August 31, 1998

Explorers turn up a clutch of creatures lost for a century. The rediscoveries provide insights into mysteries old and new: from evolution to climate change.

By Samar Halarnkar

It was a steamy May day on the dank floor of a Tamil Nadu rainforest when Karthikeyan Vasudevan suddenly found himself staring at a face no human being had seen for 100 years. Warts blanketed the creature's body. White spots covered its rotund black belly. Its eyes bulged from sunken sockets. It was a face only a mother could love -- or a wildlife biologist.

It was a frog, but, as Vasudevan brightly puts it, "a frog with a lot of character". There was a little more to it. Vasudevan, an amphibian expert, can recognise 40 species of frogs on sight, but he had never seen one like this before: it had fleshy little discs where most frogs have blunt or pointed feet. The 27-year-old biologist excitedly sped back to his makeshift camp in the rainforest. There, by the light of a kerosene lantern, he discovered why he didn't recognise this warty 12 cm blob of life. He was gazing into the soulful eyes of Indirana phyrnoderma, or the toad-skinned frog. The last time anyone had done this was in 1888.

Barely 100 km from the heaving streets and smokestacks of the industrial city of Coimbatore such ecological refugees abound. The giant trees stand in solid, silent ranks, their entwined branches weaving a sprawling canopy about five storeys above the ground. Below them is a straggly middle layer and at the bottom, a floor-level scattering of shrubs, leaf litter and small trees. This is the rainforest, the complex labour of 100 million years of evolution. Today, fists of lush coffee and cardamom plantations have punched their way into a once impenetrable, secretive land. The dense forests are being forced apart, but they still guard a considerable treasure trove of secrets.

In the past two years, Vasudevan has rediscovered two more amphibians not seen since British explorers first recorded them in the closing years of the last century. One of them, a curious gliding frog lives in the towering canopy and uses webbed feet like primitive wings to make the precipitous drop to stagnant pools on the ground, where it breeds. Another young biologist, Narayan Ishwar, similarly stumbled across a lost lizard as it was laying its eggs in another patch of Tamil Nadu's beleaguered rainforest. He pickled it, pored over the literature and learned it was last seen in the Andaman Islands in 1891; the only other one of its kind was a stuffed specimen lying in a distant museum in Copenhagen.

Rainforests are prolific in the variety and number of species they harbour, so they are particularly good hunting grounds. But a handful of other lost creatures -- from bats to birds -- are being turned up by intrepid explorers in far more degraded parts of India's once plentiful forests. Nearly 10 species, lost for a century, have turned up in less than two years. It is a windfall in a biological desert where no more than two or three are rediscovered in a decade.

But do not believe that these finds indicate that all is well with India's embattled wilderness. "The reason why such discoveries are taking place is that simply more and more people are searching," explains Asad Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society, who in 1994 himself spotted Stoliczka's Whinchat, a small bird that has not been seen for some decades.

Fame is one obvious reason why the explorers search for obscure birds, frogs and lizards (see box). But these survivors could give new insights to complex scientific questions and are both slivers of hope and precursors of a growing environmental darkness. They are first indicators of a dazzling diversity that was -- and still is -- India's wild heritage, a celebration of the remote, wonderful and bizarre life forms that survive despite the odds. But these odds mount by the day. It is evident that many of the species once recorded by British naturalists -- who painstakingly documented every creature they saw -- may never be found.

While lost frog species show up in the southern forests and new ones are discovered apace -- Indraneil Das, a biologist with the Centre for Herpetology near Chennai, has himself found 10 new species -- researchers acknowledge that amphibians are actually under tremendous pressure from the fragmentation of forests and the increasing use of pesticides in the Nilgiris. Amphibian deaths and extinction at a greatly accelerated pace have been documented the world over, and the implications are very different from a sheer loss of biodiversity.

Creatures like frogs are very sensitive to changes in their environment. "There is a gamut of effects that can be linked to the amphibian decline," says biologist Ishwar. That includes pesticide runoff, industrial pollution, even ultraviolet radiation creeping in through a damaged ozone layer. This function of amphibians as barometers is especially relevant in an age of accelerating climate change. May has been the hottest month the planet has ever seen since record keeping on a global scale began in 1860. And the 12 months ending in May were the hottest ever experienced, probably, say scientists, in 1,000 years

The health of amphibian species are believed to be strong indicators of this environmental upheaval. In India, researchers have barely begun the basic documentation of amphibians and reptiles, but many in the field already report disappearing populations. The decline could also have direct implications on the food chain because amphibian larvae serve as food supply for a variety of fish, birds and mammals.

As creatures die before discovery, science could lose out on a potential goldmine of new drugs and materials. Several compounds isolated from frogs are already being used as painkillers and in the treatment of traumas ranging from heart attacks to burns, reports the journal Current Science.

Every biochemist dreams of finding a wonder drug in these unexplored frontiers. The Government's National Project on Potential Drugs from the Ocean, for instance, has collected more than 300 samples of marine organisms to see if they harbour medically useful substances. At least seven organisms have already been shortlisted for substances showing promise of anti-diabetic and anti-viral properties. Scientific and folkloric records are strewn with examples of animals valued in folk medicine but still unaddressed in modern biomedical research.

Western scientists have found new opportunities in the natural world. They study how spiders can spin water-soluble protein molecules into insoluble silk threads tougher than Kevlar, the stuff of bullet-proof vests; how mussels manufacture a material stronger than the most advanced ceramics. It's a new area of research called biomimetics, or biological mimicking, the study of the structure and function of biological substances as models for material design and manufacturing. Over the world it's attracting researchers from fields as seemingly unconnected as materials science, engineering, molecular biology, even physics. All this is a leap far into the future for Indian science, but the journey can never begin if the vehicles themselves don't exist.

And so there is an urgent need to greatly multiply the efforts of the explorers of these lost and new worlds. "We have not even recorded all that we have," says A.J.T. Johnsingh, deputy director of the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun. This is specially so in areas of the greatest biodiversity, the Western Ghats and the still-remote forests of the Eastern Himalayas. As the forests are cleared -- India has lost 5,000 sq km of forest in the past year alone -- species with small, endemic populations, meaning they are found nowhere else in the world, will become extinct without anyone knowing.

Evaluators of the Biodiversity Conservation Prioritisation project, a nationwide plan to draw up an inventory of species (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, fish, birds and plants) according to their economic value and endangered status, have assessed 1,800 species. The total number left: hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million.

But every find is a small piece in the still puzzling jigsaw of how species evolve, live and interact with the world around them. As the picture becomes clearer, it also gives us leads to our past. The gaily coloured coin-sized frog Melanobatrachus indicus, for instance, has its nearest relatives in East Africa. Some characteristics are common to similar species in South-east Asia, not to other Indian frogs. So what is it doing here?

As science searches for answers to larger questions like these, the import of the search for a forgotten heritage becomes clearer. The wilderness is a metaphor of unlimited opportunities. The lost creatures help India understand that they exist.

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