Jungle delights

Twelve scientists from Indonesia, Australia and the US recently returned from a two-week trek through the Foja Mountains in the Indonesian west of New Guinea. Their finds have yet to be evaluated and officially classified by experts around the world, but a preliminary count of new species includes one bird, four butterflies, five palms, one flower, four or five mammals, and 20 frogs — close to 40 species in total. The team were taken to the remote region by helicopter and left to explore in the absence of any human trails. " There does seem to be an endemic biota of this mountain range, " says Bruce Beehler, the leader of the Foja expedition. " Forty species is not extraordinary in the raw sense, but it is extraordinary that they all came from one place, and we believe that's just the tip of the iceberg. " Beehler described Foja as " an island in the sky " — a biological community completely separated from its surroundings. Its unique and isolated biological community makes Foja a kind of natural experiment. " There are probably hundreds of endemic species in the Foja mountains, " Beehler says. " The mountain range is very young, maybe three or four million years old, " he says. And a key question was where the flora and fauna may have come from. Beehler's expedition was designed to address that question, he says, " by looking at what's there and trying to find the closest relatives. The fact is, the species we've found seem to have close relatives in New Guinea. The new bird looks very similar to another on New Guinea. " Beehler infers from these similarities that existing flora and fauna on the island colonized the cool, moist, elevated environment of Foja and became independent species quite recently in the evolutionary timescale. One of the team's most remarkable discoveries was a honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face — the first new bird species to be sighted on New Guinea in more than 60 years. The researchers also solved a major ornithological mystery — the location of the home range of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise. First described in the late nineteenth century through specimens collected by indigenous hunters from an unknown location on New Guinea, the species had been the focus of several subsequent expeditions that failed to find it. On only …