Rhinoceros were once plentiful throughout the Southeast Asian ecosystem. They consumed vast quantities of plants and seeds and moved from one area to another pooping the seeds out thus aiding in dispersal.

However, the demand for rhinos foolishly used in Chinese “medicine” has decimated the population to the point where they are now on the critically endangered list. Conservation efforts by governments have largely failed throughout the world.

Elephants were also responsible for the wide dispersal of seeds. Eating and pooping from one place to another, their habitat has been decimated from hunting for ivory and the planting of oil palm plantations.

Accumulating evidence has demonstrated the understory of the forest has shown a dramatic reduction in fruit trees formerly dispersed by these gentle giants. The ecological cascade has affected many species in the food web.

Could the Malayan tapir, the third largest ruminant after these great beasts, replace these wonders for seed dispersal? There are a couple of things in their favor. None of their body parts are used in Chinese potions. Their meat is not favored. Although an endangered species, their survival looks a bit brighter than for rhinos and elephants.

Malayan Tapirs are usually about 1.8 meters long and weigh about 350kg. They are solitary animals and eat fallen fruits and twigs from the forest floor. Running into thick bushes is their defense from tigers, their major predator.

An experiment* conducted at the Wildlife Reserves in Singapore made an attempt to answer whether the tapir could replace the rhino and elephant for seed dispersal. Nine plant species, seven from Southeast Asia, were fed to eight Malayan tapirs, seven of which were born in captivity.

The fruits, purchased at a local market, included mango, durian, chemedak, rambutan, manosteen, tamarind, longan, dillenia and papaya. A known number of seed fruit were fed to the Tapirs. For example, the rambutan has a large central seed and the number they ate were counted.

Five hours later, the dung was collected and the seeds counted. They were then planted in pots to see if they would germinate after a journey through the digestive system.

Large seeds (durian, chempedak and Tamarind) failed to germinate. Very few mid sized seeds did not survive the gut passage. In comparison, elephants defecated 75% of ingested Tamarind seeds where 65% germinated in a similar experiment performed elsewhere.

The Tapirs are picky eaters. They had a special aversion to durians. They spat out or dropped many seeds eating only the flesh. Elephants gobble and gulp everything in a single swallow. Tapirs also found great difficulty with eating hard elephant apples although the researchers concede this could possibly be because they were captive had not been exposed to the fruit.

The digestive system of Tapirs and elephants could also be major factor. Because of their teeth, Tapirs are much better in crushing seed than elephants or rhinos. The gut passage time is much longer in Tapirs that in the larger denizens allowing the digestive juices to work more effectively.

These preliminary studies suggests the Tapir will not replace elephants and rhinos for seed dispersal. However, the authors suggest many more studies must be performed in order to assess the role played by other dispersing critters including bears and Horn bills. They also relate there needs to be further studies on the digestive systems of all major participates in seed dispersal before any concrete conclusions can be reached.

As the world’s rainforests become more fragmented and will eventually become islands surrounded by agriculture and human living space, the management of these remainders needs to be fully understood. This first study of the role of Tapirs and seed dispersal is an important step in saving the ecosystem that will left.

*Campos-Arceiz, et al Asian Tapirs Are No Elephants When It Comes To Seed Dispersal Biotropica 44(2):220-227 2012

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all

Kuching, Malaysia Borneo-Since I quit teaching I can now get back to one of my hobbies, my Kris collection. A Kris is a weapon unique to the Malay world and akin to a dagger. I am not going into a description as you can see pictures of them on my Face book page, Borneo Tom.

As in most collections, the intent was to start out small and just acquire a few. Now I have over thirty, enough to equip a small army. I made the mistake of informing people of my interest and suddenly I was presented with hundreds. Most were manufactured in Indonesia for the tourist trade and I had to gently relate that I only wanted the very different and rare types.

The lore is as fascinating as the Kris itself. They are said to have magical powers that can change lives and impart the owner with special powers.
Each one has a personality of its’ own and what one can, the others cannot.
Among some of the Malay people, just pointing a Kris at someone can bring bad luck and disaster. By stabbing the foot prints, the person will fall ill and die. One Kris at a museum in Malaysia, thirsts for blood, sneaks away after dark, kills someone then washes itself and returns to the showcase. A bad Kris was destroyed and pounded into a fine powder. It was testified by many the grains ascended into the sky on a starry night.

Because each Kris has its own personal properties, no one is quite sure what capability each possesses, the powers of Islam are employed. There are two types of Islam here in Malaysia, each represented by a color of either green or yellow. I am told we are of the yellow sort. I am not sure what that means but will try and find out and then share with you.

