SEABCRU » Brunei

Batty and Pitty now in Malay and Spanish

Tigga Kingston — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:26:24 +0000

The wonderful story of Batty and Pitty has now been translated into Malay and Spanish! You can download copies from the Brunei Outreach page here

Many thanks/terimah kasih banyak/muchas gracias to Michael and Caroline Schöner for increasing the accessibility of this wonderful story. If any one would like to add another language to the collection, please go ahead.

Now in English, Malay and Spanish

Batty and Pitty – Children’s Story

Michael Schoener — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:55:35 +0000

The children’s story “Batty and Pitty” is based on our research about the mutualistic relationship between the bat species Kerivoula hardwickii hardwickii and the carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes hemsleyana. Both species can be found on Borneo. The relationship between the bat and the plants is a symbiosis: the bats have a safe place where they can sleep, the plants can use the faeces from the bats as fertilizer and thus do not have to catch so many insects to gain nutrients.

Although our study on the bat – pitcher plant – interaction is far from being finished the children story is mainly based on our researches that we conducted between June and July 2009 and have been published under the title:

Grafe, T. U., C. R. Schöner, A. Junaidi, G. Kerth & M. G. Schöner (2011): A novel resource-service mutualism between bats and pitcher plants. Biology Letters 7: 436-439.

The idea and the text are from Caroline and Michael Schöner, the drawings have been done by Claudia Spitzkopf and Robin Schöfer, a twelve year old girl who was totally fascinated by this story. We also like to thank Tigga who kindly reviewed the story. Of course, you are all invited to use our story in order to familiarize children with the fascinating world of bats. However, we want to remind everyone that interactions like this are fragile. The bats and the pitcher plants occur in highly threatened peat swamp forests which are often converted e.g. into palm oil plantations. With stories like this we hope to increase the awareness of future generations that the diversity of our world is rich but also endangered.

Note from Tigga:

“Pitty and Batty” can be downloaded from the Brunei Outreach Materials Page; meanwhile, below are some of the wonderful illustrations as a taster.

Caroline and Michael are working with colleagues to translate this into Malay. If anyone would like to translate into another language we’d love to hear from you.

Bat diversity in the lowland forests of the Heart of Borneo

Matthew Struebig — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:48:19 +0000

Borneo’s rainforests are renowned for their high levels of biodiversity, including >93 species of bat, but are facing unprecedented levels of conversion. In a bid to safeguard Borneo’s biodiversity the governments of Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia recently signed a declaration to conserve 22 million ha of continuous habitat within the Heart of Borneo (HoB) transboundary conservation area. Surprisingly, very little is known of the diversity and distributions of much of the wildlife within the HoB, particularly for bats. This study characterised insectivorous bat assemblages across ten sites within the HoB to inform decisions for possible extensions to the area, and also provide valuable information on patterns of diversity within Brunei Darussalam.

Harp trap surveys captured 1,362 bats from six sites in Brunei, which added 15 bat species to the national species list. Together with data from four additional sites in Sabah and Sarawak the surveys showed that bat assemblages are quite similar (i.e. beta diversity is low) across large tracts of undisturbed forest, and that subtle differences between sites are mostly driven by the abundances of a few cave-roosting species (e.g. Hipposideros cervinus). Analyses showed that areas prioritised as extensions to the HoB in coastal Brunei supported the fewest bat species at the lowest densities, and that inland forest catchments supported high bat diversity. One of these catchments, Sungai Ingei, is being considered by the Brunei government as a new national park.

The article has recently been published online in Biodiversity and Conservation:

Struebig M, Bozek M, Hildebrand J, Rossiter S, & Lane D (2012) Bat diversity in the lowland forests of the Heart of Borneo. Biodiversity and conservation, DOI: 10.1007/s10531-012-0393-0

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