Hundreds of New Species Discovered in Eastern Himalayan Region

More than 350 new species — including the world’s smallest deer, a flying frog, and an ultramarine blue flower that changes color in response to temperature — have been discovered in the past decade in the eastern Himalayas, according to the conservation group WWF. But in a report entitled “The Eastern Himalayas: Where Worlds Collide,” WWF said that many of the species are threatened by human development and by rising temperatures that are rapidly melting the region’s glaciers and endangering water supplies. The conservation group said that among the new species discovered between 1998 and 2008 are 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds, two mammals, and at least 60 new invertebrates. The eastern Himalayas — which include eastern India, Nepal, Bhutan, northern Myanmar, and parts of Tibet — are one of the most biologically diverse regions on earth, yet rapidly expanding human populations have left only 25 percent of the area’s original habitat intact, WWF said. Tariq Aziz, head of WWF’s Living Himalayas Initiative, also said that the region’s biodiversity risks being “lost forever unless the impacts of climate change are reversed.”