In order to rein in these powers, a Kris is wrapped or adorned with a yellow piece of cloth so it will not fly around the room. Of course I do not believe in such nonsense that is why each of my krises has a yellow piece of cloth around them.

Local lore, meaning the people I am associated with, relates they have a spirit that lives with them. The apparition inside the Kris will take care of the owner and the house. When you get cut by a Kris it will not heal because one violated the spirit. I guess he is supposed to go out and get his/her own blood and not be fed.

Some of the people associated with the Kris are warriors and could come from descendants of those who have drawn blood. Very few people have a Kris because they are usually in possession of the rulers and those who deal in the supernatural world. Most people prefer not to have them around the house because they are not sure what spirit they are imbued with, good or bad, and are very wary.

My collection comes from remote islands in Indonesia. Usually passed down from generation to generation, the current youngsters have discarded the beliefs and, sadly, sell them for hand phones and motorcycles, necessary items to conduct business. I am so fortunate to have acquired these pieces and their spirits.

…Life is good

Malayan Tapir

How are seeds dispersed now that the large animals, elephants and rhinoceros, have been hunted from their ecological habitat? Who took their place? A Tapir?

Rhinoceros were once plentiful throughout the Southeast Asian ecosystem. They consumed vast quantities of plants and seeds and moved from one area to another pooping the seeds out from one place to another.

However, the demand for rhinos foolishly used as an aphrodisiac in Chinese “medicine” has decimated the population to the point where they are now on the critically endangered list. Conservation efforts by governments have largely failed throughout the world. It will probably take a soldier armed with a machine gun stationed next to each animal with orders to shoot and kill to save the remaining animals.

Elephants were also responsible for the wide dispersal of seeds. Eating and pooping from one place to another, their habitat has been decimated from hunting for ivory and the planting of oil palm plantations.

Could the Malayan tapir replace these wonders for seed dispersal? There are a couple of things in their favor. None of their body parts are used in Chinese potions. Their meat is not favored. Although an endangered species, their survival looks a bit brighter than for rhinos and elephants.

Malayan Tapirs are usually about 1.8 meters long and weigh about 350kg. They are solitary animals and eat fallen fruits and twigs from the forest floor. Running into thick bushes is their defense from Tigers, their major predator.

An experiment* conducted at the Wildlife Reserves in Singapore made an attempt to answer whether the tapir could replace the rhino and elephant for seed dispersal. Nine plant species, seven from Southeast Asia, were fed to eight Malayan tapirs, seven of which were born in captivity.

The fruits, purchased at a local market, included mango, durian, chemedak, rambutan, manosteen, tamarind, longan, dillenia and papaya. A known number of seed fruit were fed to the Tapirs. For example, the rambutan has a large central seed and the number they ate were counted.
Five hours later, the dung was located and the seeds collected. They were then planted in pots to see if they would germinate.

The Tapirs are picky eaters. They did not like the big seeds and when they did pass through the gut, none of the seeds germinated. The Tapirs captured, radio collared and set free in central Malaya and whose range was monitored, pooped only a short distance from the food source.

A preliminary conclusion suggests the Tapir will not replace elephants and rhinos for seed dispersal. However, the authors of the study suggest many more experiments need to be performed.

*Campos-Arceiz, et al Asian Tapirs Are No Elephants When It Comes To Seed Dispersal Biotropica 44(2):220-227 2012

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all

A stromatolite is built when photosynthesizing bacteria (cyanobacteria) produce minerals in a process called biomineralization. This is not so strange when you consider our teeth and bones are made biologically and shells and corals are also formed by a similar process. However, instead of using calcium from the calcium carbonate in the cave, these critters use phosphorous from the bat guano!

In the cave, millions of bats hang around during the day producing guano. This guano mixes with water and drips down onto the “shelves” providing a rich mixture of phosphorus for the cynobacteria to convert into a hard substance.

The entrance to the cave, I like to think of it as a cavern, allows sunlight to infiltrate deep into the recesses where the stromatolites form. They only need a bit of light to grow and live in the dimmest part of the cave. Therefore one has the perfect ingredients: sunlight, fertilizer from the bat guano and water from a hole in the roof. These three combinations, plus a warm temperature come together to form the perfect conditions. In fact, this is the only place in the world where they appear in freshwater conditions and on the wall of a cave.

Well, not exactly on the wall. No cave has a smooth surface. There are always places where indentations occur especially in Deer Cave where rainwater runs down the walls. The water erodes unstable parts of the rock forming ledges. It is on these ledges the stromatolites form and build upward and outward forming the ledges or steps.

