tropical ecology – Fevziye Hasan

When I was leaving Maliau Basin in 2015 after completing the data collection for my masters project, I did not think I would have the opportunity to return to Borneo any time soon… I was wrong!

Between September – December 2016 I went back to the beautiful pristine rainforests surrounding Maliau Basin in Borneo, this time, as an ecological field research assistant with the Natural History Museum, I worked with the Termite Ant Research Team which includes Paul Eggleton, Louise Ashton, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool’s Kate Parr, Hannah Griffiths and Alice Walker.

I spent half my time in the rainforest collecting data from fieldwork including:

Termite transects
Leaf litter transects/Winkler Bag sampling
Ant bait card monitoring
Predation study on fake grublets
Wood occupancy surveys
Hand collecting 2,000 individual ants for molecular gut content analysis
Ant resource removal experiment

The other half of my time was spent in the Laboratory in the Institute of Tropical Biology and Conservation (ITBC) at the University of Malaysia, Sabah (UMS) in Kota Kinabalu working in the Natural Products Chemistry laboratory where I extracted chemicals from soil and seedling samples. I also helped the UMS Friends of Borneensis Outreach Initiative to design a field course for Malaysian School Students in 2017.

Our resource removal experiment revealed that Ants are the major agents of resource removal from tropical rainforests and was published recently in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Drying and Weighing Soil Samples at UMS

Extracting chemicals from seedlings from all of the plots

Topographic representation of Maliau Basin and all of the camp sites

Maliau Basin Field Studies Centre

Cookenia spp. Fungus

Dicuspiditermes nemorosus termite mound growing out of a buttress root

Preparing fake grublets made out of plasticine to look at predation

Hospitalitermes sp. Termite Foraging Column

Dysphania subrepleta (Day flying geometrid obtaining salts from civet poo)

Fieldwork

Catterpillar – potentially irritating to the skin

Microcerotermes dubius arboreal termite nest

Spooning trees?

Coleoptera

Plasticine grublet under the microscope. Can you identify the bite marks?

Termites

View over Maliau Brigde

Chalcosoma moellenkempi

View from the research station

Walk towards field sites

Mailau river

Forest trees

Mailau Basin Field Studies Centre

During the field seasons of 2012 and 2013 I was the entomology team leader at Operation Wallacea, Indonesia. The country of Indonesia is a huge country made up of around 18,000 islands across 5,000km. With a population of around 260 million people, and an incredible diversity of approximately 730 different languages. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the island biogeography provides a hot-house for speciation in this tropical island region with an incredible examples of adaptation and endemism. The Wallacea region, named after the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace

I worked in the main base for the university students doing the jungle training course, and the starting point for school students in south Buton is the village of Labundo. I conducted lepidoptera pollard surveys, banana baited bottle canopy arthropod surveys and Dung beetle surveys in both natural habitats and disturbed agricultural ecosystems. As well as this, I conducted rapid biodiversity assessment of termites using the standard transect method.