Birds
and bees and bats
IT stood no chance against the trap
The furry brown ball of a bat flew right into the harp like in strument bounced off its springy strings and slid down into the bag underneath Trapped
Until a hand reached down and scooped the fellow out
Looking at the twittering mammal trying to wriggle it self free from the cupped hand it s hard to imagine that a creature that small has such a gigantic mission ahead
Tagged checked and mea sured it was finally hung up side down on a small tree like a Christmas tree ornament
The bat s ears quivered picking up sound waves to help it map its surroundings Once the disorientation faded it took offfor its roost
This mock exercise by re searcher Joann Luruthusamy on a trekking trail in the Forest Research Institute Malaysia FRIM Kepong recently was meant to show how the real thing is done in the forest
Forthe past year Joann 25 and seven other young scien tists have been carrying out biodiversity assessments in the forests of Peninsular Malaysia
The work is for the Conserva
tion of Biodiversity Project CBioD which hopes to come up with simple tools that can give basic information as to what s in the forests and how
harvesting changes the ecology These simple tools are none other than small unassuming creatures which call the forest their home
By trapping bate birds bees and other small animals and studying how they interact
It s about the birds and bees and bats Not the kind you blushingly learn from your parents or teachers but the real biodiversity type Young scientists show CHAI MEI LING how these little flying things and others tell you the health of
the forest
with the ecosystem the scien tists hope to find out how a dis turbed forest affects these an imals and how the ecosystem
is impacted
The eight groups of flora and fauna chosen for the study are what researchers call bio indicators
Take insectivorous bats for example whose echolocation or use of high pitched sounds emitted from and bounced back to them for navigation is unique to bat types
Because of the different sonar they emit bigger bats navigate better in open space while smaller ones in dense environments says Joann the project s taxa leader for bat
census
The team s coordinator Dr Christine Fletcher adds For bats whose echolocation is evolved to fit a dense location like this ifyou open up this area by logging then they won t be able to navigate anymore
So you see a decline in this species
Similarly moths ants birds stingless bees and dung beetles each have their own stories to tell
For example one can tell how dense the forest is by ob serving the complexity of the moth s antenna
One can also tell whether a
forest has been disturbed by the types ofbirds present
The presence of dung bee tles which feed on big mam mals dung mean that the likes of elephants wild boars and tigers dwell in the area
Small as they are these creatures serve as important tools to indicate the health of the ecosystem
The tools to be refined over time by the researchers wffl at the end of the five year study period be passed to country s
foresters
They are meant to be cost effective easy to Implement and a sample for forestry de partment officers
The project into its third year now doesn t end withjust a biodiversity study
It will also cover whether an improved harvesting method can reduce damage to the for est what the best virginjungle reserve entails and put a price tag on the services of the jungle
At the end of the day we ll find out how rich in biodiversi ty a particular production for est is Hopefully this will be taken into account when har vesting decisions are made
ffight now the only consid eration in forest management is timber harvesting says na tional project director Dr Shamsudin Ibrahim
When we talk about forest what we have in mind is tim ber which you can equate to in dollars and cents
This study will add biodi versity value for a more bal anced approach Ifyou want to log the forest and yet save bio diversity what s the best tech nique to do that
Maybe to a certain extent the timber profit margin will be reduced but we need this Und of sacrifice from timber concessionaires
Whatever loss you re going to get from timber is going to be a gain to the environment
This is what we re trying to impress upon the govern ment but it s up to the politi cians to decide
The CBioD project is a col laboration between the Natu ral Resources and Environ ment Ministry United Nations Development Programme Global Environment Facility the International Tropical Timber Organisation and
FRIM
