The plants and mammals of the Moluccas are much like those present on Hollywood tropical islands. Overhead are exotic clove and nutmeg trees, coconut palms, bananas, and trees sprouting strange and fragrant tropical fruits. A great variety of birds – pigeons, sunbirds, lories, cockatoos, and kingfishers – fly and screech overhead. Jus offshore, the coral-filled seas teem with bright fish, anemones, and sponges. Even scientist are moved to grandiloquence.
“The forests of the Moluccas offer to the naturalist a very striking example of the luxuriance and beauty of animal life in the tropics,” writes British naturalist Sir Alfred Russel Wallace in The Malay Archipelago. “The glorious birds and insects render the Moluccas a classic ground in the eyes of the naturalist, and characteristic and beautiful upon the globe.”
From the biologist’s point of view, Molucca—except for Aru—falls into a large area called Wallacea, named after Wallace, who spent eight years here during the 1850s.
In an 1863 paper Wallace had drawn a red line on the map of the Indies west of Sulawesi and Lombok, dividing Asian and Australian faunas. T.H. Huxley later called it “Wallacea’s Line.” As evidence grew, more lines were proposed, but scientists now think of a transition zone rather than a line.
Wallacea is the island region between the Sunda and Sahul continental shelves. During the great Ice Ages, with much of the world’s water tied up in ice, much the South China Sea was dry land, and Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Bali were all connected to the Asian mainland. At the same time, New Guinea was connected to Australia by a land bridge. When the Ice Ages receded, the seas rose and the western land mass became the islands of today. New Guinea and the Arus separated at the same time from Australia.
The Moluccas therefore form a transitional zone between the two very different types of plant and animal species—those characteristic of Asia (e.g., placental mammals), and those characteristic of Australia (e.g., marsupials). As a result of selective migrations of species and their ensuing isolation on these islands, many unique hybrids and evolutionary holdovers found nowhere else in the world flourish in the Moluccas.
(PeriPlus)