(photo by John Sutter: Makira National Park in northeast Madagascar is home to incredible biodiversity. You can see some of the forest near the park burning in the top right part of the image.)
By John Sutter
An Oklahoma State researcher has gotten lots of media attention for untangling the secrets of a tiny chameleon in Madagascar. Furcifer labordi lives a high-speed life that’s much more like the life of a plant or an insect than a reptile: it dies in a year, and spends much of that time trapped inside an egg.
It’s an all or nothing existence. The chameleon has one chance to mate. One chance to reproduce. It only has one season to survive. It operates like an annual plant, spreading its seed before dying off. That may be a survival technique, since the chameleons live in a harsh desert environment that would be tough to live through anyway.
Kris Karsten, the recent PhD graduate at OSU who did the research, told me the discovery shocked and excited him in part because it’s proof that humans know so very little about this planet of ours. People have known F. labordi existed for more than 100 years, Karsten said, but no one knew about its bizarre life style until just recently.
It’s that sentiment–the idea that so much of the world is unexplored, and everything we do know seems worthy of our reverence for its incredible complexity–that pushed me to move to Madagascar last summer.
The huge Indian Ocean island, just off the coast of Africa, is known for its incredible biological resources. Most species of chameleons in the world live only in Madagascar and nowhere else, to site just one example. The whole island, which has been on its own evolutionary track for millions of years, seems a Dr. Seussian adventure. There are beetles with periscoping necks, geckos that look exactly like tree leaves and palms that poke their fronds up in a perfect line. It’s wonderful and amazing. And, in some ways, tragic.
Much of Madagascar’s natural resources have been exploited, and conservationists say more than 80 percent of the island is now deforested. When you fly over the central highlands, you see why people call it the Red Island: the iron-rich red dirt is visible everywhere. But there aren’t simple causes or solutions. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on earth, and locals burn down the forest to plant rice paddies so they can feed their families. Or they plant a few cash crops, and sell them at market to get money for food. Environmental groups say the burning practices are unsustainable and are ruining the soil, but some locals say the burning is part of their culture. Foreign groups are trying to teach more sustainable farming practices. They seem to be catching on well in some areas, and are largely ignored in other places.
One thing seems clear about the burning practices: when an acre of land is lost in Madagascar, species could go extinct. I spent a couple of weeks in the northeast part of the island near a national park called Masoala. There, biologists say you can find species of orchids and palms that exist in one valley on one side of one mountain. Nowhere else. If those patches of forest go, so do the species.
As you’ll hear in the podcast, there’s reason to be optimistic that Malagasy people can come to benefit from their rich natural resources. As mentioned, there is a government effort to expand protected land. But environmental groups are also trying to get carbon credits for local people who will protect virgin forest or replant land that has been burned.
All that aside, I found Karsten’s perspective interesting and refreshing. He showed a true appreciation for how complex nature is. When we take a minute out of our days to look at how amazing the details of natural systems are — that we’re still discovering new life cycles in species we know about, and are finding species we’ve never heard of all the time — then it’s hard not to be kind of impressed.
(PS: You don’t have to go to Madagascar to get that feeling. Did you know Oklahoma has more ecoregions than almost any other state in the country?)
