The Arbornaut, page 29
It did not hurt to have a prior friendship with the Sultana of Johor, one of Malaysia’s major proponents of conservation. Three years before, I was her keynote speaker for the country’s Conservation Day, hosted by the royal family and specifically by her Highness, whose official name I carefully memorized before attending: Raja Zarith Sofiah Binti Sultan Idris Shah, wife of Sultan Ibrahim Ismail of Johor. After the talk, Raja Zarith Sofiah publicly committed to raising the salaries of enforcement officers in the parks as an incentive to reduce poaching, making their jobs competitive against black-market payments for tigers. Malaysia’s tiger population had fallen to less than 300 by 2014, yet poachers could still illegally get paid RM 50,000 for a tiger. She also urged her government to raise the penalties for poachers and encouraged nongovernmental organizations to promote conservation awareness. She continues to advocate tirelessly for biodiversity.
Malaysia is battling more than just tiger poaching with regard to its rain forest conservation. One of the greatest current threats is the palm oil industry, which netted $50 billion in 2017 and continues to expand. Indonesia and Malaysia account for over three-quarters of the world’s palm oil production, although Brazil and Africa are entering the market. In Asia, enormous swathes of dipterocarps were cleared for this cash crop, sold for multiple uses in manufacturing as well as an edible vegetable oil. Most consumers don’t even know they are purchasing palm oil—or what palm oil is, or what it costs Earth—which is used in thousands of everyday products from shampoo to fast food to soaps to plastics to baked goods. The introduction of biofuels was another death knell for Malaysian forests, because it caused a big spike of clear-cutting in anticipation of a commercial market. Once these tall primary tropical forests were cleared, vast plantations of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), a species native to Africa, were planted as single crops in expansive monocultures. Fire is often used for clearing primary forests to plant oil palms, and over the past decade, some of the world’s largest fires have occurred in Southeast Asia due to palm oil plantations.
Dipterocarps are the centerpiece of Malaysian forest ecosystems and were my original inspiration for pursuing tropical ecology. My master’s thesis advisor in Scotland, Peter Ashton, was a world expert on dipterocarps, conducting much of his fieldwork in Malaysia. They are arguably the most economically important woody plant family in existence. While I shivered in the cold Scottish Highlands trying to measure birch bud expansion on my rickety scaffold, Peter was studying in the hot, sultry tropics, after which he returned to summers in Scotland (admittedly not always that warm!). Hearing the stories about those tall, charismatic trees growing in Malaysia’s hot, humid forests, he got me hooked on the tropics. During graduate work in Australia, dipterocarps came back on my radar in an indirect fashion. My PhD graduate advisor, the renowned ecologist Joe Connell, and I mused for five years over the fact that some forests are dominated by a single species, including Australian stands of Nothofagus moorei and vast tracts of rural eucalypts, plus Mora stands in Trinidad, Pentaclethra in Costa Rica, and, of course, the dipterocarps in Southeast Asia. How can one species dominate so successfully in a world with over sixty thousand tree species? To most ecologists, the tropics are synonymous with high diversity, and temperate-zone biologists travel great distances to study low-latitude, highly diverse stands. But because Joe and I were carefully identifying every individual seedling and tree in different Australian plots for long-term research, we started noticing the existence of monodominant stands. I had just finished three years working on Antarctic beech, which occupied almost 95 percent of the cool temperate rain forest pockets. The only common factor Joe and I could find among these dominant species were their underground partnerships with certain types of mycorrhizae, which seemed to offer a competitive advantage. These fungi lived in association with specific species and provided an extra mechanism to absorb water and nutrients from the soil. Even for a canopy specialist, this belowground explanation was thrilling and transformed my perceptions about the growth dynamics of whole trees.
