Cambodia’s largely unexplored limestone caves stretch for thousands of miles, are home to countless undiscovered species and host unique ecosystems, with creatures found nowhere else on Earth.Now, a new survey of caves in the northwestern province of Battambang has uncovered a range of species that are new to science, including a turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, several 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 finds have been officially recognized over the course of the biodiversity survey, which explored 64 caves across 10 hills between November 2023 and July 2025, and was published in a report Monday.AdvertisementAdvertisementEach hill and cave in Cambodia’s rocky karst landscape –– a term for a landscape created when rocks break down, forming large cave springs, sinking streams and sinkholes –– is isolated from the others. Each performs as its own individual “island laboratory” of evolution, holding numerous distinct life forms that have adapted to their niche habitat, according to UK-based conservation charity Fauna & Flora, which led the survey along with Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment and field experts.A flying snake, documented on the expedition. – Phyroum Chourn/Fauna & Flora“Think of it as their own vignette of biodiversity, where nature is performing the same experiment over and over again independently,” evolutionary biologist Lee Grismer, professor of biology at La Sierra University in California, who supported the survey team, said in a statement.“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,” he added.For instance, while researchers identified one species of the striped Kamping Poi bent-toed gecko, named Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, during fieldwork in 2024, they found four different populations evolving in different ways.AdvertisementAdvert …
