes. They are now considering extracting palm oil for cooking to replace oil bought outside the village.
The collaboration also rekindled Perez’s willingness to deepen his studies. At 60, he is now trying to enter the nearest university to study natural sciences. “This is the first time I have my name in a publication, and now I will have more access and opportunities to study and help my community,” he tells Mongabay.
This type of collaboration also contributes to biodiversity preservation, according to Elliot Gardner, a botanist at Case Western Reserve University in the U.S., who did not take part in the research. Gardner himself led a 2022 study with the Iban people of Borneo, which confirmed that the Indigenous community correctly identified two tree varieties as distinct species, while science had previously classified them as a single tree.
“Indigenous communities have crucial knowledge about species in their environment that may be unknown to science,” he says. “This collaboration allows for the scientific description and naming of new species, and that is the first step to getting a species protected. If a species does not have a scientific name, no one is going to pay attention to it.”
Banner image: Cacua members drew a map of their community and surroundings, highlighting rivers, hills and the spots where the táam palm grows in the forest. Image courtesy of Rodrigo Cámara-Leret.
Citations:
Copete, J.C., López-Pérez, S., López-Gallego, J.C., López-Navarro, D., Pavón, H., López, L., … Cámara-Leret, R. (2026). Attalea taam—a new palm species well known by the Cacua Indigenous People. Phytotaxa, 739(1), 83-93. doi:10.11646/phytotaxa.739.1.5
Gardner, E. M., Ahmad Puad, A. S., Pereira, J. T., Tagi, J. A., Nyegang, S. A., Miun, P., … Zerega, N. J. (2022). Engagement with Indigenous People preserves local knowledge and biodiversity alike. Current Biology, 32(11), R511-R512. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.04.062
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