Sunday, June 10, 2012

Love those new species...

20 years of RAP team success

Conservation International's Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) teams have traveled to hotspots around the world, making rapid inventories of species whose environment is under threat.  Everywhere they go, new species descriptions follow - 1,300 so far. Here is a slideshow of 20 top hits - the tube-nosed bat, the walking shark, and other spectacular finds. 
COMMENT: The CI biologists' work is often arduous and rarely safe: two people drowned on one South American trip to a remote river area. These scientists and their support personnel are the SWAT teams of conservation, the smoke jumpers, the EMTs.  They are heroes. 

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