Qualla: Madagascar Spiny Forests

Madagascar Spiny Forests: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MeegsC, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nineteen out of every twenty plants in this forest live nowhere else on the planet. Walk into the spiny forests of southwestern Madagascar and the strangeness is immediate: spindly trunks studded with thorns reach upward like the arms of some sea creature, leaves shrink to almost nothing, and the whole landscape looks built for a different world. It is a place that took drought and turned it into one of the most distinctive plant communities on Earth, so unusual and so important that it sits among the Global 200, the list of the most ecologically vital regions anywhere.

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Image: MeegsC | CC BY-SA 3.0

Madagascar Spiny Forests: A Catalogue of Endemics

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AxelStrauss, CC BY-SA 3.0. The numbers behind this forest are staggering. Across the ecoregion, 48 percent of the plant genera and an astonishing 95 percent of the species are endemic, found here and nowhere else, the highest level of plant endemism anywhere in Madagascar. That is what isolation and a hars...

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Image: AxelStrauss | CC BY-SA 3.0

Madagascar Spiny Forests: Trees That Mimic Cacti

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smiley.toerist, CC BY-SA 3.0. The signature plants belong to a subfamily called the Didiereoideae, woody and thorned and strange. They look so much like cacti that the resemblance fools nearly everyone, yet they are only distant relatives, having arrived at the same spiky design from a completely different br...

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Image: Smiley.toerist | CC BY-SA 3.0

Madagascar Spiny Forests: Built for the Dry

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K, CC BY 2.0. Everything here is an adaptation to scarcity. The spiny forest grows on poor, thin soils under a sky that delivers low and unreliable winter rain, so the plants have engineered themselves to survive long thirst. Thorns deter the animals that might eat precious moisture-storing ti...

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Image: gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K | CC BY 2.0

Madagascar Spiny Forests: A Corner of a Divided Island

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vassen from Brussels, Belgium, CC BY 2.0. Madagascar can be read like a map of climates, and the spiny forest is its driest chapter. The great island divides into four broad zones: lush moist forest along the eastern flank, dry forest in the west, mangroves fringing the western coast, and this spiny forest claiming the p...

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Image: Frank Vassen from Brussels, Belgium | CC BY 2.0