Meet the Awesome Yin Yang Frog, and the Other Newfound Members of the Animal Club

Writing about ecology can be a real bummer sometimes, because everywhere you look, species are in decline and the world's biodiversity is continually inching towards collapse. But here's some happy news for ones: WWF just released a report surveying research in the Greater Mekong region, and a total of 126 new species have been described there last year.

The region, which includes parts of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, is a hotspot for new discoveries. WWF says there have been 1,170 new species described in the area since 1997. But all those discoveries doesn't mean there's some sort of environmental renaissance in those countries allowing for a biodiversity boom. In fact, the region has seen some of the worst ecological management worldwide, and just because new species have been found by man does not mean that they aren't also under threat, as many are. But before I elaborate on that, let's look at some of the coolest finds.

Check out the appendix of the WWF report (PDF) for a list of all new species, which includes 82 plants, 21 reptiles, 13 fish, five amphibians and even five mammals. (Curiously, it doesn't count invertebrates, which usually make up the bulk of new species found. For example, this report from Guinea the same year shows 580 new invertebrates and 218 plants out of a list of 1,060. Also missing are birds, but a brief poking around the old Googlewebs makes me think perhaps no new bird species were discovered in the region that year.)

I'm biased towards vertebrates, but it always amazes me how many new plants are still waiting to be found. Orchids, like Coelogyne pachystachya above, are some of the rock stars of the plant world, partly because they're beautiful, and partly because they can have incredibly specific ecological niches. That also makes them very susceptible to habitat loss and degradation.

Representing the reptiles is Cryptelytrops rubeus, also known as the ruby-eyed green pit viper, one of a pair of new pit vipers of the Cryptelytrops genus by Anita Melhotra et al. Interestingly, the two new species are both morphologically similar to another, previously-described species, but the team showed with genetic analysis that they are indeed distinct.

To represent the amphibians, you know damn well that Leptobrachium leucops, aka the yin-yang frog, is going to be my choice. Look at those chill eyes! This guy was discovered in South Vietnam, and is the newest addition to a genus full of trippy-looking frogs. Now, I'm definitely of the school that thinks basing the "value" of an animal on how cool it looks is a serious detriment to conservation efforts, but come on. This frog's got yin-yang eyes. That rules.

For the fish, I dug Bangana musei, a blind cave-dwelling fish described by Kottelat and Steiner. Subterranean species have always fascinated me because they truly display the ruthless efficiency of the evolutionary process. Eyes? The fish doesn't need 'em, so why waste energy maintaining them? Poof, they're gone. ("Poof" here is more like "over thousands of generations.") Same goes for pigment. Why put the effort into being fancy colors when literally nothing will every see them in your dark, underground environment? Because its range is so small, the fish has been listed as vulnerable, but luckily for this guy (well not this one, this one is dead, but the species), that range of caves also apparently is within a protected area.

Of the mammals, one is a shrew, and the other four are bats, all of which were described by Gabor Csorba of the Hungarian Natural History. It's impressive work, including one paper in which his team describes three new species of the genus Murina, one of which grabbed headlines for being called named Beelzebub's tube-nosed bat (M. beelzebub), a monikor Csorba's team gave it to "reflect the dark ‘diabolic’ coloration of the new species and its fierce protective behavior in the field," as he was quoted by Wired.

Because I'm a bit of a Lepidoptera dork and I didn't want to leave all you invertebrate fans out in the cold like WWF did, here's a paper with five new records of butterfly species in China's Yunnan province. Now everyone's happy!

Now back to the bummer part. The huge amount of new species being described does not mean that the regions are healthy–nor does it even mean the species themselves are doing so well, as evidenced by the report earlier this year in which researchers described a bunch of new species of Caribbean skinks that were probably already extinct by the time the paper was published.

In fact, environmental degradation could even be helping researchers find species–as forests disappear, species that were once locked in the middle of hard-to-reach forests are suddenly easier to find. It's not just that; the Greater Mekong is also a huge research area with an enormous amount of diversity, so it's no surprise that new species are constantly being found. But the truth of the matter is that the entire region is being decimated by illegal logging operations and mismanagement that has little regard for the preservation of the region's rich habitats. Therefore, such impressive lists of discoveries shouldn't be an excuse to not worry about protecting the region, but instead should stand as a reminder to why such vital regions need to be protected in the first place.