The park encompasses Lanbi Island and several smaller islands in the Mergui Archipelago, a scattered chain off Myanmar's southern Tanintharyi coast. The terrain rises steeply from sea level to 1,493 feet, packing an extraordinary range of habitats into a compact space. Coral reefs ring the islands, giving way to seagrass beds where dugong grass grows alongside five other seagrass species. Mangrove forests line the rivers and freshwater sources, their root systems serving as nurseries for marine life. Inland, the landscape shifts to tropical evergreen rainforest, its canopy dense with Dipterocarpus trees, wild orchids, ferns, and lianas draping from branch to branch. Sixty species of coral, 50 species of mangrove, 6 types of seagrass, and 17 endangered tree species have been documented within the park's boundaries. Vast caves punctuate the island's interior, fed by freshwater sources that sustain the forest above.

Between November 2015 and May 2017, a camera-trapping survey transformed what scientists understood about Lampi's terrestrial wildlife. The images documented an astonishing roster of mammals sharing an island smaller than many cities: smooth-coated otters, Asian palm civets, small-toothed palm civets, long-tailed macaques, northern pig-tailed macaques, dusky langurs, Bengal slow lorises, lesser mouse deer, wild boar, and that Sunda pangolin. Red giant flying squirrels and black giant squirrels appeared alongside Pallas's squirrels and Berdmore's ground squirrels. The sheer diversity raises questions about how such varied species maintain viable populations on an island. For many of these animals, Lampi represents an isolated refuge, a fragment of mainland biodiversity marooned by rising seas and sustained by the island's rich forests and freshwater.

A 2013 survey found carapaces of leatherback sea turtles, green sea turtles, hawksbill sea turtles, and Oldham's leaf turtles on the island, confirming that these waters remain critical nesting habitat. But the turtles face compounding threats. Fishing gear entangles them. Habitat deterioration erodes their nesting beaches. And direct harvesting persists: fishermen and locals take turtles for consumption and commercial sale. The same pressures bear down on the island's terrestrial wildlife. Hunting proves profitable enough to draw outsiders who travel to the island specifically to catch and sell mouse deer, pangolins, wild boar, and water monitors to fishing boats or inland markets. Local residents, by contrast, typically hunt for subsistence. The distinction matters, because it means the most destructive pressure comes not from the people who live alongside these animals but from those who arrive, extract, and leave.

Lampi's designation as an Important Bird Area reflects more than bureaucratic recognition. The Nicobar pigeon, a large iridescent ground-dwelling bird related to the extinct dodo, breeds on the islands. Edible-nest swiftlets build their saliva nests in the island's caves, structures so prized in Chinese cuisine that their harvest has historically driven human activity across the Mergui Archipelago. The interplay between birds and landscape here is intimate: the swiftlets depend on the caves, the pigeons depend on undisturbed forest floor, and both depend on the island remaining remote enough to discourage large-scale human settlement. For now, access remains restricted to daytime visits, a regulation that protects the nocturnal animals the camera traps revealed and preserves the darkness the nesting birds require.

The Mergui Archipelago contains over 800 islands, most of them uninhabited and many unmapped in any meaningful ecological sense. Lampi stands out precisely because someone thought to look. The camera traps, the turtle surveys, the seagrass inventories, all represent a choice to document what exists before it disappears. Myanmar's political instability has complicated conservation efforts, but the park's ASEAN Heritage status provides a thin layer of international visibility. From the air, Lampi appears as a dark green hump fringed with white sand and turquoise shallows, unremarkable among hundreds of similar shapes. On the ground, in the cave-pocked interior where flying squirrels glide between dipterocarps and pangolins shuffle through leaf litter, the island reveals itself as something rarer: a place where the full complexity of tropical life still operates largely intact.