Record 287 Reptile & Amph Species In Manu NP (Peru) - Park Buffer Zone Now Cleared For Gas Drilling

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It's official: Manu National Park in Peru has the highest diversity of reptiles and amphibians in the world.

Surveys of the park, which extends from high Andean cloud forests down into the tropical rainforest of the Western Amazon, and its buffer zone turned up 155 amphibian and 132 reptile species, 16 more than the 271 species documented in Ecuador's Yasuní National Park in 2010.

The research, published in the journal Biota Neotropica, was conducted by Alessandro Catenazzi of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Edgar Lehr of Illinois Wesleyan University, and Rudolf von May of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at University of California, Berkeley.

"The number of species recorded in Manu is noteworthy if we consider that the national park represents only 0.01% of the planet’s land area, but houses 2.2% of all amphibians and 1.5% of all reptiles known worldwide," said the researchers in a statement. "Amphibians such as frogs, toads, salamanders, and caecilians, and reptiles such as snakes, lizards, turtles, and caimans thrive there."



EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0128-manu-world-record-herps.html


The Peruvian government has approved plans for gas company Pluspetrol to move deeper into a supposedly protected reserve for indigenous peoples and the buffer zone of the Manu National Park in the Amazon rainforest.

The approval follows the government rescinding a highly critical report on the potential impacts of the operations by the Culture Ministry (MINCU), the resignation of the Culture Minister and other Ministry personnel, and repeated criticism from Peruvian and international civil society.

A subsequent report by MINCU requested that Pluspetrol abandon plans to conduct seismic tests in one small part of the reserve because of the "possible presence of [indigenous] people in isolation," but didn't object to tests across a much wider area. In addition to the seismic tests, the planned operations include building a 10.5km flow-line and drilling 18 exploratory wells at six locations—all of them in the reserve which lies immediately to the west of the Manu National Park and acts as part of its buffer zone (see map below).

http://s3.amazonaws.com/mongabay-images/14/0204.Lote-88-(and-part-of-Camisea)---Final.600.jpg

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Almost three-quarters of Pluspetrol's concession overlaps the reserve—officially called the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others' Territorial Reserve—which was created in 1990 and given greater legal protection in 2003. The reserve's inhabitants live in what Peruvian law calls "voluntary isolation" or "initial contact," having sporadic, little or no contact with outsiders and therefore lacking immunological defenses. Pluspetrol admitted in its EIA that contact with the reserve's inhabitants is "probable" during the course of its operations, and that such peoples in general are vulnerable to "massive deaths" from transmitted diseases.

EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0204-hill-gas-manu.html