Joe and I coauthored a publication, hypothesizing that mycorrhizal associations enabled some species to dominate by outcompeting others. We cited examples in both tropical and temperate regions. After our paper was published in 1987, many students tested our theory in different sites (and found it correct!). Since then, new tools have been developed to study roots in greater detail, finding that trees “communicate” through their root hairs. In some temperate forests such as those of the Pacific Northwest, a mature or mother tree will share resources with her seedlings through underground connectivity. In a sense, those soils contain a complex highway of mycorrhizae and root hairs, transferring benefits between parents and their offspring. Tropical stands with low diversity have not been studied as extensively as sites with higher species diversity. This represents a bias, since most scientists who travel from temperate zones to conduct fieldwork in the tropics are seeking highly diverse forests, those different from the low-diversity ones back home. I call this a “temperate bias,” and after musing about the single-species stands of Antarctic beech in Australia, I was thrilled to finally undertake fieldwork on dipterocarps, which exhibited a similar monodominance in Malaysia.
Then came October 13, 2017. All participants convened at dawn for the onset of the BioBlitz on Penang Hill. Ready, set, go! Everyone scrambled into the jungle to find critters and bring them back to our “base camp,” which amounted to an outside setup of simple folding tables, microscopes, alcohol, lights, enormous spreads of food and snacks, and other equipment as needed to count every creature. One entomologist brought tiny inflatable swimming pools from which he created outdoor collection basins for trapping insects attracted to water. Another used special sieves to find micro-arthropods in soil samples. As vials were brought in from the canopy, taxonomists looked under microscopes and eagerly counted ants, scorpions, beetles, mites, nematodes, larvae, and other six- or eight-legged creatures. Eight climbers were engaged to sample the crowns and collect whatever the biodiversity experts requested. This created great excitement, especially when new records of arboreal ants and epiphytes were brought down from above. Visitors flocked to the Habitat eco-park and gazed in awe at the tables of scientists excitedly making discoveries. The methods of each team were quite different, depending on the taxon under investigation. Like the organisms they studied, many biologists became active at night, counting bats, spiders, or other nocturnal creatures. As some awoke early to watch birds, others were just going to bed after catching scorpions. The canopy team used single-rope techniques and pole pruners to collect leaf, flower, and fruit specimens from tall trees. They later pressed all collections for accession into the herbaria at USM, plus duplicates to loan elsewhere. With international biodiversity surveys, it is critical to lodge the specimens at a local institution, but sometimes duplicates can be loaned elsewhere. The ornithology team carried out point count surveys, meaning they stood in the same place at specific times of day, and recorded bird sightings and sounds. They also collected records and photographs for the iNaturalist website. Meanwhile, the ant team was literally crawling on the forest floor, juggling a pooter to suck up specimens, a machete to dig into rotten wood, and notebooks. The myrmecologists shared a few gadgets with other entomologists, including yellow pan traps (certain flying insects are attracted to both a water medium and the color yellow), pitfall traps, sweep nets, and light traps. Akin to the choreography of a ballet performance, the woods were alive with human bodies engaged in artistic motions but dedicated to biological collection.
A BioBlitz represents lots of perspiration, focus, and exclamation as scientists make discoveries in pursuit of their specific taxa. Overall, it was a hot and dirty process. We extracted and identified forty-three species of termites, requiring a microscopic follow-up in the laboratory to isolate each type into vials of alcohol with hundreds of tiny floating brown blobs, which may ultimately swirl into posterity in a museum drawer. We also cataloged eleven species of tardigrades representing the first collections of this phylum (Tardigrada) in Malaysia, of which two species were new to the world. To identify these creatures too small to see with a naked eye, Dr. Randy “Water Bear” Miller spent many hours poring over small bits of moist moss, leaf, and bark collections under a scanning electron microscope (SEM) looking for microscopic tardigrades, plus a year’s follow-up to compare his photographs with existing collections around the world. The identification of 220 lianas and 300 Diptera (aka flies and their relatives) was absolutely incredible, as was the final count of 490 arachnids. Another prized sighting was the Sunda slow loris (Nycticebus coucang), a small nocturnal primate with enormous forward-facing eyes. It looked almost extraterrestrial when spotted in a headlamp late at night. Completely arboreal in behavior, the loris was christened as our BioBlitz mascot. Lorises are omnivores, feeding on vegetation, bird eggs, insects, and animal matter. As the world’s only venomous primate, the loris secretes poison from glands on its elbows, which it licks before biting any enemies. Lorises are increasingly victims of the illegal pet trade, and because of their cryptic habits, accurate population counts are difficult.
