Discovering diversity

In the May 20 issue of the journal Fieldiana, Filipino and American scientists reported identifying seven new species of field mice that live in forested parts of the Zambales Mountains, Mt. Banahaw, the Mingan Mountains of Aurora and the Sierra Madre.

“The discovery and description of seven previously unknown species of mammals may surprise people, especially since all but one come from within 150 [kilometers] of Manila, a metropolitan area with roughly 15 million people, and especially in the current millennium, when it is widely assumed that… mammals would have generally been well-documented. Our studies in the field and museum show that this widespread assumption is not well-founded,” wrote the team of researchers, which included Phillip Alviola from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, Mariano Roy Duya and Melizar Duya from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, and M. Josefa Veluz from the National Museum of the Philippines, in their report.

Affected by ongoing changes

Finding and identifying so many new species contrasts sharply with the frequent reports on how plant, animal and insect populations in various land and marine environments are being affected by ongoing changes in climate and habitat.

For example, in a recently released report based on a meeting held mid-April at the University of Oxford in England, marine scientists cautioned that the “next globally significant extinction event in the ocean” will happen unless action is taken immediately. The list of contributors to the state of the oceans included overfishing and the increasing number of ocean “dead zones” where the oxygen levels have been depleted due to fertilizer runoff from farm lands that promotes algal blooms, in turn forcing the fish and other organisms that make up the ecosystem in the area to move elsewhere.

The identification of mice that may not be so easily spotted in the mountain forests comes a year after a different team of Filipino and American researchers identified a new species of monitor lizard in the same environment.

In the report first published online April 7, 2010 in the journal Biology Letters, samples from museum collections were used to determine that the 6.5-foot long lizard found in the Sierra Madre range had not been identified before. This finding helped the monitor lizard make the annual Top 10 New Species List released earlier this year by Arizona State University’s International Institute for Species Exploration, joining other newly discovered species such as a jumping cockroach, a glow-in-the-dark mushroom and bacteria eating the rust off the hull of the sunken Titanic.

“How could such a large-bodied (2 [meters] total length) monitor lizard have escaped the notice of the many biologists that have worked in the northern Philippines?” The team led by University of Kansas researcher Rafe Brown answered their own rhetorical question in the Biology Letters article by noting that several factors might have prevented the discovery of such a long lizard earlier, such as the lack of surveys on the species diversity in the Sierra Madre forests.

Hasn’t gone unnoticed

They also pointed out that the lizard hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed in the forest. “Despite escaping recognition by biologists,” they wrote, “the new species is well known to resident Agta and Ilongot tribespeople who rely on it as a major source of protein.”

Though released a year apart, both reports indicate that even as known species are disappearing, there are still others waiting to be recognized, particularly in this country. “It is clear that a great deal of the mammalian diversity on Luzon, and perhaps in the Philippines as a whole, has been unknown to the scientific and conservation communities in the past, and it is likely that many species remain unknown,” the team concluded in the Fieldiana report.

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