Abstract:
In the mid-1980’s, while lecturing at a small university in Sabah, I accompanied my honours
student to the Danum Valley Field Centre for fieldwork, an inventory of small mammals
near the Danum station. The university was training students in field biology, while acquiring
mammal specimens for the university’s small museum, sponsored by Danum Valley
Management Committee. The station had been open less than a year, with only a few
researchers working on site. One evening after dinner’1 was approached by a European
visitor to the station, who inquired about our work. When I replied that we were collecting
small mammals as part of a fauna inventory, he gazed at me with great concern and remarked,
“Don’t you think what you are doing is contradictory to the status of Danum as a conservation
area?” Although our subsequent discussion was brief, both of us quickly realised our points
of view were rather different. The experience has remained with me ever since.
I have worked in Malaysia for the past 25 years lecturing in animal taxonomy and ecology,
and conducting field studies of frogs, snakes, crocodiles, birds and small mammals. Since
the early 1970s there have been some dramatic educational, demographic and environmental
changes in the country, as the development of plantation crops progressively expanded, and
formerly extensive forests rapidly receded. Agricultural, agrohorestry or aquaculture schemes
became popular alternatives to the management of original habitats. In tertiary education,
taxonomy and ecology gradually took aback seat, as it had in temperate countries, to applied
sciences and biotechnology. Rather abruptly in the 1990s, the subject of threatened
biodiversity entered the stage, with its emphasis of documenting species of the tropics, where
diversity is greatest. A great urgency was felt to sample this largely unknown resource before
pristine habitats disappeared. Funds have become available, but efforts to document
Malaysia’s biodiversity have, unfortunately, not kept pace with rapid agricultural and
industrial growth, which has progressively altered the landscape.. In fact, collections of
terrestrial vertebrate specimens has declined almost to zero. This paper attempts to explain
how collections have run aground, and with luck, how they can be put back on track.
