Great Mormon Butterfly in Hong Kong

AJP photographed this Great Mormon Butterfly (Papilio mormon) in the garden in May. He has seen large numbers of this large butterfly (around 5 inches -125 mm) this year.

Females are highly polymorphic. In some parts of southern Asia the females mimic toxic butterflies. The fact that the males have the choice of a number of different female forms within an area seems to have been responsible for their common name of ‘mormon’.

Great Mormons figured in one of the key papers on mimicry and its evolution. Ian Thornton (1926-2002) then Reader in Zoology in the University of Hong Kong sent specimens to Liverpool for breeding experiments and was a co-author of the paper with Sir Cyril Clarke (1907-2000) and Philip Shepherd (1921-1976) which was published in Transactions of the Royal Society in 1968.

I only discovered that Ian Thornton had been involved in work on the genetics of the Great Mormon when writing this note. I then recalled something odd about the department of zoology in those days. I never recall a single internal seminar. External visitors and talks by a host of distinguished scientists calling in Hong Kong, yes; but talks by staff and PhD students on what they were doing, no.

Clarke CA, Sheppard PM, Thornton IWB. 1968. The genetics of the mimetic butterfly Papilio memnon L.. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 254 37–89. doi:10.1098rstb.1968.0013

ANIMALS Magazine. Back to the 60s

 

ANIMALS magazine was launched in January 1963 by Purnell & Sons as a weekly. The editor was John Paget Chancellor (1927-2014) but television personalities were used as ‘influencers’ then as now, and the film maker Armand Denis was listed as Editor-in-Chief. For those not around then, Armand and Michaela Denis produced and presented On Safari, a hugely popular programme on BBC television in the 1950s. Not content with a celebrity editor-in-chief, Chancellor assembled  a collection of well-known naturalists and scientists as ‘patrons’ and ‘advisory editors’ (Julian Huxley, Solly Zuckerman, (13th) Duke of Bedford, Bernhard Grzimek, Gavin Maxwell, Peter Scott, Gerald Durrell, Nicholas Guppy, Alan Moorehead, Niko Tinbergen).

As well as articles ANIMALS ran extracts of books. It had an important role in drawing attention in Britain to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which it began publishing extracts soon after its launch and only four months after the book was first published in the USA.

At the time of its launch as a colour glossy, Purnells were in their heyday. However, it seems that ANIMALS was, by the mid-60s, not doing well; it is said that it ran at a loss for its four years with Purnell. In 1967 the magazine was bought by one of the assistant editors, Nigel Degge Wilmot Sitwell (1935-2017), who changed it to a monthly and cut the costs of production. Then in 1974 he changed the title to WILDLIFE. The magazine was sold to Reader’s Digest in 1978, then via another publisher to become BBC WILDLIFE which is still extant but which I have not seen for years. Nigel Sitwell, whom I got to know slightly 30-odd years ago, moved to other publishing, travel and conservation interests in Antarctica and the Galapagos.

Copies of ANIMALS are difficult to search for, given the title. It was, however, an important popular publication of its time and well worth reading as a source of what was going on in the world of animals and conservation in the 1960s.

Feral Gecko Populations in British University Buildings

Escapes and deliberate releases have been responsible for the occurrence of feral populations non-native amphibians and reptiles in Britain, ranging from Midwife Toads to Aesculapian Snakes. Tropical and sub-tropical species sometimes escape in heated, indoor accommodation but rarely in sufficient numbers to produce a breeding population. However, it does happen, as a recent paper illustrates.

Two feral populations of gecko have been found in buildings at the University of Hull and the University of Nottingham. The date when they were first noticed seems to be the late 1990s-early 2000s in Hull and the 1970s in Nottingham. Both populations have been identified as Hemidactylus turcicus, the Mediterranean House Gecko or Turkish Gecko, which, as its names implies is found in countries bordering virtually the entire Mediterranean coast. It is, like many geckos, nocturnal. However, like some others in the genus, it is now to be found found in other parts of the world where it has been introduced, probably in shipments of goods. It is, for example, found in the USA and Mexico and said to be abundant in Florida.

Molecular genetic studies suggested the Nottingham population is derived from a single or very few founding individuals. Those studied from the Hull population showed greater genetic diversity, suggesting a larger number in the founder population and/or evolution in situ.

The authors speculate that the two populations were established by individuals being kept by people as part of research projects. It may be that the individuals involved are known—or could be guessed—at one site or the other but ‘no names, no pack drill’ may apply.

In Britain, it is difficult to imagine sub-tropical or tropical reptiles becoming established in buildings, other than in those heated all day, every day, in the winter in the decades before the 1970s. Laboratory buildings were often freezing cold in vacations and at weekends—far too cold for most reptiles to survive let along breed and thrive. 

