Joined Oct 2018
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Sydney
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In terms of biodiversity it also depends on the class of animal you're discussing. Brazil is number one for animals overall as well as amphibians, and Colombia is number one for birds - so, that's essentially three wins for the Amazon. But Australia is the most biodiverse for reptiles and fish, and Indonesia is the most biodiverse for mammals. For vascular plants it is India.
Here are the stats:
Megadiverse countries - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
On the reasons for the biodiversiy of megadiverse countries, it's also worth looking at Indonesia. It is the country with the greatest biodiversity of mammals, and there seems to be two related reasons for this:
- It is the country with the most islands in the world, meaning the most distinct biomes separated by sea (a barrier for mammals that aren't bats!).
- Indonesia happens to include the Wallace Line, which separates the Indomalayan biogeographic region from the Australasian biogeographic region. Thus, in Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Bali you can see apes, tigers, elephants, rhinos, wild cat species (incl. tigers), wild dog species, all but one of the monkey species in Indonesia, and all but one of the wild pig species in Indonesia. But in Sulawesi, the Moluccas, the Lesser Sundas and New Guinea there are marsupials, monotremes, cockatoos, lorikeets, monitor lizards and birds of paradise. The Australasian region is also more diverse than was originally appreciated, with New Guinea forming its own zoogeographic region separate from Wallacea to the west and Australia to the south. Wallacea itself, at least west of the Moluccas, still includes some Indomalayan animals, such as the crab-eating macaque, tarsier and babirusa.
