Critically EndangeredCoelacanth
Latimeria chalumnae
Africa
Madagascar has been separated from Africa for some one hundred and sixty million years and from the Indian subcontinent for about eighty-eight, an isolation so prolonged that around ninety per cent of its fauna and flora exists nowhere else in the world. The island strings together rainforest on the eastern slope, deforested highlands in the centre, dry deciduous woodland and baobabs in the west, and in the south a surreal spiny forest of succulents adapted to extreme drought. The lemurs, which here fill the niches of primates, squirrels and even woodpeckers, have diversified into more than a hundred species. To them are added half the world's chameleons, tenrecs that recall hedgehogs and shrews without being either, and the fossa, the island's largest carnivore.
National animal: No official national animal; the lemur is the island's natural emblem and the zebu its cultural animal
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur with a skeletal, greatly elongated middle finger that it uses as a tool: it taps the wood and listens with its enormous ears for the echo that reveals grub tunnels, gnaws the bark with rodent-like incisors and hooks the prey out with that finger. In doing so it fills the role played on other continents by woodpeckers, which are absent from Madagascar.
Deforestation through slash-and-burn agriculture and rosewood extraction has drastically reduced the original forest. The ploughshare tortoise, of which very few remain in the wild, is one of the most trafficked species in the world among collectors.
Andasibe year-round to hear the indri's song at dawn. Berenty and Isalo in the dry season for ring-tailed lemurs. Tsingy de Bemaraha between April and November.
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Same region: Southern Africa
Same region: Southern Africa
Same region: Southern Africa
Same region: Southern Africa
193 species found
Based on what we already know about Madagascar.
