langkawi magazine
Nature SECTION
Conservation News: News from the Scientific and Heritage Expedition Langkawi, 13 April 2003
Real Lunch, Finally!
That must have been the jubilant cheer all those not-very-scandinavian folks made when they saw their packed lunch this morning. Nasi Goreng (Chinese style) with Spicy fried chicken and a hard-boiled egg! Did I not tell you that the Mutiara Burau Bay Beach Resort's F&B people are super nice to us?
The expedition family was actually expanded overnight. Some new folks from UKM actually arrived the day before and will start collecting insects and primates from today! Maybe we will finally find out if those long-tailed macaques are really escapees from the Penang Botanical Garden or not? So the teams were off again, on a rather wet morning, after the torrential rain we had last night. Some to previous locations (thank heavens for GPS!) while others moved on to ?new territories?.
The SIRIM researchers left with the MARDI folks to Dayang Bunting Island, where the Taman Botani people were heading for as well but had to change their itinerary after they had to abandon their boat halfway. The freshwater fish team from World Fish Centre was off to Datai Bay (see pix) while the IMR folks eventually left, after a good rest from last night?s late rendez-vous with the mozzies to catch even more mozzies (did I not say that it?s a mad, mad crowd?).
Normally, I would have to wait until the 9.00 p.m presentation and reports to find out what the others have been up to. But today, maybe because for once, we were looking for our freshwater specimens in more undisturbed locations, we kept bumping into the other teams. So in the Datai area, while heading for a river there, we bumped into the plant physiology folks from UPM, caught the USM-UKM small mammals team in action (see pix) and also their insect team. It?s sometimes nice to find familiar faces in new surrounding, no? But that?s just a few. We have 37 teams, remember? The others were doing their work elsewhere but we?ll soon find out at the night presentation. And we did! After a thorough presentation on GIS technology from UM , his colleagues who are studying the bio-diversity of micro-fungi in Langkawi informed us that after covering 4 areas in the island, reported to have found more than 44 species in Datai Bay alone, while the dragon-fly and mudskipper team managed to identify 7 out of 15 families already and 3 new records were made for the mudskippers.
The freshwater fish, yet again, had good news to share. After returning to a river last visited 10 years ago, the researcher confided that he would be leaving the island tomorrow with less worry for the endemic fish species of the island, locally known as tengas. This brought the session to a wrap up, but not without a warm farewell by the Expedition Leader, Prof. Datuk Dr. Abdul Latiff to all those leaving the family, with much hope to see them in Stong, of course!
Langkawi 13/04/2003