When you cut a chunk of stromatolite in half there are alternating dark and light bands. They seem to be evenly separated. The researchers think they may be are caused by the different amounts of rainfall. Although there is rain usually every day, the amount increases or decreases with the seasonal monsoons. Each layer, therefore, should provide an accurate record of the amount of rain over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, rainfall records for comparison are scant and altogether missing for the war years.

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.

The article was adapted from:

Lundberg, Joyce and McFarlane Donald Subaerial freshwater phosphatic stromaolites in Deer Cave, Sarawak-A unique geobilogical cave formation in Geomorphology 128 (2011) 57-72 and
Presentation by the authors 18 July 2011 Sarawak Museum, Kuching, Sarawak.

orangutan
and us watch each other
did an alien separate us?

john tiong chunghoo

majestic orangutan

Majestic Orangutan

Oh majestic orangutan
it has been years since I saw you last
I remember your eyes well
such eyes! mirrors glimmering sadness
you are on display for the gawkers
smug in their superiority
you are so much more than they
could ever be
man, that greedy beast!
not fit to be called ape
I remember when our eyes met
eyes became tongue
you spook eloquent
touching my soul
crying out I pounded against your glass
of injustice, shattering!
each shard reflecting your plight
one day we will meet again
majestic orangutan
you will sing your song and
I will listen into the far reaching night
searching out your beauty
without greed or strife

Cynthia Grier

CROCS PARK

It is as if the park
we walk on,
this New year day 2009
is the park of wild beasts
tranferred from jungle forest
compress into single jail
beautifully landscaped and designed

Entrance fees
not for ransoms nor bails
for creatures’ release
for not-to-be expected freedom

They are exploited
like the just-born baby crocs
couldn’t taste yet the
aroma of wild river
their supposed grandeur habitat
away from human touch
radiation of digital cam
harmful sights of guests
teasing their squared limited haven
so heart breaking
while their teary eyes
gaze up the native birds and buzzing bees
flying freely in infinite sky
grasping full justice and freedom
chanting all day long over the
extra judicial prisoners’ animals
not so lucky enough to be a localized- common
creatures that unshackles spectator’s curiosity
unfetters commercial animal tours

may this poem unlocks the
croc’s inmates aching fate

ROMMEL MARK DOMINGUEZ MARCHAN

The Mosaic Theory of Species states the rainforest taking over the old Mayan gardens should eventually show species at random and not in any particular order.

Each part of the rain forest should have different tree species with none dominating the other. When this randomness is achieved the rain forest is considered in balance and has returned to its normal state after having been logged or disturbed in other ways such as fire.

The great British naturalist, Alfred Wallace, who spent years in the Malay Archipelago, wrote in 1878 that high diversity was associated with low densities of each species in a given area.

Since that time, several other theories and studies have been put forth in an effort to discover if Wallace’s observation holds true. It does

But how long will it take? Researchers took a look at the old plantings of the Mayas and tried to figure out if they had any effect on the rain forest that subsequently took over the area. The Maya culture collapsed in about 1 AD. This should be long enough for the Mosaic Theory to take effect.

The Maya gardens consisted of groups of trees from the forest that produced products useful to the Maya community. And, as every back yard gardener knows, groups of species clustered together grow and survive better than if planted alone. Hence, plantings are in rows or groupings.

What they found is that the Mosaic Theory didn’t work even after all that time. There were still groupings of trees of the same species that violated the randomness that should have been achieved.

But why?

One explanation they proposed stated there wasn’t enough time for the forest to take over because the trees in a tropical rain forest live for a very long time. But, they discounted this idea because hurricanes have penetrated well inland and have devastated the forests yet the species grew back in the same area, again in violation of the Mosaic Theory.

Another idea states that the trees clustered together, could like a single organism, inhibit other species from coming close. Could the Maya plantings emit a chemical that prevents other species from moving in? Studies have shown that groups of trees perform in this manner.

The question remains.

In my own opinion, this study is important because when the time comes, and it will but not in my life time or my children’s, where palm oil is no longer in demand because something else has replaced it. There will be a desire to return the lands back into natural tropical rain forest. One should examine oil palm trees to see if they possibly could exhibit the same behavior as the trees planted by the Mayans so long ago.

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.

This article was adapted from:

Ross, Nanci J “Ancient Maya Agroforestry Echoing Through Spatial Relationships in the Extant Forests of NW Belize” in BioTropica, Volume 42 no.2, March 2011, p. 141-148

But how did we arrive at the two separate species, one in Sumatra and one in Borneo and three subspecies in Borneo?

We need to remember that Borneo, Malaya and Sumatra were all connected and the critters roamed back and forth. Then, the glaciers melted, like they are doing now, and flooded all the lowlands, leaving the orangutan populations stranded. But, then, how did they become separate species?

