Unearthing Indonesia’s Diversity

Posted on September 17th, 2010 at 9:54 am by Akhyari

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Incorporating 17,000 tropical islands, Indonesia is one of the world’s richest areas of biodiversity. Over half of this biodiversity remains unrecorded with only 20 of the more than 400 regencies in the country recording species.

It is estimated that as many as 300,000 animal species are inhabit its many ecosystems. This equates to 17% of worldwide fauna species, these across only 1.3% of the world’s landmass. With 515 species, Indonesia has more species of mammal than any other nation. There are 1539 bird species and 50% of all the world’s fish species can be found in its marine and freshwater systems.

Few years ago, scientist from several countries found ‘the lost world’ where new species were discovered. Amazingly, those animal had never been known nor even recorded in any literature. GNFI had previously posted the stories about this matter.

We found another discovery of new species in the Kalimantan jungle.The discovery of four new species of spider in Kalimantan was announced yesterda, adding to the country’s already rich catalog of fauna.

The four new species of whip spiders, or tailless whip scorpions, known here as kala cemeti , were found in the Sangkulirang caves in East Kalimantan and around Mount Muller in Central Kalimantan.

One of the species was named Sarax yayukae, in honor of Yayuk R. Suhardjono, an Indonesian scientist specializing in cave biology who helped the researchers during their work.

Sarax sangkulirangensis was found to be the most widespread of the new species, existing in three regions — Talabar, Lake Tebo and Pengadan.

Sarax mardua, which was found in Mardua Cave in Pengadan, has a pale-colored body and eyes that are smaller than those of Sarax sangkulirangensis.

The last of the new species, Sarax cavernicola, got its name because it is found only in caves.

It is considered the most unique of the new species because the spine composition on its pincers are all the same length, while other whip spiders have gradually longer spines.

Cahyo warned that three of the species endemic to the limestone regions of Sangkulirang were threatened by human activity, including mining and land redevelopment.

Source :

The Jakarta Globe

Mongabay.com

Tempointeraktif.com

Kaskus.us

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