MADAGASCAR

RICK WEISS, Washington Post Staff Writer, January 26, 2008
CZIKOWSKY: I have long found Madagascar fascinating. Being isolated, didn’t many of its plants and animal species develop independently from the rest of the world? I have found one finds some of the most interesting products of nature in Madagascar. My questions: about how much of Madagascar has even been searched by scientists? Are the political leaders and population supportive of further research?
WEISS: It is very interesting to look online at some of the sites that show how pieces of the Earth’s crust moved around 100 million years ago or so. You can see Madagascar, all by itself, even back then. A big piece of crust scrapes by off its east coast and drifts northward for 50 million years or more and crashed into central Asia, to become the Indian subcontinent (and making the Himalaya in the process; a hell of a fender bender). Point is, yes, it’s been its own piece of turf for a long time, so evolution took its own course there and made all kinds of exotic plants and animals in the process. There are some fledgling efforts to conserve parts of the island for tourism and for general biodiversity preservation, but it is incredibly poverty-stricken and it’s not like the government has tight control over activities in the island’s hard-to-reach areas, so people are cutting down lots of trees for both survival and commerce and planting fields of crops just to get by.