Let’s take a series of events that happen randomly but discreetly like cancer cells. They reproduce unpredictably and quietly but they move forward to build a tumor.

However, let say we want to work backwards and trace the tumor back to the original cell. Using this very simplistic example, the authors trace the origins of the Sumatra and Borneo orangutans back to a common ancestor through their chain of random events.

The Sumatra and Borneo orangutan had to come from a common ancestor but who was this creature and how did we get the magnificent ape we have today?

We also need to remember we need to have a lot of genes in a gene pool to recombine to make two very similar apes but still very different. With out the genes to trial and error back and forth there could be no sub species. Just look at the number of attempts to arrive at us humans!

The authors have come up with the time it took to create a new species as 334,000 years from a population of 26,800 + or – 6,700. In other words, 26,800 ancestors made whoopee for 334,000 years to make the orangutans we have today.

Now the neat thing is how they came up with these numbers. They first built their own model using the Orangutan Genome Project information (I didn’t know there was one either) as a basis. Then they added in formulas for population genetics and many other math stuffs(one of their formulas has a string of four “E” things lined up!) and came up with their very own model.

The resulting formulas, very simple to them but mind boggling to me, can be applied to other species to determine the numbers and time it took to go from a period of gene flow back and forth to a period where the gene flow stopped and the new sub species appeared.

The above is adapted from:

Mailund, Thomas et al “Estimating Divergence and Ancestral Population Size on Bornean and Sumatran Subspecies Using a Coalescent Hidden Markov Model” PloS Genetics, 7 (3) March 3, 2011

I bear full responsibility for any mistakes in interpreting the article.

“All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small all things wise and wonderful the Lord God made them all”

After caring for his parents in the years before their death, Tom impulsively decides to pull up roots and move to Borneo as well as travel through Southeast Asia. That only would be more than enough material for a great book, but Tom’s story doesn’t end at the traveling.

Tom decided to write Borneo Tom for several reasons. One of those being to educate people on the Islamic faith and attempt to reduce the bigotry and prejudice against the. Tom lived with the Islamic people in Southeast Asia and writes of those experiences. after reading Tom’s experiences I must say I see the Islamic people in a different light.

I told you there were orangutans in Borneo Tom. Efforts to help these creatures are mentioned in the book, and a portion of the proceeds from the book go to benefit this worthy cause. The illustrations of orangutans in Borneo Tom show how they interact with humans in such a way that will endear them to readers and make them want to learn more.

The illustrations in Borneo Tom help you create a true and vivid picture in mind about the life Tom lived traveling through Southeast Asia. Waterfront Niki created the sketches, he lives near the Sarawak River in Borneo. He is famous in the region for his work because he sketches portraits of tourists.

Borneo Tom is about taking a chance and just doing it. It took courage to suddenly pick up and move. For tom McLaughlin that courage paid off. Remember the romance I mentioned? Well Tom fell in love with a local girl in Southeast Asia and in spite of a vasectomy years prior, she got pregnant.
Posted by Rita at 6:01 PM
Labels: animals, Asia, book review, Borneo Tom, romance, travel, true story

http://ritasbookreviews.blogspot.com/2011/02/borneo-tom-by-tom-mclaughlin.html

A very rare event in efforts to save the endangered species, Volunteer Leo Biddle stated this rivals efforts obtained only by the San Diego Zoo, a world renowned reproductive center for critically endangered wildlife.

“We had an idea she may be pregnant because she began acting strangely,” Mr. Leo continued. “Then she dug a huge burrow under the largest tree in the bear enclosure. We have had glimpses of the cub. All seems well at this point and the entire center is filled with excitement”, he continued.” The cub could possibly make an appearance in about month after gaining weight and developing fur.

The center has had three major disappointments with breeding Sun Bears. Two were still born and another was killed by a wild boar. “We have cordoned off the area and have provided top security to keep the other bears away.

The parents are mother Gani and dad Gabby, two elderly bears in the later stages of their lives. Gabby, around 25, ancient for the breed and Gani, thought to be in her late teens are doing well.

Gani remains in seclusion in her burrow dashing out to get food left by the keepers and then quickly returning. Trip cameras, donated by proceeds from the sale of the book “Borneo Tom”, have recorded some of the action.

Tom McLaughlin, 60, author of the book, stated cheekily, “We old men can still do it” referring to the age of the daddy bear and his own two month old son. “I am happy the trip camera is helping to monitor things”

The Sun Bear population has been decimated by logging in Indonesian Borneo and its survival greatly endangered. The Matang Wildlife Center plans to construct a bear habitat on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water and a bunker on the fourth. Researchers will then study and hopefully fill in the gaps of its still uncompleted life cycle.