Sarkar Lab

Mini-Symposium: Research at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge

We are organising a mini-symposium about research at the Balcones Canyonlands NWR on the University of Texas--Austin campus for Friday, 25 January 2008, from 2.30 -6.00 p.m. at the Atrium (FAC 419). There will be 15-minute talks followed by general discussion. All researchers are invited to present their projects and we will try to accommodate as many talks as possible. Even if you do not wish to present a talk, please try to attend.

The audience will include several students who are considering doing research or otherwise volunteering at the Refuge. At the end we will retire to the Scholz Beer Garden.

If you wish to present some work, please send me a title as soon as possible (even if it is tentative). In any case, I would like to hear from everyone who plans to come. It will be a great occasion for those working at the Refuge to interact with each other. With luck, it will spur more research across disciplines and universities.

A new bird from India

A new species of bird has been discovered in Northeast India in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. The species belongs to genus Liocichla, and is a member of the group of birds known as babblers. It was discovered by Raman Athreya, who is an astrophysicist by training, and works at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics near Pune City in Maharashtra, India. Ramana is a passionate biologist (and an ornithologist in particular), who has been conducting surveys in Northeast India (mainly the state of Arunachal Pradesh) for more than 10 years now. He also heads a biodiversity inventorying and conservation project at the Eagle’s Nest Wildlife Sanctuary  funded by a grant from the Rufford Foundation (UK).

Arunachal Pradesh has some of the largest contiguous tracts of tropical, subtropical and temparate broadleaf forests in South Asia, and lies at the conjunction of three biodiversity hotspots: Himalayas, Mountains of Southwest China, and  Indo-Burma. In recent years, these forests have yielded many new vertebrate taxa, including a new species of monkey.

Stakeholder Involvement in Systematic Conservation Planning

I have a new entry on stakeholders in our other blog, Systematic Conservation Planning, that may interest some of the readers of this blog.

The Prowling Naturalist: Bukit Timah II: Visiting the Reserve

At only 163 m., it was a fairly easy climb to the summit of Bukit Timah in the pre-dawn darkness last Monday, along the paved Main Road and then up a steep slippery shortcut abutting what is called, for unspecified reasons, the Police Repeater Hut. (This structure, surrounded by a wire mesh fence, has dire warnings posted against potential trespassers and, it being Singapore, you should take these seriously. To play it safe, I’ve always averted both my gaze and my camera whenever I’m in its vicinity.) Sunrise at Bukit Timah came over the city and, so close to the Equator (only 137 km. south of where we were), dawn was a short fleeting affair. You can’t really see the city from the summit itself but a VHF station on an adjoining lesser peak provides a good view, especially when the sun is coming up. Around dawn, the Main Road and the summit began to fill with scores of health seekers carrying out complicated exercises, many of which involved walking backwards and flailing and clapping their hands. (I will leave it to cultural anthropologists to study the amazing rituals now evolving in Singapore.) Birding, for which I was up so early, was expectedly terrible in the midst of all this commotion. It was far from the peaceful beginning of the day that I had anticipated, going by what it had been like ten years ago. Between 1996 and now Singaporeans seem to have really discovered their one remaining rain forest and turned it into an open air gym.

The Prowling Naturalist: Bukit Timah I: Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago

Unless you are a captain of commerce, by most reasonable standards, Singapore is not an interesting city. But even if you are infatuated with commerce, Singapore is now a city fighting off inevitable decline with China and India emerging as the economic powerhouses of the new Asia. The island state is also one of the most repressive “democracies” in the world, governed by a paternalistic state that tolerates little deviance. If taxis begin to move at speeds higher than the permissible 80 km. per hour, a bell starts to ring inside. Long hair used to be reason enough to deny tourists entry. It is illegal to bring chewing gum into the country. Smoking has not been permitted almost anywhere public for decades. In the 1980s Singapore was the only country in the world promoting positive eugenics, offering well-educated women incentives to bear more offspring and less educated ones equally attractive largesse to be sterilized. As early as 1958, the famously prescient biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, had declared Singapore to be a “police state [1].” It isn’t much better now even though the police is not glaringly visible every day.

But Singapore’s often impossible to avoid if you travel around Southeast Asia partly because Singapore Airlines is about the only truly international carrier from the region. Singapore is also a remarkably green city with all its remaining forests (less than 0.5 per cent of the area) now under protection. If you’re stranded there, as I was last weekend, the only solace—besides good food and general friendliness—is a rather remarkable piece of native habitat about 14 km. northwest of the city center, and surrounded by highways and developments on all sides. That piece of land is the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, a patch of primary Southeast Asian rain forest in the around the highest hill in the city (at 163 m.).

