🚀 go-pugleaf

http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1565276.htm

'Lost world' may be Earth's last

Anna Salleh
ABC Science Online

[photo] Owlet nightjar  This owlet nightjar is one of the species found in
the 'lost world' of West Papua, a world where animals show no fear of
humans (Image: Bruce Beehler/CI)

  The lost world largely untouched by humans that was recently unearthed on
West Papua may be the last such find on Earth, an expedition scientist
says.

His comments follow the discovery of a world teeming with new species, giant
flowers and rare wildlife showing no fear of humans.

Australian, US and Indonesian scientists, led by Conservation International
(CI), say they found the 300,000-hectare paradise in the Foja Mountains of
the Indonesian-controlled province during an expedition late last year.

The local Kwerba and Papasena people, who are customary landowners of the
forest, acted as guides and naturalists.

"The first bird I saw when I got out of the helicopter turned out to be a
new species of honeyeater," says team member Kris Helgen.

The bird was an orange-faced honeyeater, a bird with a bright orange
face-patch.

Helgen, who is completing a PhD under Dr Tim Flannery of the South
Australian Museum, says the honeyeater is the first new species of bird
found in New Guinea since 1940.

"Seeing that as the first bird was the clue that we were onto something
big," he says.

The team also captured the first photos of the male Berlepsch's six-wired
bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi) in its natural habitat.

This bird was one of a number first collected in the late 19th century by
indigenous hunters and sent to Victorian England where it was described as
being of "unknown location". Several subsequent expeditions failed to find
the bird.

"It's definitely an area of great biological novelty," says Helgen. "There
are lots of things found in these mountains that are found nowhere else."

The team took the first photos of the golden-fronted bowerbird (Amblyornis
flavifrons) displaying at its bower, a tower of twigs and other forest
materials it builds for the mating ritual.

The bowerbird, like the bird of paradise, had been collected in Victorian
times but no one knew where it came from.

In 1979, University of California's, Professor Jared Diamond was the first
to demonstrate that the Foja Mountains was the true homeland of the
bowerbird.

A lost world

Helgen says while Diamond made observations of a number of birds in the Foja
Mountains, he did not collect data or specimens.

"We were the first to mount the true scientific expedition," he says.

Helgen says, apart from the reports from Diamond, there is no evidence that
humans have ever been to the mountain range. Even the locals who took part
in this latest research had never been there. 

The researchers say the area is probably a 15 or 20 day walk from the
nearest village.

"Not only are there no people but there are no things that people bring with
them: rats, dogs, pigs," says Helgen, adding these animals affect native
fauna.

"It is a world that's been lost elsewhere," he says. "Much of the world
would have looked like that at some point.

"What's so interesting and unique is that it might be last time this is ever
done: high adventure, true exploration of a place where no one has set foot
hardly."

Animals without fear for people

The team also found mammals that show no fear of humans. For example they
were able to pick two long-beaked echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal,
that had been hunted to near extinction elsewhere.

"The animals there just don't know people because people have never lived
here. That's a very, very rare thing in this day and age," says Helgen.

The team also found a golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus
pulcherrimus), which had previously only been found on a single mountain in
neighbouring Papua New Guinea.

And they found new species of plants including the largest rhododendron
flower on record, almost 15 centimetres across, more than 20 new frogs and
four new butterflies.

Pretty impressive

Dr Ken Aplin, an evolutionary biologist who specialises in mammals of
Australia and New Guinea, describes the find as "pretty impressive" and
agrees the remoteness of the Foja Mountains explains why it is in such
pristine condition.

"People will generally hunt within a days travel of the village," says Aplin
of CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, currently based at the Kyoto University
Museum in Japan.

Aplin says mountain ranges such as Foja originally started life as a series
of oceanic islands off to the north of New Guinea, which over time, came
closer and closer to the main central range and connected up in the past
million years.

"So they were evolving their own faunas prior to becoming part of New
Guinea," he says.

Other ranges along the north coast the Foja range would have evolved unique
species too, he says, but their biodiversity would have been affected by
humans, feral pigs and dogs.

"In a global context it may well be unique or very nearly so, in being one
of the last places that is not showing any impact at all of human
activities."

The expedition was co-sponsored by the Indonesian Institute of Science
(LIPI) and received funding from the Swift Foundation, the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the Global
Environment Project Institute.