Moving once again along the picturesque paths in the Mossy Forest, we look around and catch sight of something new that naturally appears in this living, changing system. From season to season, visiting familiar places, we see flowers, small creatures, and new heaps of fallen trees. We observe how long-fallen trees gradually deteriorate, with some of their nutrients returning to the forest floor to almost immediately replenish the soil. Dead wood serves as a habitat, food, and water source for many terrestrial and aquatic species, and it is also a substrate for new plants, including trees. Rotting trees teem with miniature life forms: bacteria, insects that consume the wood and carry fungal spores deep into the tree, and fungi that use the hardest parts of the wood as food.

So, as we contemplate the cycle of nutrients in the forest ecosystem, we walk along the river path and come upon the remains of a once huge tree, now broken down by decay. About a quarter of its former height, the tree's skeleton, almost black in the high humidity, still stands vertically. On the "slope" of this dark mass, a nutrient-rich substrate, we spot tiny “eggs” that resemble those of geckos, scattered randomly on both vertical and horizontal surfaces where the rotten wood has already crumbled. This is on the shady side. On the lighter side, where the sun hits, small, elongated mushrooms grow, resembling miniature stinkhorns. Their yellowish mesh legs, even those growing vertically, bend downwards, ending in a brownish “bell.” On mature and apparently the most fragrant stinkhorns, you can see tiny flies. This time, I didn’t check the mushrooms for smell; it was inconvenient to get too close to the rotting tree skeleton, which was standing in a hole washed out by water. From photographs, it was later determined that our find, the stinkhorn mushrooms, is Phallus drewesii. The most amazing thing is that this mushroom is endemic to the African island of São Tomé and was first discovered outside this island, in Asia, in Bidoup Nui Ba National Park in 2009.