SAN DIEGO, March 14 (UPI) -- The San Diego Zoo says it will run a biological research station in one of the more remote and biologically diverse places on Earth: the Amazon rain forest.
Zoo researchers say few places on the globe have had as little contact with the modern world as the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru's rain forest, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.
Accessible only after a flight into the jungle on a small plane and then a two-day trip by boat up the Amazon River, it is a perfect place to study more than 1,000 species of birds, 200 of reptiles and amphibians, 125 of mammals and numbers of Amazonian fish, scientists say.
John W. Terborgh, a professor emeritus at Duke University and a pioneer in the field of tropical research and conservation, ran the station for three decades but is now retiring.
Under an agreement signed with the Peruvian government, the zoo will continue and expand the station's research with an annual budget of $250,000.
The research station sits inside the 6,000-square-mile Manu Biosphere Reserve, part of a national park off-limits to the hunting and logging that have affected the ecosystem of much of the Amazon region.
