Camponotus gigas from Lanjak

Dear all,

Camponotus gigas (the gigantic ants common in pristine forest) are different in Lanjak Entimau. They have bright yellow femur compared to the ones in Sabah.

New Specimens

Dear friends,
Petherine has just received 13 soecimens of wildlife (various species) from Wong Siew Te of Danum - who left for the us recently. they are either from roadkills of given to them in danum. The specimens are kept in a frezer in borneensis. We have a problem to identify which freezer to store them - most of them are full of dead animals.

If some of you would need to anything to them, please do and it is good if we will some space in the freezer for future specimens.

Specimens are legal and we have notified SWD for their arrival here.

Hamid.

Featured on BBC

Dear everyone,
just a quick post. There's an article being featured on BBC news at 10, BBC World and BBC 24 about Danum Valley (10th Dec). It was being aired in Malaysia BBC World Channel at 5pm last monday and a longer footage on afternoon news yesterday. Deforestation, logging, rainforests, canopies, global warming and climate change was the main discussion. There's a snippet of me being interviewed while working on top of the tree as well. :D
this is the link to the video Video.

and link to the article
Timber today or climate tomorrow.

Yangtze river dolphin (the Baiji)

The Baiji (Lipotes vexillifer)

Facts:
-estimated 75-150 in the wild.
-endemic to the Yangtze
-Declined from 500 in 20 years
-no captive population
-hard to find/assess

Probs:
-10% of the world's human population lives on the banks of the Yangtze
-pollution from factories
-collision with boat propellers
-fishing
-hard to locate

Proposed solution:
-100 km impounded stretch of th river where fishing would be banned and pollution from the banks controlled
-a 25 km oxbow lake with nets at each end
-captive breeding including 3 pools and a 1 km artificial river has been constructed.


erm...Any other solution??

Ant wet specimens moved to Wet Collection Room

Hassan and I have moved most of the ant wet specimens from Bilik Belajar 3 to the Wet Specimen Collection room, just next to the Isoptera cabinet. All what we need now is to sort and document them. In some cases, we need to identify them too to genera. Thanks Hassan for the help.

News from CPS BORNEO

Hi all...
just to let everybody know that Ms. Milena Salgado-Lynn, a PhD candidate from Cardiff University is here with us for the next few years. Shes going to work in Kinabatangan on primates genetics. If you are anywhere near the CPS BORNEO office, please drop by and said hi.. she very nice and friendly.

Also, I would like to wish 'Selamat Hari Raya and maaf zahir batin' to everybody.

Cheers

Fairus

Which is the specimen?

I went to Sipadan to come face-to-face for the first time with the cooconut crab (Birgus latro). It was first described by Bazin (1970) - Bazin, F., 1970. Étude comparée de l''organe deutocérébral des macroures reptantia et des anomoures (Crustacés Décapodes). Arch. Zool. exp. gén. 111: 245–264.

If you're collecting this one for BORNEENSIS - what is going to happen to the Dynamo washing liquid bottle cap? He looks gorgeous in there, don't you thing so? Furthermore, you don't have to fix the cap with formalin and it goes well with alcohol 75%, too!