600 New Species Discovered in Madagascar

However, the diversity of Madagascar is threatened. Hundreds of species on the island is extremely vulnerable.

More than 600 new species discovered on the island of Madagascar in the last 10 years. However, their survival is threatened due to the more complete human solid in rehab mereka.Hal was delivered in a report issued by WWF environmental agencies, was launched from the pages of The Guardian. Among these new species are 385 kinds of plants, 42 invertebrates, 69 amphibians, 61 reptiles and 41 mammals. Most attention is the mouse lemur Berthe, bodied as long as 10 cm and weighing just 30 grams, this beast is the world's smallest primate. There is another golden orb spiders that build webs up to one meter in diameter, and geckos that have a tail like a leaf to disguise it from predators. Mark Wright, nature conservation adviser at WWF, said that biological diversity in this world's fourth largest island thanks to the separation of this island with the main island, Africa. Separation that occurred during 80 million this year, Wright said, making evolution happen rapidly. "This is a strange island. Placemark geography help shape the species. Mountains in the middle, in the east of the island there are rain forests. But in the west is very dry. So island We have varieties of environments ranging from wet to dry environment environment, "said Wright.Namun, the diversity of Madagascar is threatened. Wright said that hundreds of species on the island is very vulnerable, especially because of widespread residential community in recent years. Residents, she said, still use firewood for cooking and building houses. This will cause damage to the forest habitat. Due to this behavior, in the last 20, Madagascar lost more than one million hectares of forest. Wright said that forest protection should also be the responsibility of the local population. One way to generate a desire to protect forests is to provide incentives to citizens for every land they protect. "If they do not have a way to meet a living, of course they will switch to the natural resource sector," said Wright.