The Western Ghats: A 1,600-Kilometre Strip Full of Species Found Nowhere Else
Older than the Himalayas, and home to frogs, birds and plants that live in these hills and absolutely nowhere else on Earth.
Run your finger down a map of India along the western coast. That long green ridge of hills, stretching roughly 1,600 kilometres from Gujarat down to Kerala, is the Western Ghats. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and biologists call it one of the world's biodiversity hotspots.
What 'endemic' means
A species is endemic to a place if it lives there and nowhere else in the wild. The Western Ghats are packed with them — the lion-tailed macaque, the Nilgiri tahr, the Malabar grey hornbill, and a long list of frogs, many of which were described by scientists only in the last few decades.
That happens because the hills act like islands. Wet forest sits on top; drier country lies below. A frog that needs cool, damp leaf litter cannot simply walk to the next hill, so populations stay separated for a very long time and slowly become their own species.
Those same rains feed rivers that millions of people depend on, including the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri. Looking after the Ghats is not only about the animals in them.