Shortly before he retired as head of pest control for the Hong Kong Government in April 1980 and returned to UK, John Romer became involved in a controversy over the discovery and description of a ‘new’ species of newt allegedly from just north of Hong Kong’s border with China. He, with Jean-Paul Risch of the natural history museum in Paris published a paper on their findings in 1980 which, in short, demolished that claim.
Risch seems to have unearthed the story from the European end. An animal dealer in Hong Kong advertised in a West German magazine in 1975, thereafter shipping newts to dealers in that country. One such customer who was expecting to receive the Hong Kong Newt, Paramesotriton hongkongensis, realised that the animals he had received were not of that species. Therefore he sent them to Konrad Klemmer of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt for identification. Klemmer then sent the newts to Günther Erich Freytag (1918-1989) in East Berlin. Freytag with H-J Eberhardt described them as a new species, Cynops shataukokensis, the specific name given for the site of their alleged collection, in the West German publication Salamandra of December 1977.
In the 20th century and until comparatively recently, the highly aquatic Japanese Fire-bellied Newt was exported in large numbers for both amateur herpetologists and pet keepers. With import bans imposed largely because of the spread of the disease Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, the numbers have decreased markedly. However, IUCN now has the species as ‘Near Threatened’. The Hong Kong Newt was sold locally by street hawkers alongside goldfish. It has protected status but is also classified as ‘Near Threatened’. At the right time of year it can easily be spotted in the streams.
In their paper Risch and Romer noted:
Freytag and Eberhardt (1978) do not mention all of these details, yet it is extremely important to know that the newts in question were purchased from an animal dealer.
In December 1975 Jean-Paul Risch was sold two kinds of newts by a different dealer in West Germany. One was definitely the Japanese Fire-bellied Newt, Cynops pyrrhogaster. The other, sold as Paramesotriton hongkongensis, proved not to be that species but another local form of C. pyrrhogaster. That German dealer had clearly ordered Hong Kong Newts from the Hong Kong dealer but had instead received Japanese Fire-bellied Newts of two different morphs or geographical variants instead. C. pyrrhogaster is now known to comprise several lineages or clades highly variable in coloration and morphology. Some of those bought by the first purchaser, a Mr K Haker, were then compared—and found to be identical—with those bought by Risch.
Haker contacted the dealer in Hong Kong who told him they had been caught at Sha Tau Kok, in Chinese territory near Hong Kong. Haker passed this information to Risch as well as via Klemmer to Freytag. And that is where John Romer comes into the story.
It seemed to Romer highly unlikely that the ‘new’ newts had been collected in the vicinity of Sha Tau Kok. In conversations with the dealer, Mr Wong, he first realised that the dealer regarded ‘Sha Tau Kok’ as a much wider area than the Hong Kong village that approaches and then straddles the border. Wong firmly believed only one species occurred there, P. hongkongensis. He also emphasized that he could clearly recognise the smaller Japanese Fire-bellied Newt. He had imported newts from Japan to re-export and exported those with newts from Hong Kong and the immediately adjacent areas of China. Romer also tracked down the man, Mr Choi, who actually supplied the newts caught at ‘Sha Tau Kok’.
My guess is that the Hong Kong Newts newts were caught on the Chinese side of the border and entered Hong Kong at Sha Tau Kok, the site of a large egretry. That village was in a border area open only to local residents. However there was cross border traffic of people working the fields and bearing goods. Is that how Mr Choi obtained them?
Risch and Romer concluded:
We consider there are sufficient arguments that the newts collected by Choi at ‘Sha Tau Kok’ were really P. hongkongensis, that there are no fire-bellied newts of the genus Cynops in this area, that such newts sold to Germany had been imported to Hong Kong from Japan before reexportation, and that there has been confusion between Wong and Haker concerning their origin. Animal importation to Hong Kong from Japan is not unusual and has also been reported for chelonians.
Following our investigations it is not difficult to understand how the confusion arose, and in our view it is a dangerous practice to assign locality to specimens purchased from animal dealers. The danger is at its greatest when animals are imported from abroad from dealers who also import animals for re-export.
In other words, Mr Wong had imported two different morphs of the Japanese Newt and one of these had been confused somewhere along the line with the Hong Kong Newt. I also suspect that the dealers in West Germany had been the victims of the oldest exporters' trick in the book. If the species ordered is not available (and the Hong Kong Newt was never available on the market all year round) then send a substitute.
Further evidence that ‘Cynops shataukokensis’ was in fact Cynops pyrrhogaster came from electrophoresis; the protein pattern matched that of the ‘Hiroshima’ form of C. pyrrhogaster. Analysis of the morphometric data published by Freytag and Eberhardt also indicated that what they had (re)described was in fact C. pyrrhogaster. Risch and Romer were also miffed about lack of access to the type specimens sent to Freytrag:
Unfortunately, we have not been able so far to make a thorough morphological analysis on the basis of collection material as the senior author has been unable to obtain the holotype of C. shataukokensis on loan from the Senckenberg Museum for examination and comparison with other Cynops samples.
The conclusion is clear. The existence of ‘Cynops shataukokensis’, its origins and the methods of its proposers had been shot down in flames. It really is the newt that never was.
…and that was the last scientific paper published by John Romer on the fauna of Hong Kong before his death on 15 March 1982.
Risch J-P, Romer JD. 1980. Origin and taxonomic status of the salamander Cynops shataukokensis. Journal of Herpetology 14, 337-341.
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