Walk through some forest patches in the southern Western Ghats and you may notice that the ground suddenly looks different.
The soil under your feet stays wet. Small streams cut through the forest. Some trees appear to be standing on roots that spread out like stilts, while others have thin, finger-like roots sticking out of the mud.
And then comes the surprising part: the whole forest patch you are looking at may cover only a few hundred square metres.
These are Myristica swamps, rare freshwater swamp forests that survive in scattered pockets of the Western Ghats.
On a map, many of them would barely stand out. But these tiny forests can store water, help recharge groundwater, keep streams flowing and provide a home for plants and animals found in few other places.
Some are smaller than a playground.
And many are disappearing.
A 2026 paper by Ashwin Sivasankar and P R Divya in Current Science describes Myristica swamps as among India’s most primitive and threatened wetland ecosystems. In Kerala, the remaining swamps are now scattered across fragmented patches around Kulathupuzha, Anchal and nearby areas.
To understand why losing them matters, it helps to begin with something you can actually see: their unusual roots.
Why do these trees have roots sticking out of the ground?
Leave most trees with their roots underwater for long enough and they will struggle to survive.
The trees growing inside Myristica swamps have adapted to do exactly the opposite.
These forests are dominated by trees belonging to the nutmeg family, Myristicaceae. Among their characteristic species are Myristica magnifica and Gymnacranthera farquhariana.
Because the soil remains waterlogged and contains very little oxygen, their roots have developed unusual ways of coping.
Some spread wide like stilts, helping the trees stay upright in soft ground. Others rise above the soil as specialised breathing roots called pneumatophores. A few bend upwards in shapes that look almost like knees.
They may appear strange at first, but these roots are what allow the trees to live in a place where many other forest species cannot.
And there are fewer and fewer places left where you can see them.
According to the Kerala Forest Department, Myristica swamps occupy only about 0.004% of Kerala’s land area. Yet these tiny pockets support several species that are endemic to the Western Ghats.
Known sites include Kulathupuzha, Shendurney, Arippa, Madathara, Palode and Anchal.
Scientists have been studying them for decades. The first scientific records from the former Travancore region go back to the 1960s, when botanist and forest officer Krishnamurthy documented Myristica swamps around Kulathupuzha, Shendurney and Anchal.
Once a swamp stops staying wet through the year, its characteristic species can struggle to regenerate. Photograph: (Dhritiman Mukherjee/Via natureinfocus)
But their importance becomes much easier to understand when you look beyond the trees and follow the water.
A forest smaller than a playground can help keep a stream alive
Rainwater falling on a Myristica swamp does not simply rush away.
It settles into the low-lying ground and moves slowly through the wet soil, plants and streams around it.
That ability to hold on to water is one of the reasons these forests matter well beyond their boundaries.
Sivasankar and Divya note that Myristica swamps can help regulate floods, recharge groundwater and maintain streams that continue flowing through the year. Their waters also provide habitat for freshwater life, including endemic fish and amphibians.
So when one of these forests is damaged, you do not lose only a group of unusual trees.
You can begin changing the water system around it too.
Researchers in Karnataka have seen how quickly that can happen.
M D Subash Chandran and Divakar K Mesta of the Indian Institute of Science documented 51 Myristica swamps in southern Uttara Kannada. Together, they covered only about 9.8 hectares.
Nearly half were smaller than 500 square metres.
For perspective, that is less than a tenth of a football field.
Yet several were already losing the very thing that makes them swamps: water.
Researchers found that 17 were losing their year-round wet conditions because streams had been diverted. Another 21 faced pressures such as tree-felling, burning and the conversion of land for agriculture.
Once the water disappears, trees and other species that depend on permanently wet conditions may struggle to grow back.
Which means a swamp can begin dying even while many of its trees are still standing.
Sometimes, changing the direction of a stream is enough.
What can possibly live inside such a tiny patch?
If you saw a forest covering only a few hundred square metres, you might assume there would not be room for much wildlife.
A study from Kerala suggests otherwise.
Over two years, researchers studying Myristica swamps in Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary recorded 206 species of butterflies. Nineteen of them were endemic to the Western Ghats.
The researchers also found 82 plant species that butterflies use as larval host plants, where they lay their eggs and where caterpillars later feed. Twenty-seven of those were new host records for the Western Ghats.
It is a reminder that the size of a forest tells you very little about how much life it can hold. A tiny patch of wet ground can support hundreds of butterfly species, freshwater animals, specialised trees and the plants on which all of them depend.
A two-year study of Myristica swamps in Kerala’s Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary recorded 206 butterfly species. Photograph: (Dhritiman Mukherjee/Via natureinfocus)
And in some places, these forests are still standing because people protected them long before anyone calculated their ecological value.
Some swamps survived because a village chose to protect its forest
Across the Western Ghats, several old forest patches survive as sacred groves, protected by local communities because they hold religious and cultural significance.
That relationship has sometimes protected rare habitats along with them.
In 2024, researchers Pravin Desai, Vishal Sadekar and Shital Desai documented a previously unrecorded Myristica swamp inside the Bhalandeshwar Sacred Grove in Dodamarg, Maharashtra.
During fieldwork between November 2023 and January 2024, they found a swamp dominated by Myristica magnifica.
The surrounding grove continues to be protected by villagers because of its religious importance.
Researchers described it as only the second reported Myristica swamp from Maharashtra.
The discovery also leaves an interesting question: how many more of these forests could still be hidden inside small patches that scientists have never documented?
Finding them, however, is only one part of the challenge.
Their tiny size makes them especially vulnerable.
A Myristica swamp may depend on a single stream and a few hundred square metres of wet forest. Divert that stream, clear the vegetation around it or change the surrounding land, and the conditions that kept it alive can disappear.
Planting the same trees somewhere else would not simply recreate the swamp.
The ecosystem works because many things come together in one place: the trees, the permanently wet soil, the streams, the surrounding forest and the wildlife that depends on them.
That may be the simplest way to understand why Myristica swamps matter.
Some are smaller than spaces we walk past without a second thought.
Yet inside them, water is being stored, streams are being fed and species found almost nowhere else are finding a place to survive.
For a forest that takes up so little space, there is a great deal to lose.
