Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Angola, Mozambique, South Sudan, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afgh-
anistan, and Korea, but one could add at least twenty other examples.
This sad but all-too-common phenomenon of human conflict is the last major human-in-
duced cause of rarity for us to examine up close. An important question to answer underpins
what at times resembles a search-and-rescue mission for rarities: Do the outbreak and after-
math of war inexorably drive both rarities and some former commoners to extinction? Our
first stop is an exemplary destination, the Annamite Mountains, known in Vietnamese as the
Truong Son. In any language, this is one of the most biologically unexplored cordilleras on
Earth, a necklace of remote ridges along the western border of Vietnam that are studded with
the highest concentrations of rarities in mainland Asia. Neighbor to the Annamites are the
Eastern Plains of Cambodia, a vast region bordering Laos and Vietnam, formerly home to
elephants, primates, tigers, rare giant cattle, and other large ungulates. This is a story of the
rehabilitation efforts, from the early stages beginning in 1985 up through July 2012, to bring
rarities back from a war-ravaged land, once peace had returned.
Map of Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Annamite (Truong Son) range
