Tag Archives: photo of new species in Borneo
The Sunda Clouded Leopard in Borneo
The Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is the largest wild cat in Borneo and is classified as Endangered by the IUCN Red list of threatened species. Due to their nocturnal and cryptic habits they are seldom observed and very little is known of their basic ecology and distribution. This large Clouded leopard was photographed by remote camera trap in Malua BioBank as part of the Bornean Banteng Program which studies therare banteng(Bos javanicus lowi); the image was captured during the middle of the afternoon when temperatures are highest; an unlikely time for an observation.
The Bornean Banteng Program is a collaborative study between the Sabah Wildlife Department and Danau Girang Field Centre (Cardiff University), the Sabah Forestry Department, HUTAN, and New Forests Ltd. Baseline data on banteng ecology is primarily collected using remote camera traps kindly provided by Houston Zoo and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.
The Discovery Reveals New Species in Borneo
April 22, 2010 – A lungless frog (pictured above), a frog that flies and a slug that shoots love darts are among 123 new species found in Borneo since 2007 in a project to conserve one of the oldest rain forests in the world.A report by the global conservation group WWF on the discoveries also calls for protecting the threatened species and equatorial rain forest on Borneo, the South China Sea island that is the world’s third-largest and is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.”The challenge is to ensure that these precious landscapes are still intact for future generations,” said the report released Thursday.The search for the new species was part of the Heart of Borneo project that started in February 2007 and is backed by the WWF and the three countries that share the island.
The aim is to conserve 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) of rain forest that was described by Charles Darwin as “one great luxuriant hothouse made by nature for herself.”
Explorers have been visiting Borneo for centuries, but vast tracts of its interior are yet to be biologically explored, said Adam Tomasek, leader of WWF’s Heart of Borneo project.
“If this stretch of irreplaceable rain forest can be conserved for our children, the promise of more discoveries must be a tantalizing one for the next generation of researchers to contemplate,” he said.