Just in case anybody is asking, have I left feral populations behind in the buildings I once kept reptiles? I do not think so but their food supply was a different matter: crickets, locusts and fruitflies and flour beetles were some of the escapees. In the one building still standing, the crickets may still be there.

Da Silva S-M, Maka A, Hartman T, Valero KW, Gilbert E. 2024. Two established introduced populations of the synanthropic gecko Hemidactylus turcicus (Linnaeus, 1758) in England. Herpetology Notes 17, 407-410 

Coucals Taking the Sun on a Hot Day in Hong Kong

AJP saw these Greater Coucals (Centropus sinensis) in the garden on a hot day last week. Resident in Hong Kong they are known to sunbathe, particularly in the mornings. More often they are spotted clambering around shrubs or on the ground in search of food, animal and vegetable. They make short flights but always seeming to have difficulty in doing so.

For decades these birds wered known as crow-pheasants since they do resemble both a crow and a pheasant. However they are cuckoos but not brood parasitic ones, building a well-hidden nest in May and June.

They were one heavily trapped for sale in Chinese medicine. We found noose traps, illegal then as now, which used a bent twig as the spring, set along a path in the New Territories in January 1968

A noose trap set on a track (which must now be part of the Maclehose Trail)
January 1968

.

Terrapins in the Algarve. A North American Field Guide Would Have Been Useful

I was hoping we would see Spanish Terrapins (Mauremys leprosa) and European Pond Terrapins (Emys orbicularis) when we were in Portugal in early April. We did but in the Algarve we also saw very large numbers of North American sliders (Trachemys scripta) in a freshwater lake behind the saline lagoon and beach at Quinta do Lago (part of the Ria Formosa National Park). I spent ages looking through the photographs in order to try and identify what we had been seeing basking in the spring sunshine. I then found a paper from 2018 which describes an extensive survey of the National Park, which extends along the coast of the Algarve, done between 2011 and 2013. Over that period the most common species was M. leprosa (79% of all captures). Then came E. orbicularis (12%) with introduced North American species on 9%. That paper clearly demonstrated for the first time that the introduced terrapins were breeding. I also discovered that the lake, surrounded by a golf course and holiday apartments, is used as a place to release rescued native terrapins. Whether that lake is typical of other freshwater lakes and ponds of the Ria Formosa National Park I do not know but it was clear to us that introduced sliders vastly outnumbered M. leprosa while only a few E. orbicularis were evident. 

The authors of the 2018 paper raised the alarm in view of evidence that North American sliders compete for food and basking sites with E. orbicularis. Throughout its range E. orbicularis is decreasing in numbers and is now classified as Near Threatened in the IUCN Red List. The question is if and will anything be done to control the number of introduced terrapins in Portugal.

I should point out that I am following British terminology for freshwater chelonians in using ‘terrapin’ for all these species, rather than the North American ‘turtle’. However, to complicate matters, Emys orbicularis was often called the European Pond Tortoise. ‘Spanish Terrapin’ is also misleading since the species also occurs in North Africa. In Portugal and elsewhere, Mediterranean Pond Terrapin is also used as a name for M. leprosa. 

We also travelled inland and on one reservoir and a slow-moving river saw only the two native species.

I am puzzled by the presence in the same locations of E. orbicularis and M. leprosa, as I was at Butrint in Albania, where E. orbicularis and the Balkan Terrapin (Mauremys rivulata) live side by side. Are those pairs of species not in competition? And if not why not?

Sliders in Europe represent either the declining remnants of the once enormous trans-Atlantic trade in ‘baby terrapins’ in the north or a thriving feral  population in the south. As the baby terrapins grew, they were released by owners unable to house them. However, before that stage was reached only when word spread on how to rear them successfully. Until then virtually all died from being kept too cold and from being given unsuitable food deficient in vitamins and calcium. However, when kept properly the cute baby grows very rapidly.

The sliders we saw represent the two phases of the trade. Initially—and apart from ones captured in the wild for the dealers selling to amateur herpetologists—the ones which came in were Red-eared Sliders (Red-eared terrapins, Trachemys scripta elegans). The late 1950s saw the start of the mass trade in Britain. What we didn’t know was that these terrapins were being bred on ‘turtle farms’ in the southern USA and that they were fed the waste from chicken carcasses. It did not take all that long for Salmonella from the chicken and contaminated water to make its presence felt, both in the USA and in Europe. Eventually that trade was banned. But then a second wave, I think also coinciding with the mutant ninja turtle craze, this time of another subspecies of slider, brought the Yellow-bellied Slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) to pet shops. It was these two forms that were present at Quinta do Lago. In contrast to 2011-2013 data when Red-ears predominated (98% of the sliders), Yellow-bellied were as least as common, if not slightly more so, than  the Red-ears, as would be expected. 

