Russell A. Mittermeier, President

To me, the ultimate biodiversity hotspot has always been Madagascar. This truly unique island first captured my imagination as a child, and it has now emerged from our new hotspots analysis as perhaps the single highest priority hotspot on Earth.

My first opportunity to visit Madagascar came in 1984. I was eager to see the lemurs, the chameleons, the day geckos, and the tortoises that exist there. I wanted to visit the land of the now-extinct elephant bird (at 9 feet tall and half a ton in weight, the largest bird that ever lived) and the extinct giant lemurs (including Megaladapis, which looked like a giant, calf-sized koala, and Archaeoindris, an immense lemur that grew larger than an adult male gorilla). But for me, as a primatologist, the two creatures I most wanted to see and which still symbolize Madagascar more than any others were the indri (Indri indri) and the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis).

It is hard not to be fascinated by these two bizarre creatures. The indri is the largest of the living lemurs, measuring 3 feet in length and reaching a weight of 20 pounds. It looks like a cross between a teddy bear and a giant panda, with a tiny stub of a tail, fuzzy ears that look like they should have a price-tag hanging from them, and unrealistically long legs that enable it to leap from tree to tree like an arboreal kangaroo. Indeed, the leap of the indri is so powerful that it looks like it is floating in mid-air, rather like Michael Jordan at the apogee of a rim-rattling dunk.

Its eyes are a strange greenish color and stare at you like something from another world. Perhaps most memorable is the indris wailing vocalization. It sounds like a speeded-up version of the song of the humpback whale  simply unforgettable and one of the great sounds of the Madagascar forest. On top of this, the indri has never been successfully held in captivity. It simply cant stand the idea of being cooped up, and the few times people have put it in a cage, it has survived no more than a few weeks. So if you want to see an indri, you have to go to the eastern rain forests of Madagascar.

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The other animal that I absolutely had to see was the aye-aye, the only surviving species of an entire primate family and, like the indri and all other lemurs, restricted to Madagascar. In contrast to the elegant and graceful indri, which is sacred to many of the Malagasy people and taboo to hunt in many areas, the aye-aye is highly elusive, mysterious, and downright creepy. The size of a large cat, the aye-aye weighs about 7 to 8 pounds, has shaggy black fur, a long bushy tail, large bat-like ears, and huge buckteeth. These incisors grow continuously like those of a rodent, and the aye-aye is the only primate with this feature. But perhaps the weirdest aspect of the aye-aye is the skeletal middle finger on its hand, a long, very thin, bony protuberance that stands out from the other four more normal digits.

All these physical characteristics have a purpose. The large ears enable the aye-aye to hear grubs crawling around in rotten wood, its teeth are used to gnaw holes, and its elongated finger is used to poke around and extract the grubs, a behavior it has now adapted to extract coconut meat from plantation-grown coconuts.

These two fascinating creatures are regarded in very different ways by the Malagasy people. Active in the daytime, the highly visible indri is considered sacred by some. Not so the nocturnal aye-aye. It is viewed as an evil omen to such an extent that some tribes will actually abandon a village if an aye-aye passes through. Indeed, the animals secretive habits and the reluctance of people to talk about it led early researchers to consider it to be on the verge of extinction.

Although we were delighted by what we were able to find on this first visit to Madagascar in 1984, we also found it quite depressing. The country was strongly influenced by several of the East bloc countries like Cuba and North Korea and was quite xenophobic. Conservation simply was not a priority. Erosion and forest destruction were the worst I had ever seen. The budget of the entire protected areas department, which included a number of globally important parks and reserves established by the French, was on the order of a few hundred dollars.

Many conservationists at that time considered Madagascar to be a basket case and beyond hope. Prince Phillip, then president of the World Wildlife Fund, said the country was committing ecological suicide. However, a handful of us were so committed to Madagascar and so fascinated by its truly unique wildlife heritage that we refused to give up. We joined forces with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has had a stellar record of conservation in Madagascar; the World Bank, which had never paid much attention to conservation before; and a host of other smaller donors, to come up with a series of conservation action plans for Madagascar. These plans have begun to bear fruit.

Our findings show that not only does Madagascar have very high levels of species diversity and endemism (14,00015,000 plant species, 90 percent of them endemic; 380 reptile species, 95 percent of them endemic; 69 lemur species and subspecies, 100 percent endemic), its levels of endemism at the genus and the family level are beyond compare. With 24 families and 478 genera endemic to the Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands Hotspot, this nearly Texas-sized area is unmatched in the number of unique evolutionary lineages that it harbors and for which it is uniquely responsible.

Most important of all is the new level of commitment that we are seeing from the government of Madagascar and especially its new president, Marc Ravalomanana. Since taking office in 2002, this former businessman and former mayor of the capital city of Antananarivo has shown exceptional commitment to conservation. He made history in September 2003 when he declared his commitment to triple protected area coverage over the next five years and to ensure that all of his countrys unique biodiversity is covered in parks and reserves. At that time, he also requested help from the international community to establish a $50 million trust fund to help make this a reality. Indicative of the worlds interest in Madagascar, more than $30 million of this fund has already been pledged in just 15 months, starting with a lead gift of $1 million from CI.

Clearly, Madagascar, which has lost more than 90 percent of its original forest cover and still has some of the worst erosion on the planet, has a long way to go. But a great deal of progress has been made over the past 20 years to protect the unique treasures of this remarkable place. This optimism for the future drives our efforts in all the hotspots and has led us to many of our conservation successes.