The oldest island

 

"Earth´s Tropical Islands" is a 2020 nature documentary in three parts, co-produced by the BBC and PBS. I just watched the first episode, covering the weird and wonderful wildlife of Madagascar, the world´s oldest island. Formed about 88 million years ago, the first animals somehow managed to reach the island around 60 million years ago. Today, there are about 25,000 endemic species of animals and plants on Madagascar. An enormous mountain range cuts the island in several distinct bio-geographical regions. The climate of the southwestern part is extremely dry, while lush rainforests grow in the eastern part. 

While parts of the documentary deal with the people of Madagascar (the first humans only arrived about 2,000 years ago), the emphasis is on the unique wildlife. In the "deserts", the ring-tailed lemurs eat plants that are deadly to humans. The national park Tsingy de Bemaraha, with its bizarre Mordor-like cliffs, is home to Von der Decken´s Sifaka, which climbs and jumps the rock formations with surprising ease. We also get to meet a chameleon that only lives for four months - the shortest known lifespan of a terrestrial vertebrate species (their eggs last longer). In the rainforest, the tenrec can have up to 32 young per litter. The "pelican spider" catches and eats other spiders by mimicking the movements of an insect caught in the other spider´s web. And so on! For some reason, I found the locusts to be particularly absurd. After eating everything in its wake, their enormous swarms are stopped by the Madagscar mountains and rains, simply dying?!

One problem with the docu is that it treats Madagascar as a self-contained unit. This becomes problematic when discussing the island´s environmental destruction. Yes, it´s caused by humans, and yes, the natives exterminated the local mega-fauna alreday at arrival (we are shown an underwater cave with skeletal remains of extinct animals). Still today, those darn natives cut down the forests to grow food. But "Earth´s Tropical Islands" says nothing about timber, cash crops or French colonialism. Are the Malagasy solely responsible for the deforestation?

Unfortunately, the endemics (including most of the iconic lemurs) at the world´s oldest island are threatened by extinction at the hands of *some* sub-branch of Homo sapiens. Still, they experienced 60 million years in the sun. Or the rain shadow. That´s probably longer than we will ever be around, so I say the flora and fauna wins...