Conservation biologist Pablo Sinovas led the Fauna & Flora team in Cambodia, working with local researchers to get a feel for the terrain during the day and – the “fun part” – to search for creatures like snakes and lizards at night.
Cambodia 's largely unexplored limestone caves stretch for thousands of kilometers, harboring countless undiscovered species and unique ecosystems, with creatures found nowhere else on Earth.
Now, a new survey of caves in the northwestern province of Battambang has revealed a variety of species that are new to science, including a turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, several species of geckos, two micro-snails, and two millipedes.
The viper and three of the newly discovered gecko species are still being formally named and characterized. The other discoveries were officially recognized during the biodiversity survey, which explored 64 caves in 10 hills between November 2023 and July 2025, and whose results were published in a report in March.
Each hill and cave in Cambodia's rocky karst landscape – a term for a landscape created when rocks break down, forming large cave springs, underground streams, and sinkholes – is isolated from the others. Each functions as an individual "island laboratory" of evolution, harboring countless distinct life forms that have adapted to its habitat niche, according to the UK-based conservation organization Fauna & Flora, which led the survey along with Cambodia's Ministry of the Environment and field experts.
“Think of this as a small sample of biodiversity, where nature performs the same experiment repeatedly and independently,” says evolutionary biologist Lee Grismer, a professor of biology at La Sierra University in California, who supported the research team, in a statement.
“We go to these distinct locations and analyze the DNA of the species, observing how the experiment unfolded,” Grismer adds. “Some species are similar, others different, and by analyzing this, we can get an idea of the driving forces behind their evolution.”
For example, although researchers identified a species of striped curved-toed gecko from Kamping Poi, called Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, during fieldwork in 2024, they found four different populations that are evolving in distinct ways.
“If we truly want to conserve the biodiversity of this planet, we have to understand what exists,” Grismer emphasizes. “We cannot protect something if we don’t know that it exists.”
Globally threatened species, such as the Sonda pangolin, the green peacock, the long-tailed macaque, and the northern pig-tailed macaque, were also found in the region during this latest survey.
We've only 'scratched the surface' so far.
Conservation biologist Pablo Sinovas led the Fauna & Flora team in Cambodia, working with local researchers to get a feel for the terrain during the day and – the “fun part” – to search for creatures like snakes and lizards at night, “when they are most active, when they come out of their hiding places,” he tells CNN.
The team would set out after sunset and spend hours traversing “rocky and rugged terrain” with torches, “peeking into every crevice, searching for caves in the landscape, rocks, branches, vegetation, really everywhere – it was like a fun search team,” says Sinovas, who is now a senior program manager at the charity.
Some caves in the region are home to up to a million bats, although the research team did not enter caves with large bat colonies due to health concerns, the report indicates.
Karst landscapes represent about 9% of Cambodia's land area, corresponding to 20,000 square kilometers (or 7,722 square miles), according to the report, which highlights that "much of this area is still unknown to science."
Fourteen previously unmapped caves have been recorded in a karst hill in the Banan district of Battambang province.
“There is still much to be explored,” says Sinovas, adding that they have only “scratched the surface” in terms of the biodiversity waiting to be discovered in the ecosystems of Cambodia’s vast landscape.
In addition to harboring a variety of species, many of the caves are used as sanctuaries for meditation and other rituals, and are visited by tourists and pilgrims, the report adds.
Even so, karst habitats are threatened by poorly planned extraction work for cement production, as well as by overtourism, hunting of wild animals, deforestation, and forest fires.
“There is a growing demand for cement, and karst limestone is useful for cement manufacturing,” explains Sinovas, “therefore, karst provides a very important raw material.”
“But obviously, if we destroy an area where certain species live, and these species don’t live anywhere else, that can automatically lead to the extinction of those species – in some cases, species that haven’t even been described yet,” he counters.
That is why Sinovas and his team are “working with the government to ensure that these important areas are better protected,” he explains, adding that there are ongoing discussions about “giving this area some kind of protected status, so that it can be preserved in the future.”
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