Admittedly it has been a slow process & while still plagued by unforeseen delays our brand new lab is starting to take shape. The building team have done us proud & depending on delivery of materials we should be moving in around New Year. And we can’t wait, for as well as the obvious benefits to having our own lab, the views from up there are spectacular!
SAFE HOUSES
While the building crew have been waiting for materials for the lab they have not been idle. They’ve been putting up some great new structures including a new dorm for the single RA’s & a new kitchen area for the RA’s.
FRAGMENTATION PROCESS
The last few months have seen planned and scheduled logging work happening around some of our plots. Some of the plots are now isolated as part of the experimental fragmentation process, and we have been taking advantage of this to collect our own core allometry measurements. The progress of the loggers have allowed some of our researchers, like Takeshi Inagawa, to obtain data from recently felled mature trees from the matrix to assist in his research. Also pictured here is the fragment boundary at Stephen Hardwick's Micro-climate & Sap flow experiment, with his ibuttons recording vital data about the microclimate on the forest edge.
Resident Researchers & Volunteers
RANDALL LEE
Randall, pictured here smiling in the middle of the photo, hails from Keningau, Sabah, & is going into his 3rd year of his undergrad. in conservation biology. He is currently out at SAFE volunteering for a month carrying on with Amy Fitzmaurice’ camera trapping work. Also while out at SAFE he is collecting data on the vegetation structure of each camera trap point to compare the species composition, persistence & presence of medium to large mammals found across the gradients of habitat disturbance in our E, B & D plots. This data he will use for his final year project. Randall’s main interest lies in primates & in particular Orang Utans & while this is his first at length stay in a field station, he has had previous field experience at Gunung Alab, Kawang Forest reserve & Gomantong caves in the Kinabatangan region.
As there is a lot of down time between camera trap deployment & retrieval, Randall has been busy reading papers & writing his methods but has lately taken a keen interest in our garden. He has been a great help & played an integral part in establishing some new SAFE camp vegetable beds. Besides from gardening Randall has a particular interest in sports, mainly badminton & volleyball. Randall would like to give a big thanks to our SAFE RA’s who he found very helpful & friendly. He is yet to see a wild Orang Utan.
TAKESHI INAGAWA
Takeshi, who featured in our newsletter of DEC-JAN earlier this year is back at SAFE. This time around his team is able to take advantage of the advanced state of logging in the area & collecting samples of tree trunks, branch & course roots to understand detailed nutrient allocation. He wants to see if the nutrient allocation differs depending on height of the trunk or size of branch & it’s proximity to the trunk. He collects 3 locations of trunk disc & 3 points of branch & trunk will be partitioned into 3 parts which are bark, sap wood & heart wood for the chemical analysis.
Takeshi’s team has been in the matrix felling trees of 10 species with 3 replicates. This gives the opportunity for Takeshi to have access to entire trees to understand detailed allocation of nutrients to different parts of the trees.
SARAH MAUNSELL
Originally from the country town Grafton in northern NSW, Australia comes Sarah Maunsell. She has been based at Brisbane, Queensland now for a while where she did her PhD at Griffith University on elevational associations of host-parasitoid food webs in subtropical rainforest. Sarah is now at SAFE as a postdoctoral researcher working on an Australian Research Council project lead by Roger Kitching & Nigel Stork. They are researching how forest modification & fragmentation affects herbivory and the distribution of herbivorous insects and their predators. On her first trip out this year she has been surveying moths, which are primarily herbivores at their larval stage, across SAFE sites. She has been catching moths using light traps, matching sites where fogging samples have previously been collected by Dr Kalsum Yusah as the group will also be looking at other arthropods within these fogging samples.
In order to identify the moths she has been pinning them & counting numbers of individuals and species. So far she has counted over 800 species in the SAFE area. Sarah developed a passion for tropical rainforests when she first visited Sabah seven years ago on a student field trip to Danum Valley. Since this time she has worked in rainforest in the Wet Tropics region of northern Australia, tropical southern China and subtropical rainforest in Eastern Australia. Sarah is very happy to be back in Sabah. She would like to thank her very entertaining and helpful volunteers Yen and Leona (UMS) and hopes they will return to help her next year. She also thanks her RA's Harbin and Mamat. Jumpa tahun depan!
HAH HUAI EN (YEN)
Yen is Johorian by birth but has been out in Sabah for three years studying Conservation Biology at UMS. She was out at SAFE for a month this year with Leona volunteering assistance to Sarah Maunsell. Yens final year project is on the relationship of butterflies to their host plants. Yens other interests include microclimate, dipterocarps, canopy biology & camera trapping. For more on Yen's adventures at SAFE click here
LEONA WAI
Leona is from Kota Kinabalu, Sabah & like Yen is in her final year of Conservation Biology at UMS. Leona is primarily interested in mammals & this is what her final year project will be about. Leona loves to travel & explore the forest & she hopes one day to join the B.O.R.A. (Borneo rhino alliance) as this is her favourite mammal. The duo have been great fun to have out at camp & conversations of their daily adventures have brought great merriment to all involved. For more on Leona's stay at SAFE click here
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SAFE Project Research Assistants
Basri & Risma
BASRI BATIONG & RISMA MALISO
Basri, from Beluran near Sandakan, met Risma, from Palopo Sulawesi Indonesia, in 1997, the year after she trans-located to Sabah. The happy couple were wed in 1999 & have 3 sons – Hairul (13 years), Azrul Ramlee (12 years) & Fakrul Mikhael (8 months in October). Hairul & Azrul attend school in Beluran & live with their Grandmother while Fakrul is a SAFE camp resident. Before joining SAFE they both worked out at Danum Valley with INFAPRO. Risma is our chief cook & keeps us all well fed at camp- her popular specialities include fried chicken & yellow rice, she also makes a mean green mango salad & pumpkin curry! Basri, who is a contender for the handiest man in the Eastern hemisphere, is our camp Handy man. While he does do work as an RA & is an excellent driver, his main duties are camp maintenance & if there is anything broke Basri will fix it. He is also known at camp for his spicy sambal tuhau & making parangs (Malay jungle machetes) & hammocks. When Rismas camp & family duties are over she likes to relax & listen to music while playing candy crush saga & has just reached level 197!
Species profiles
Atlas Moth
Attacus atlas
The Atlas moth, are considered the largest moths in the world in terms of total wing area (400 cm2 ) & have some of the largest wingspans of any moth (over 25 cm). The adult females are significantly larger than the males & they never stray far from their chrysalis once hatched. Deemed by nature to be sexually passive, they find a perch nearby where favourable air currents can carry their powerful pheromones to a potential mate. The males, who are unsteady fliers, may thus be attracted from several kilometres downwind. The Atlas moth ranges across South East Asia & is common in the Malay Archipelago.
Long-Patella Ant Mimics
Argorious spp
The term myrmecomorphy or “myrmecomorphousâ€, is used to describe an organism that mimics ants or uses ant mimicry. And Agorious borneensis looks alarmingly like an ant as it waves its two front legs in the air mimicking ant antennae. Thanks go to Adam Sharp for providing us this photo, taken while he sat identifying beetles earlier this year at his desk observing this spider casually moving around an ant colony & displaying its unusual prowess in springing on its prey & leaping away from danger. Truth be known our I.D. might be a misnomer as there are so many unnamed, undescribed Ant Mimic Jumping spiders in Borneo- but this was the closest we could get with available literature & we feel this photo was too cool not to use for a species profile. Can anyone out there verify this I.D.?
