Scientists Just Pulled a Turquoise Pit Viper and Flying Snake from Cambodia’s Unexplored Caves
A turquoise pit viper. A flying snake. Geckos evolving in real time across isolated limestone hills. These are among the new-to-science species emerging from a sweeping survey of Cambodia’s karst caves — a landscape that covers 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles) of the country and remains largely unknown to science.
What the Survey Found
A team led by UK-based conservation organization Fauna & Flora, in partnership with Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment and local field experts, explored 64 caves across 10 hills in northwest Battambang province between November 2023 and July 2025. The report, published Monday, documents the discovery of several species including two micro-snails, two millipedes, the turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, and several geckos.
The pit viper and three of the geckos are still being formally named and characterized. The others have been officially recognized.
The team also encountered globally threatened species already known to science: the Sunda pangolin, green peafowl, long-tailed macaque, and northern pig-tailed macaque.
Why Isolated Caves Make Evolution Visible
Karst landscapes — porous limestone terrain riddled with caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers — make up 9% of Cambodia. Each hill functions as a self-contained ecosystem, cut off from its neighbors. That isolation creates something researchers are calling an “island laboratory” of evolution, where distinct life forms adapt to hyper-specific habitats.
Lee Grismer, an evolutionary biologist at La Sierra University, framed it this way: “Think of it as their own vignette of biodiversity, where nature is performing the same experiment over and over again independently.”
“We go to these separate places and analyse the DNA of the species, and we see how the experiment has run. Some look alike, some look different, and by analysing this we can get an idea of what the driving forces are behind the way they evolve,” Grismer said.
One concrete example: the striped Kamping Poi bent-toed gecko, Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, found in 2024. Researchers identified four different populations of this single species, each evolving differently from the others.
How the Team Actually Did the Fieldwork
Pablo Sinovas led the Fauna & Flora team, working alongside local researchers who surveyed the caves day and night. Night surveys were where the action was.
“Fun part – look for creatures at night, when they come out of hiding,” Sinovas told CNN. “After sunset, spend hours traversing sharp, rocky terrain with torches, looking around every crevice, caves, rocks, branches, vegetation. Kind of a nice search party.”
Some caves hold up to 1 million bats. The research team did not enter large bat colonies due to health concerns.
On a single karst hill in Banan district, the team registered 14 previously unsurveyed caves.
What’s At Stake
These caves aren’t empty wilderness. They’re used as shrines, meditation sites, and ritual spaces, and they draw tourists and pilgrims. That human connection makes the conservation equation more complex — and more urgent.
Karst habitats face threats from poorly planned cement extraction, overtourism, wildlife hunting, logging, and wildfires. Sinovas pointed to a specific tension: “Growing demand for cement and karst limestone is useful for making cement.” But he warned that destroying areas where species live — species that don’t live anywhere else — “could lead to extinction, some species not even described yet.”
The Fauna & Flora team is working with the Cambodian government on protective status for the area. “Only scratched the surface in terms of biodiversity waiting to be discovered in Cambodia,” Sinovas said.
As Grismer put it: “If we are truly going to conserve the biodiversity on this planet, we need to understand what is there. We can’t protect something if we don’t know it exists.”
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