By deploying the climbing team, who collected extensive material from the canopy, all scientists were able to survey species from the bottom to the top of the forest for each taxon. In addition, treetop leaf samples were collected from each species, creating a snapshot of defoliation for one point in time, not as accurate as monitoring leaves for many years as I have done elsewhere, but allowing an overview of insect-plant interactions. The JASON high school students measured insect defoliation by calculating the proportions of leaf surface eaten for samples of thirty leaves per species, height, and age. Herbivory ranged from 0 percent leaf area eaten (Ficus sp.) to 61.9 percent defoliation in one individual of Cinnamomum porrectum, with an average of 31 percent defoliation in C. porrectum throughout the hillside. After sampling hundreds of trees for a rapid assessment (aka snapshot herbivory) throughout my lifetime, Penang Hill was the first place in thirty years to find one species with absolutely no herbivory. Every leaf of the local fig (Ficus sp.) was uneaten, the aforementioned 0 percent! I can only imagine my Amazon shaman friend, Guillermo, excitedly asking about the special medicinal qualities of those incredibly toxic leaves. Unfortunately, we couldn’t identify these tall figs to species, simply because the fruits were not present.
This BioBlitz advanced the natural history toolkit in several ways. First and foremost, our survey successfully deployed a whole-forest approach spanning from soils to the uppermost treetop, using eight professional climbers. Canopies were rigged with climbing ropes throughout the hillside, including our iconic and tallest species, Shorea curtisii, a locally common dipterocarp growing up to two hundred feet high. Second, the surveys included a large range of taxa: microbes, algae, tardigrades, arthropods, ferns, vines, trees, and vertebrates. During a ten-day span, we documented new field records: new species of ghost scorpion and tardigrades, new algae documented for the first time in this region, new records of ants in the treetops and rare ferns on rocks, and the discovery of ultrasound communication by the nocturnal Sunda colugo (Galeopterus variegatus), detected at night when biologists were tracking bats. A new species of whip spider, Phrynichus cockrelli, was named after the visionary donors who built the walkways and funded the survey. Our total of 1,659 records were tallied at a symposium held on the last day of the expedition, although the numbers of some taxa will not be finalized until well into the 2020s.
Another distinction of our BioBlitz was its composition of participants, with local-plus-global collaborators, and the fact that 65 percent of our 117 participants were female, an absolute record for any rain forest expedition to my knowledge. (I think back to my being the sole female on the Cameroon hot-air balloon expedition and chuckle.) The survey also engaged global youth both in person and virtually, by hosting Malaysian and Hong Kong high school students to work side by side with scientists, and online livestreaming to K–12 classrooms. I had obtained a separate grant to rekindle the distance-learning JASON Project for its first tropical expedition since broadcasting from the Amazon walkway almost two decades before. Advances in technology had really changed the dynamics of virtual expeditions: the original JASON cost several million dollars to ship equipment and import a broadcasting team to film, edit, and relay a signal via satellite around the world; our reboot cost $50,000 for a laptop, three technical hosts, and a cadre of students partnered with a few teachers.
