The last endemic

In 1900, Ridley listed 33 endemic plants in Singapore. He predicted that some eventually lose this status as more botanising revealed their presence beyond this island. [An endemic plant is a plant that occurs naturally in one place and nowhere else.]

Singapore's flora shares some affinity with the flora of southern Johore and the northern flora of Borneo. And indeed as those regional floras were better studied, only one species from that 1900 list of 33 proved to be endemic.

However, later on, Ridley himself, Holttum and few others revived the list of endemics with some of the new species that they described from Singapore. Up to recently, the "revived" list of endemics was 19 species.

Recently, Kiew & Turner (2003) scrutinised the list and report that only seven eventually proved to be endemic as knowledge of regional floras improved. The rest had their distributions widened to Peninsular Malaysia.

Sadly, of this seven, only one, an aquatic aroid recently described from Bukit Timah in 2001, is extant - Cryptocoryne xtimahensis Bastmeijer.

Even then, its long term status as an endemic is tenuous as the putative parents are also found in Southern Peninsular Malaysia; Cryptocoryne are known to hybridise readily. On top of that, it is also a very vulnerable species, growing in two adjacent small pools along just one stream.

Source: Ruth Kiew & Ian Mark Turner, 2003. Are any plants endemic to Singapore? The Gardens' Bulletin, 55(2): 173-184.

The seven endemic plants of Singapore

• extinct - Bolbitis xsingaporeansis (fern)
• extinct - Flickingeria laciniosa (epiphyte)
• extinct - Spatholobus ridleyi (climber)
• extinct - Strychnos ridleyi (climber)
• extinct - Thunbergia dasychlamys (climber)
• extinct - Tectaria griffithii var. singaporeana (fern)
• endangered - Cryptocoryne xtimahensis (aquatic)

Dismantling the misinformed

A student of German literature pens a poorly researched editorial in a student newsletter, raising the ire of Gary Hurd, amongst others, who calls it "baseless slander" as he dismantles the argument in the Panda's Thumb.

Sadly, the student apparently plagiarised websites in the process.

The evolution-creation debate is apparently alive and well and The Panda's Thumb and Myers at Pharyngula seem to have their plates full, correcting misinformation.

Homo sapiens just got older

Nature News, 16 Feb 2005

Argon dating puts fossil skulls Omo I and Omo II at 195,000 years old. These are the earliest known members of our species, and this has added more weight to the idea that Ethiopia was the birthplace of humans.

Eye of Science

Marsh-dwelling Mole Gives New Meaning To The Term 'Fast Food'

Marsh-dwelling Mole Gives New Meaning To The Term 'Fast Food':


The star-nosed mole gives a whole new meaning to the term "fast food." A study published this week in the journal Nature reveals that this mysterious mole has moves that can put the best magician to shame: The energetic burrower can detect small prey animals and gulp them down with a speed that is literally too fast for the human eye to follow.

Test: from the rss feed of Science Daily Headlines, read in Net News Wire Lite 2.0 and uploaded using ecto. Yes, its very fast.

Gliding Ants!

Discovery of gliding ants shows wingless flight has arisen throughout the animal kingdom. By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News, 9th February 2005.

Ants, courtesy of Cephalotes atratus, (for starters), are added to the list of animal gliders!

Gliding ants - the only wingless insects known to actively direct their fall - were first observed last year outside Iquitos, Peru, by insect ecologist Stephen P. Yanoviak of UTMB. While perched 100 feet up in the rainforest canopy waiting for mosquitoes to alight and feed on his blood, Yanoviak casually brushed off a few dozen ants that were attacking him and noticed their uncanny ability to land on the tree's trunk and climb back to the very spot from which they'd fallen.

"I brushed them off the branch with my hand, and I noticed that maybe 20 or 30 of them fell in unison and then made this nice little cascade back to the tree trunk," said Yanoviak. "That's when I realized something was up with this behavior and it was worth checking into a bit more."

By painting the ants' rear legs with white nail polish, he was able to track their fall and establish that they come in backwards to the tree, hit and hang on, though they often tumble down the trunk a few feet and occasionally bounce off. They can actually make 180 degree turns in midair, however, so even when they fail the first time, they can execute a mid-air hairpin turn and glide in for another try.

"It's an amazing discovery," said Robert Dudley, a UC Berkeley expert on flying and gliding creatures ranging from hummingbirds and lizards to moths and bees. "Apparently, it's fairly common among a lot of tropical canopy ants."

