Madagascar

Diversity hotspots, centers of phylogenetic endemism, and conservation gaps for Malagasy vascular plants. Credit: IBCASResearch on Madagascar’s vascular plants reveals crucial conservation priorities, identifying areas of high endemic and phylogenetic diversity and pinpointing significant conservation gaps in the island’s arid and semi-arid regions.Despite the importance of biodiversity and the urgency to conserve it, assessing what aspect of biodiversity requires the highest priority has proven complex, especially when…

At the fraying tail end of French colonialism, at an army base in early 1970s Madagascar, the soldiers and their families cling to an expat lifestyle that will soon be relegated to the past. Cocktails and parties set against the tropical sweep of this bewitching island; churning undercurrents of sexual tension: all of it is observed by the keen eye of eight-year-old Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), a comic-book-obsessed spy on a thorny adult world that he doesn’t fully comprehend.Director Robin Campillo draws on his own…

Film-maker Robin Campillo has surrendered to the flow of memory and given us this wonderful, personal movie, created with tenderness, unsentimental artistry and visual flair, inspired by his own childhood growing up on a French army base in recently independent Madagascar in the early 1970s. It is the story of an imaginative little kid spying and eavesdropping on the private lives of grownups, which are a mystery to him and a mystery to the grownups, too. Red Island elides his own poignant growing pains with Madagascar’s…

Physical dynamics of the escarpment landscape evolution model, in the initial state (A–C) and at a model time of 28.2 Myr (D–F). Credit: Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi0833 Madagascar is home to more than 11,000 plant species, 80% of which are found nowhere else on Earth. A recent study by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and ETH Zurich has put forward a new hypothesis for the…

Image of tropical cyclone Freddy acquired on February 21, 2023, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20 satellite.The tropical cyclone made landfall on February 21, 2023, after traveling for more than two weeks across the Indian Ocean.After traveling for 15 days across the Indian Ocean, Tropical Cyclone Freddy made landfall on the east coast of Madagascar on the evening of February 21, 2023.This image shows Freddy just east of Madagascar at 1:50 p.m. local time (10:50 Universal Time) on…

The critically endangered Verreaux’s Sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) is one of the 109 species of lemurs that currently are extant on Madagascar. A total of 17 species of lemurs have already gone extinct. Credit: Chien C. LeeAccording to a new study, it would take an astounding 3 million years for the number of species that have been lost due to human activity on Madagascar to be restored. Furthermore, the study found that if currently threatened species were to become extinct, it would take more than 20 million years for…

The adorable Lygodactylus salvi, one of the newly described species.Photo: Vences et al., Zootaxa 2022Two years after the smallest-yet-known reptile was discovered in Northern Madagascar, scientists probing the same region have discovered even more new cold-blooded friends:eight new species of minuscule geckos.The animals are from the subgenus Domerguella, in the genus Lygodactylus, a group of diurnal geckos that mostly live in continental Africa and Madagascar. A team of researchers discovered the species hiding in the…