Animals in Cambodia

Cambodia covers 181,035 square kilometers of low plains ringed by forested hills, with the Mekong running through its east and the Gulf of Thailand on its southwest coast. Its heart is the Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. In the dry season the lake covers about 2,500 square kilometers, but when monsoon rains swell the Mekong, the Tonle Sap River reverses its flow and the lake grows to around 12,000. That yearly flood feeds fish, flooded forests and huge bird colonies. Around it the country moves from rice fields and dry forest plains to the rainforests of the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest, the evergreen hills of Mondulkiri in the east, and islands and seagrass beds along the coast.

People here have long lived by that same water. About three million Cambodians depend directly on the lake, and fish provide much of their protein, which also puts heavy pressure on its wildlife. Cambodia was a pioneer in conservation, setting aside the Angkor temple complex and its surrounding land in 1925, and a royal decree in 1993 created a national system of 23 protected areas. UNESCO named the Tonle Sap a biosphere reserve in 1997, and Koh Rong became the first marine national park in 2018. One of the deadliest threats today is quieter than logging or guns: wire snares. Rangers removed 109,217 of them in the Southern Cardamom National Park alone over six years, and a national campaign is now trying to bring the number down, because snares catch whatever walks by, from deer to young elephants.

Cambodia received 5.57 million international visitors in 2025, down 16.9 percent from the year before after the border conflict with Thailand. Nearly one million of them went to Angkor, where the temples stand among old trees, and others head for the beaches and islands near Sihanoukville. From December to May, boats from Siem Reap reach the water bird colonies of Prek Toal on the lake, and ecotourism in the Cardamoms helps keep the forest standing. Wildlife follows these contrasts: elephants, wild cattle and wild cats in the far forests, snakes and water birds on the plains and the lake, and turtles and reef fish along the coast.

Snakes are by far the most serious animal risk in Cambodia, although nobody knows exactly how serious. There is no reliable national count, and one regional compilation gives a very wide range of 800 to 21,500 bites and 80 to 700 deaths a year. Many people never reach a hospital, which is one reason the figures are so uncertain. Local numbers give a better sense of the problem. A provincial official in Banteay Meanchey reported about 300 cases in a single year, with four or five deaths, and a 2009 study cited 153 reported cases and 12 deaths in 2008. Most of these bites happen in rice fields and along dirt paths, where farmers meet snakes at close range, and cobras are among the species blamed for the most deaths. Elephants are a much rarer danger. Reports from Mondulkiri describe a man killed by a wild elephant, a case noted at the time as the first in recent years there, and today's reports more often describe elephants dying in snares and old bomb craters than attacking people. Bears, wild boar, wild cattle and large pythons are strong enough to hurt a person at close range, but they live mostly in remote forest and national figures on attacks are hard to find. Along the coast, sea snakes, barracuda and sharks share the water with fishers and swimmers, and reports of people being hurt by them are hard to find as well.

Cambodia's most famous animals live far from the temples most visitors come to see, mainly in the Cardamom Mountains of the southwest and the forests of the northeast. Elephants are the best known. The Ministry of Environment puts the wild population at about 400 to 600, and around 300 of them live in the Eastern Plains of Mondulkiri, including about 100 in the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary. Others use an elephant corridor through the Cardamoms. Sightings of wild herds are rare even there, because these forests are dense and the animals are wary. Camera traps tell most of the rest of the story. In the Central Cardamoms, a study that counted 108 species recorded pangolins, and other cameras in the range have filmed wild cats moving along forest trails. Pangolins are active at night and are among the most heavily trafficked animals in the world, so a visitor is very unlikely to meet one. The same is true of lorises, which rangers have also rescued from poachers in the Cardamoms. Deer are spread more thinly than they once were, and a review of records from 2000 to 2020 found that one of the rarest kinds now survives in very small groups in nine areas of the east and north. Wild cattle have turned up on camera in the Cardamoms too. Snakes are the group people are most likely to meet by chance, since they also live around the rice fields and dirt paths of the plains.