More at UC Berkeley News, including video clips.

Tigers: endangered in Malaysia

I remembered the hairs on the nape of my neck standing up when I saw my first tiger foot print in the muddy trail in Endau Rompin national park in 2001. the track must be at least two days old since it was filled with rain water but the thought that a real live tiger had sauntered down the same trail was exhilarating.

Star feature:
"Protecting the endangered tiger." The Star Online, 8th February 2005.

"Living harmoniously with the tiger." The Star Online, 8th February 2005.

Ernst Mayr dies

By Leslie A Pray, The Scientist, 4th February 2005. Towering figure of 20th century evolutionary biology was 100


Ernst Mayr, the eminent evolutionary biologist and arguably one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, died Thursday morning (February 3) at the age of 100, Harvard University said today.

Mayr, known for his work on speciation and contributions to the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1940s, died at a retirement community in Bedford, Mass., the university said. No specific cause of death was noted.


In his classic 1942 book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, Mayr championed allopatric speciation, whereby new species form only in physical isolation. It was not a new idea, as even Darwin had entertained the notion before settling on the opposite, sympatric view: that speciation does not require geographical separation. But scientists didn't embrace allopatric speciation, said University of Maryland's Kerry Shaw, until Mayr "cogently and forcefully argued" the case. "He had a major influence on our thinking about speciation as a process that occurs in geographic isolation," Shaw said.


Mayr believed that behind every good speciation biologist stood a good naturalist. "People without that naturalist experience don't have that feeling," he told The Scientist in 2003. "They don't know species."


Read the complete article at The Scientist.

Thanks to Hugh Tan

See also the obituary in The Economist - Alvin Wong.

Evil Ant Invasion!

Evil Ant Invasion! By Chaim Estulin, Time magazine, 07 Feb 2005 Vol. 165, No. 5. As a plague of insects descends on southern China, authorities wonder how to stop them - and who's to blame.

"It sounds like something out of a bad horror movie. Swarms of imported red fire ants - Brazilian insects with scarlet armor and a burning sting - have run rampant in parts of the United States, Australia and Taiwan, consuming small birds, felling livestock, and leaving painful welts on any human skin they contact. Its Latin species name, invicta, means invincible, and so far no affected country has managed to eradicate an infestation of the 2- to 6-mm-long ant.

"I hate them," says Keith McCubbin, director of the Queensland Fire Ant Control Centre, which is spending $136 million on a six-year campaign to rid Australia of what he calls "some of the evilest creatures God put on Earth." Last week, the ants were discovered in Hong Kong, probably arriving via southern mainland China, where infestation had gone previously unannounced.

As with any problem affecting Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan - which in October discovered it too had fire ants - fingers were inevitably pointed. Hong Kong officials complained that Guangdong authorities had left them in the dark; mainland farmers blamed Taiwan for foisting the little terrors on them in the first place, likely stowed away in shipments of recyclable trash."

Read more at Time magazine.

"This horror film may well have a sequel. The winged queen ants can fly up to 15 km to start a new colony - which means that eradication efforts in Hong Kong likely will be ineffective without cooperation from the mainland. Says Dr. Richard Corlett, a Hong Kong University biodiversity expert, "There is no border patrol for ants.""

GM trees to save the day?

While most of the world's attention is focussed on genetically modified food. It is interesting to see other applications of genetically modfied organisms. Various groups working independently have produced genetically modified trees with different lignin and cellulose composition ratio in order to achieve the optimal mix for using these trees to produce paper. The modified trees apparently grow as strong as their wild type counterparts, and grow faster too. A group in New Zealand is looking at inserting the Bt gene into trees. However, I have my reservations about pesticide resistant plants. In my opinion, their effects will wear off after about ten years or so, once Nature catches up.

Read more with this article from the Economist, 6th January 2005.

Saturday 5th Feb 2005: Public Forum on GM Food

"We Are What We Eat" - the truths and fallacies of bioengineered foods

A public forum on genetically modified foods Organised by: Genetic Modification Advisory Committee (GMAC)

Saturday, 5th February 2005: 10.30am - 12.20pm
Lecture Theatre 3A/3B
Level 3, Matrix, Biopolis
30, Biopolis Street

The forum is free and open to all.

To register, please contact GMAC Secretariat by email (info@gmac.gov.sg) or phone (6826-6358)

More details here