What was the secret ingredient of this phenomenally successful BioBlitz? We had great weather—one week after the expedition, it rained so much that half the hillside fell into the valley and closed the mountain for two months; those are the risks of fieldwork. We had wonderful compatibility in the field teams, so much so that a few groups are still collaborating on global projects. But the essential driver of our success was great government support as well as visionary funders, plus the pairing of local with international scientists. Those collaborations also garnered media attention, with praise from both government and corporate entities that enhanced the underlying goal of promoting conservation throughout diverse stakeholders. In ten frenzied days, we recorded over fifteen hundred never-before-officially-documented records on Penang Hill. What if every museum would undertake to send their collections staff to survey one unexplored ecosystem on the planet, and what if all museums made a coordinated strategy to each sample a different place? Scientists could probably advance our global knowledge of species diversity nearly tenfold. Field biologists often fall into a convention of returning to the same place and focusing on one major site throughout an entire career. As a result, some places become well studied while others remain underfunded and unexplored. Our BioBlitz was an example of an underexplored place yielding immediate discoveries; in ten short days, we unlocked new secrets of Malaysian tropical rain forests.
One of the unique attributes of Penang Hill is its location within a fifteen-minute drive of approximately two million residents, plus annual visitation by over three million tourists. Not many tropical ecosystems can claim such broad-reaching public access, making this site a great ambassador of conservation, citizen science, and education outreach. When finalized, the UNESCO proposal was entitled “Penang Hill Biosphere Reserve: Gem of the Island—Where Nature Is Conserved, and Culture Celebrated.” A copy of the 188-page UNESCO dossier sits on my desk, and it also sits on a few government desks halfway around the world, pending consideration by an international committee. Penang has eight UNESCO cultural sites but no biological sites, so everyone was hopeful of success that will ensure this tropical forest is protected in perpetuity.
Another innovative feature of this site involved the green business model of the Habitat, a wildlife park with its two new ribbon bridges dedicated to research and education about tropical treetops. The Habitat’s generous funders envisioned a canopy research station in the future. Fieldwork would be a solo effort no longer, as was the case when I climbed in Australia as a lone arbornaut. Our BioBlitz exemplified a new model of field research, with inclusivity from many diverse partners: the Habitat Foundation; Penang State Forestry Department; California Academy of Sciences; Universiti Sains Malaysia; TREE Foundation; Habitat Penang Hill; Department of Wildlife and National Parks, Malaysia; Penang Hill Corporation; University of California, Berkeley; JASON Learning; Fulbright; PBS Nature; National University of Singapore; Tree Climbing Planet; World Wildlife Fund–Hong Kong; and Tree Projects.
The Malaysian canopy project taught me new ways to conduct the business of conservation. First, it saved time and energy to have a dedicated donor, rather than writing grants requiring multiple attempts over many years to obtain funds. Second, this project reinforced the notion that ecotourism is a critical conservation tool. The first walkway I helped design in Australia over three decades ago was a relatively simple structure to assist Earthwatch volunteers and a handful of guests at a small forest lodge in Queensland. These two Penang walkways have the potential to educate five million people per year. And third, building trust with the local community and including diverse stakeholders was key. In this case, the project included students, government officials, local university scientists, international experts, media, and Asian NGOs. This was not a formula I learned in graduate school but from the school of hard knocks, after many decades of watching deforestation and struggling to engage in more effective conservation. There is still a long way to go in this tree-saving business, but the formula for success is improving!
BioBlitzes are now a widely used, international tool for surveying species in different ecosystems. People who can’t take an entire week away from work to travel to the Amazon jungle can instead take a day to survey a local redwood stand. Hosted in numerous parks, reserves, urban settings, and even backyards, such surveys often are limited to a specific taxon. The apps on cell phones to survey biodiversity are providing a platform whereby species discoveries are delivered seamlessly to the experts. With the app iNaturalist, people post images online and taxonomists can confirm their identification. All of this relies on volunteers, however, and the power of crowds to ensure accuracy and amplification of the data sets. A big benefit of any citizen science program is the engagement of a broader public in natural history. But similar to technical research, such actions all too often report on the presence or absence of endangered species but do not save them. The scientific community, both volunteer- and professional-driven, still struggles to create actionable pathways to prevent the loss of species and habitat, rather than simply reporting. But by engaging the broader public in field biology—whether through BioBlitzes or online apps or simply the inspiration to get families outdoors to observe their local wildlife—the combination of science and technology can inspire stewardship of our planet’s biodiversity.
