Project update 10: It’s a wrap! For now…

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Drenched but happy that the fieldwork is finally over…for now

For those of you who are wondering what’s been going on in the Kenyir Wildlife Corridor (Primary Linkage 7), the end of the Chinese New Year period has also brought the end of Reuben‘s PhD field sampling. The tail end of the monsoon season caught Reuben and his team as they finally wrapped up their fieldwork, retrieving every last camera they set up along the Kuala Berang Highway. All the cameras set up in the Bintang Hijau Wildlife Corridor (Primary Linkage 8) have also been retrieved, but at a considerable cost – 15 camera traps were stolen over the course of 8 months! Only 2 were ever stolen from Kenyir within a similar sampling duration. Don’t worry, none of the stolen cameras were those adopted by individual donors. Continue reading

Media coverage: In the kingdom of the black panther

Rimba’s mascot takes centrestage in this special coverage by Mongabay! Reuben and our budding ‘carnivore researcher’ Laurie talk to Jeremy Hance about black leopards in Peninsular Malaysia, putting the spotlight on this mysterious and under-studied species. Click on the image below to read all about it!

mongabay panther

Publication update 11: All about tapirs

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Reuben’s and Sheema’s latest publications are all about the Asian Tapir (Tapirus indicus). Compared to its New World counterparts, the only tapir species to be found in the Old World is relatively poorly studied. Despite its striking appearance, its distribution in Peninsular Malaysia is still largely based on guesswork rather than in-depth, long-term research. Scientists have also been unable to get an accurate idea of its population size.

These two papers published in Integrative Zoology aren’t part of Rimba’s work though; they’re the product of a research collaboration led by WWF-Malaysia that is the first attempt in the country to identify tapir individuals based on their specific black-and-white markings. Continue reading