208 Plant, Animal Species Discovered in SE Asia

The Mekong River continues to be an untapped trove of natural wonders.

Over the past year, 208 new species of plants and animals - from a psychedelic gecko to a monkey sporting a hairdo awfully similar to Elvis – have been discovered in the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia. The stretch of land around the Mekong River as it snakes down from China into Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam is among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, as these latest discoveries have borne out. But years of strife and oppression in the region have left great swaths unexplored in recent decades. The "Elvis" monkey, for example, a small, black-and-white, snub-nosed simian, had been well known by locals but not to the international scientific community. Another of the new discoveries is species of lizard that only has female members that reproduce by cloning, essentially. Another is a multicoloured gecko that looks like something out of Salvador Dali's wilder fantasies and is found only on one small island off the coast of Vietnam. All told, according to the World Wildlife Fund, 145 plants, 28 reptiles, 25 fish, seven amphibians, two mammals, and one bird were discovered, although many of the species in the region face the threat of extinction.