By Tanveer Singh
Imagine you are a biologist walking through a forest where the ground floor is a tropical rainforest and the top floor is a Himalayan snowfield – all within the same 1,985 square kilometres, smaller than Goa, and packing more species per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Asia. And yet, entire floors of this building have never had a scientist set foot inside.
Scientists worldwide discover around 16,000 new species every year- roughly 44 every single day. Northeast India, covering just 7% of India’s land area, is quietly pushing well above its weight in that global count. In 2024 alone, this one corner of the country gave science three new frog genera, a blue ant unseen in any record since 1902, a cicada with butterfly wings, and a leafless orchid. These weren’t just new species – each was so different from everything already known that researchers had to invent entirely new categories just to file them. Like discovering not just a new book in the library, but a whole new section that the library never had a shelf for.And somehow, this library keeps adding new sections every single year. So the question worth asking is: why here?
To answer that, you have to start small – with a single park in Arunachal Pradesh that is, in many ways, the most extreme example of everything Northeast India represents.Because there is not just any forest. This forest has been waiting to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, nearly four decades on a list, still not inscribed, because the world hasn’t fully figured out what to do with something this extraordinary. The one that holds over 1,000 plant species and 1,400 animal species within a single boundary. The only park on the planet where all four big cats – tiger, leopard, snow leopard, and clouded leopard – share the same forest floor, like a neighbourhood where lions, cheetahs, jaguars, and panthers all live on the same street. That simply does not happen anywhere else on Earth. This is Namdapha National Park, Arunachal Pradesh – and it did not become this way by chance.
The secret lies in geography – and Northeast India has an unfair advantage of it. This region sits at the collision point of two of Asia’s greatest biodiversity zones – the Himalayas pushing down from the north and the Indo-Burma hotspot extending up from the south. Species from both zones meet here, overlap here, and in some cases evolve into entirely new forms here. There is nowhere else on Earth where this particular collision happens at this scale.
At the centre of that collision sits Namdapha elevating from 200 metres at its lowest point to 4,500 metres at its highest, all within the same boundary. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the difference between standing at sea level in Mumbai and standing at the top of a peak in Sikkim. Each altitude band has its own temperature, its own rainfall, its own set of creatures that have never needed to travel up or down to survive. The tropical frog at 300 metres has never met the moth living at 3,000 metres. They are neighbours on a map but strangers in every biological sense.
That separation is exactly what makes new species possible. When two populations of the same animal get physically cut off from each other by steep terrain for thousands of years, they stop interbreeding. They start evolving independently, adapting to their own little world. Until one day, the differences between them are so large that science has to give them entirely different names. Namdapha’s vertical terrain has essentially been running a species-making machine, uninterrupted, for millennia – and we are only now beginning to discover the results.
Namdapha does not give up its secrets easily – but when it does, they arrive in clusters. In 2024, researchers found three new frog species in its marshes – Gracixalus patkaiensis, Alcalus fontinalis, and Nidirana noadihing – each so different from anything previously known that scientists had to create entirely new genus categories just to classify them. Think of it like finding three new fruits that don’t belong to any existing family – not a new type of mango, but something that makes the entire mango family look incomplete.
But the frogs were not even the most dramatic story from this park. The Namdapha flying squirrel had been missing since 1981 – known to science from a single collected specimen – when a team launched 10 separate expeditions spanning 79 days, shining torches into trees every night, searching for glowing eyes in the dark.They finally spotted it in 2022. A creature that had effectively been a ghost for 42 years, still alive in the canopy. It remains Critically Endangered – its identity still not fully confirmed without DNA comparison against that single 1981 specimen in Kolkata. And this is just one park.
Zoom out to the broader Northeast and the pattern repeats. A blue ant in Arunachal Pradesh so vividly coloured it was mistaken for a jewel – the first of its kind recorded in the subcontinent in 121 years. A cicada in Meghalaya with butterfly wings that the local Garo community had known for generations, but science had never once named. A leafless orchid in Lohit district, flowering without a single green leaf, was added to the IUCN endangered list the same day it was formally described. Science is not discovering Northeast India – it is finally catching up to it. The question is whether it is catching up fast enough.
The honest answer is: probably not.
Five northeastern states – Assam, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur – account for 60% of India’s entire tree cover loss between 2001 and 2023. The region producing the most extraordinary biodiversity discoveries in the country is simultaneously losing its forests faster than anywhere else in India. Assam alone has lost 340,000 hectares. Mizoram, 334,000. Nagaland, 268,000.Each hectare lost is a floor of that multi-storey building, sealed shut forever before anyone got to open the door.
Think of it this way. The Amazon rainforest took decades of deforestation before the world noticed – and by the time it did, 17% was already gone, triggering droughts across South America, disrupting rainfall patterns thousands of kilometres away, and pushing the entire ecosystem toward a tipping point it may never recover from. Northeast India is not the Amazon. It is smaller, quieter, and receives a fraction of the attention. That is precisely what makes it more vulnerable, not less.
The leafless orchid named and endangered on the same day was not an anomaly – it was a pattern. The Namdapha flying squirrel survived 42 years as a ghost because its forest was intact enough to hide it. That condition is no longer guaranteed. Somewhere in the unexplored altitude bands above 1,500 metres, there are creatures that science has not named yet, calling from marshes that no researcher has waded into. Some of them may disappear before anyone gets the chance.
Northeast India is not waiting to be discovered. It has been here all along – producing life that the rest of the world has no words for. The question is no longer why here. The question is how much longer.
(Tanveer Singh is First year BTech Student, Plaksha University, Mohali)
