Madagascar What's So Special?

A typical person knows nothing about Madagascar beyond an awareness of the animated movies of that name and a resulting conviction that the country gives refuge to penguins. Africans do slightly better.

- Ken Behrens

Most of them know that Madagascar is a big island off the east coast. But those who visit can be baffled by the place, finding that the wildlife they’re familiar with on the mainland is not replicated here. A suite of ferocious predators has been swapped for a family of odd, mongoose-like carnivorans; in place of the herds of herbivores are gentle, arboreal lemurs. Most travelling birders are aware of the island’s several endemic bird families, including species that are drastically different from anything on the African mainland.

Madagascar is profoundly unique and rich, so different from the rest of the world that it’s sometimes called ‘the eighth continent’. Not only does it have the high level of endemism characteristic of islands, but it also boasts remarkable diversity, which for some groups approaches that more typical of a continent. Despite having only 0.4 per cent of the earth’s land area, Madagascar holds about three per cent of the global tally of plant and vertebrate species, and the vast majority of these are endemic. The island is a treasure trove of biodiversity and a ‘laboratory of evolution’, much like Galápagos but on a grander scale. Visiting it is almost like travelling to a parallel universe, in which evolution has been free to run wild on a completely different course. If only Darwin had made it to Madagascar…