The Neotropical Region (Central and South America) hosts some of the world's richest faunas and floras: roughly a third of the world’s seed plant species, a quarter of its mammals, and almost half of its birds. Within this region, the two richest subregions in terms of numbers of endemic bird and mammal species are the Amazon Basin and the Eastern Versant (Slope) of the Andes. These subregions are in contact from Venezuela to northern Bolivia. Although the Amazonian subregion is immense, the Eastern Versant fauna occupies a region that is thousands of kilometers long but only a few dozen kilometers wide. Above and west of this long sloping ribbon of montane forests lies the high-elevation Altiplano, a cold, arid steppe.

All three regions of endemism are represented in Peru’s Manu Park and Biosphere Reserve. There, a 100-km transect extends from tropical moist lowland forests of  the Amazon Basin through montane formations of the Eastern Versant onto the Altiplano. The biodiversity encountered there is exceptional. Although surveys of Manu are incomplete for all groups, those for birds and mammals are already the richest yet recorded from any reserve in the world: 10 orders, 34 families, and 193 species of mammals (Pacheco et al. 1993), and 18 orders, 72 families, and 901 species of birds (Fitzpatrick et al. unpubl.). Founded in regional patterns of richness and endemism, this extraordinary level of biodiversity ought to characterize other groups as well.

Little is known concerning the parasites of Andean vertebrates.  However, diverse parasite faunas have been recorded for other Neotropical hotspots, such as Panamá and Venezuela.


continue >>

Technical Support
webmaster@fieldmuseum.org