Rare species discovered deep within Cambodian mountains

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The rugged Annamite Mountains, which stretch across Laos, Vietnam and northeast Cambodia, are renowned for their rich biodiversity. Nestled in the southwest of the range lies Virachey, Cambodia’s largest national park.

The remote region is vast, covering more than 3,000 square kilometers, yet despite it being a protected area, it is largely unexplored and understudied. The first comprehensive biodiversity survey of the park was published on Tuesday, revealing the rare and threatened species that live there, including the Sunda pangolin, the clouded leopard and the sun bear.

Led by conservation organization Fauna & Flora, which describes the Annamites as the “Amazon of Asia,” the survey also documented nine species that have never been recorded in Cambodia before, such as the critically endangered large-antlered muntjac, Sokolov’s glass lizard and the Vietnamese leaf-toed gecko.

“The area had been virtually unexplored and there was almost no information about the biodiversity of Virachey National Park,” Pablo Sinovas, country director of Fauna & Flora’s Cambodia program, told CNN over a video call. “We found several threatened species that, by definition, are not doing very well globally or within the country. This park has the potential to provide a good stronghold to make sure that they don’t go extinct.”

“In a way, it’s kind of a Noah’s Ark of wildlife,” he added.

But the park faces a range of threats including deforestation, forest degradation, habitat fragmentation and snaring (using thin wire nooses to catch animals). Over the past three decades, Cambodia has lost more than 30% of its primary forest cover, and despite being established as a national park in 1993, investigations by non-profits claim to have uncovered large-scale illegal logging within Virachey.

Sinovas hopes that the biodiversity data will help to strengthen the management of the park and conservation strategies. “(The survey) confirmed the relevance of the area as a biodiversity hotspot and put some of these species on the map, so to speak, which means we can conserve them in a more targeted way,” he said. “It’s the first step: knowing what is present is necessary to be able to protect it.”

“Rare and exciting”

The remoteness of the park made gathering data a challenge, so the team used a range of methods over several years, compiling multiple studies. It worked closely with local indigenous communities, who Sinovas said “know the forest best,” but even they had never set foot in some of the areas that were being surveyed.

More than 150 camera traps were deployed to record elusive species, such as the large-antlered muntjac, which was caught on camera in 2021. While the deer species was first described in 1994, it had previously only been documented in Laos and Vietnam.

“To find a large mammal in a country for the first time is really quite rare and exciting,” said Sinovas.

The camera traps also helped identify threats, for instance the presence of domestic dogs in some areas and the use of snare traps; some threatened species, like the Asiatic black bear and the northern pig-tailed macaque, were photographed with missing limbs.

The team extracted DNA from water samples and tested it to reveal the presence of 161 species, including the dwarf loach (an endangered freshwater fish), the Asiatic softshell turtle and the Asian black bear. It also carried out specific population assessments for some species, such as the northern yellow-cheeked crested gibbon, an endangered primate only found in forested areas of southern Laos, northern Cambodia and central Vietnam. The survey estimated that there are around 2,000 groups of gibbon in Virachey National Park, making it the species’ most important stronghold.

Sinovas also highlighted the park’s value in providing a livelihood to local people and as a carbon sink.

“This park sits at the core of one of the largest forests in mainland Southeast Asia: that’s important for biodiversity, but also for climate in terms of carbon absorption,” he said. “It’s also important from a human perspective … around the borders of the park, there are indigenous communities that had been relying on the natural resources from the area for a long time. It is essential that those resources are preserved and continue to be managed sustainably.”

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