This was not my first visit to Bukit Timah. I had been there a decade ago when I was meandering around the region, trying to follow Wallace’s footsteps during his remarkable travels from 1854 to 1862. It was during the course of that trip that he formulated his version of the theory of evolution by natural selection and ensured his future place in the history of science. (The reminiscences that emerged from these travels, The Malay Archipelago, is also arguably the best travel book ever written.) My trip in 1996 had ended in virtual disaster. Jakarta was in flames the day I arrived in Indonesia, the beginning of the people’s revolt that finally removed Suharto from power. But the troubles made travel dangerous, if not impossible, and over a long and hard summer I managed to cover but a tiny fraction of the areas that Wallace had visited. I abandoned plans to write a book on Wallace’s travels, at least for the foreseeable future, and returned to take up a Fellowship in October at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

A Year in Texas: Is the Houston Toad Still at Stengl?

It’s mid-July now, and I might as well admit defeat at finding the Houston Toad at our Stengl Lost Pines Biological Station this year. It is not unheard of for the species to emerge to mate in some areas even in late July but extremely unlikely. The following log, extracted from my field notes tell the story:

The Prowling Naturalist: Sierra Norte de Oaxaca: La Cumbre—Ixtepeji Parque Ecoturistíco

Part of the charm of driving on Mexico’s highways comes from the fact that there are no billboards desecrating the landscape. The only exception to this ban on advertising is a single liquor company which, for mysterious historical reasons, has the right to put up giant cutouts of bulls but these, mercifully, are few and far between. But, if you are in Mexico City, getting on the appropriate highway may well be your worst challenge—to say merely that the traffic is awful gives little indication of just how much patience and dedication it requires. It took us several hours last week, just after Germany demolished a surprisingly inept Argentina on penalties, before we were on our way to Oaxaca, perhaps the most diverse and easily the least adequately protected of Mexico’s states. (Though Oaxaca contains only 5 per cent of the area of Mexico, it contains 50 per cent of the
total known vascular plant species for the country, 35 per cent of the total amphibian species, 26 per cent of the reptile species, 63 per cent of the bird species, and 55 per cent of the terrestrial mammal species).

The six-hour drive to Oaxaca takes you through a variety of landscapes including the 490 000 hectare Tehuacán—Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve which straddles the border between Puebla and Oaxaca. This Reserve is huge: if you include it among the protected areas of Oaxaca, about 12 per cent of the state is already under protection. But, if you don’t, only 0.3 per cent of Oaxaca is protected, all in three tiny National Parks. The argument against inclusion is that the Reserve, though situated in a biologically important and unique habitat (the southern limit of the North American deserts), is in far from prime condition. The Reserve is made up of wide arid valleys bordered by much more humid forested ranges. There are more than 170 endemic flowering plant species within it and the diversity of columnar and candelabra cacti is exceptional. The heat was intense. Our view from the road was typically of an otherworldly landscape, spiny shrublands dotted with columns of cacti. The toll road goes through relatively intact habitat but this is misleading. In Oaxaca, 35 000 people live within the Reserve; between both states, the human population is over 250 000.

Protection of Biodiversity

Sous la pression de l'activité humaine, les espèces vivantes disparaissent à grande vitesse, au point que certains chercheurs estiment qu'une extinction majeure est en cours. Plusieurs initiatives internationales ont été lancées pour tenter de minimiser les dégâts et maintenir un semblant de biodiversité. Mais protéger efficacement le vivant, végétal et animal, implique d'en faire l'inventaire le plus exhaustif possible en utilisant les moyens de la taxonomie, science de la classification et de la dénomination des espèces.

The Prowling Naturalist: EHA, 16 August 1851 -25 April 1909

On 15 September 1883 eight gentlemen residents of Bombay—Indians, Englishmen, and Anglo-Indians—met on the premises of the Victoria and Albert Museum and constituted themselves into the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) which eventually became the premier conservationist organization in Asia. The first secretary of the group (1883 -1886) was an Anglo-Indian, Edward Hamilton Aitken, who commonly wrote under the acronym “EHA.” The most prominent naturalist among the founders was the lepidopterist, Charles Swinhoe, also a colonel in the Indian army. (Another founder of the group though not a participant at the first meeting, was the wine merchant, H. M. Phipson, who became its second secretary [1886 -1906] and lent a part of his wine shop at 18 Forbes Street for the monthly meetings. Wine and, especially, ale seem to have been central to the early functioning of the BNHS.) The BNHS’s logo became a hornbill named William which is supposed to have lived around the Society’s early premises.

A Month in Australia: Conference in Sydney

Chris and I recently returned from Sydney where we participated in an Early Career Researcher conference for individuals working in conservation biology. The conference was hosted by Susan Cameron and Rob Wentworth. Roughly a dozen people were in attendance, including Dan Faith and Simon Ferrier. The conference lasted for two days, with most of the time devoted to presentations by conference participants. In addition, some time was set aside for general discussion of those issues thought to be most important by those in attendance. These included the roles of both phylogenetics and climate change in conservation planning. Indeed, thanks perhaps to the attendance of a couple of botanists, phylogenetics played a much larger role in the conference than I had expected. Many thanks are owed to both Rob and Susan for organizing the conference and providing a nice opportunity to see the different areas of research on which the next generation of conservation biologists is currently focused.