Of the sliders I could see clearly, I did not spot any obvious hybrids between the two subspecies. This could mean that many of the large terrapins are of the original stock or it could indicate assortative mating.

The EU banned the import, sale, breeding or exchange of all forms of T. scripta in 2015, a position maintained in Britain after Brexit.

Martins BH, Azevedo F, Teixeira J. 2018. First reproduction report of Trachemys scripta in Portugal Ria Formosa Natural Park, Algarve. Limnetica, 37, 61-67. DOI: 10.23818/limn.37.06

An Undesirable Alien in Deepest Ayrshire: New Zealand Flatworm

 

SJP realised that the worm in the topsoil of the allotment was not the usual earthworm. It was though a different sort of worm, one which had us trying to remember all we could about platyhelminths, a phylum which last impinged upon our cerebral cortices 60 years ago. It is a New Zealand Flatworm, now named Arthurdendyus triangulatus, an invasive species that first appeared in Britain in the early 1960s, probably in the soil of imported plants. It has spread throughout the country and seems well suited to the damp (wet, to be honest) soil of Ayrshire. I am told it is particularly prevalent on some allotments because of a communal composting scheme that was in operation in the past.

It was put into the category ‘invasive’ because of the damage it can do to earthworm numbers and therefore soil quality and fertility. It apparently feeds almost exclusively on earthworms which are killed and digested outside the body. The flatworm wraps itself around the earthworm, extrudes its pharynx which produces digestive enzymes, and then ingests the resultant slurry (paté?) of earthworm. Earthworm populations may be reduced by 20%. As well as in soil it lives in damp laces above ground, around the bases of plants, under pots, stones, logs etc. In spring they lay egg capsules about the size of a blackcurrant. Each holds 5-8 young which hatch after two months.

It is forbidden under the Wildlife and Countryside Act(s) to distribute New Zealand Flatworms which means that any found have to be killed and not released alive.

This species was first described by Arthur Dendy (see here and here) as Geoplana triangulata in 1896. The eponymous genus Arthurdendyus was erected by Hugh D. Jones in 1999.

The mucus is said to be a skin irritant. However SJP survived unscathed from wrangling this most undesirable alien.

The Heart of the Salamander: Science in the Making 1940-41

The Royal Society sometimes publishes papers from the archives under the heading Science in the Making. A recent one certainly drew my attention since it is a letter from 1940 concerning a paper and people I have written about previously. It provides an amusing insight into how papers were refereed and of why the whole business of selecting scientific papers for publication by peer review is so fraught with difficulty, why mistakes are often made and how good papers are sometimes rejected while utter garbage gets published sometimes, sadly, by what were/are highly-regarded journals. Before I digress into a tirade on the decline in standards of present-day refereeing and editing, back to the paper in hand.

The letter from the archives was written from Trinity College, Cambridge on 28 December 1940 by Carl Frederick Abel Pantin FRS (1899 –1967) of the Department of Zoology. From the letter’s content it is obvious that he had been asked by John David Griffith Davies (1899-1953, the Assistant Secretary from 1937 until 1946) to provide a second opinion on a paper submitted for publication. Griffith Davies was trying to keep the publication system working as war took its toll and he was running from pillar to post moving records to safety, compiling a register of scientists for the war effort and running the London operation. The first refereewas Alan Nigel Drury FRS (later Sir Alan) (1889-1980) who recommended publication but that the introduction should be shortened. Here I declare a personal interest since after Sir Alan retired for the first time from the Lister Institute and having established a blood transfusion and blood products system during the war, he was persuaded to become head of the pathology department at the then new Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham. After his second retirement he still kept a close interest in the people and work of the Institute. Although he was then 88 and frail, on my last day at Babraham before leaving for Ayr he asked to be picked up from home and brought to my lab in order to wish me well.

The paper in question was The Heart of the Salamander (Salamandra salamandra, L.), with Special Reference to the Conducting (Connecting) System and its Bearing on the Phylogeny of the Conducting Systems of Mammalian and Avian Hearts by Francis Davies (1897-1965) and Eric Thomas Brazil Francis (1900-1993) of the Departments of Anatomy and Zoology, respectively of the University of Sheffield.

Francis Davies

Eric Francis

Pantin’s first criticism was that the historical introduction was far too long. ETBF was following the tradition set by his former professor of zoology at Reading, Francis Joseph Cole FRS (1872-1959) with regard to immensely long histories of the subject of the publication. Pantin and Drury were right.

On the second point, that the paper needed to refer the paper to somebody from a human anatomy department, since the work would only be of interest to anatomists, was wrong. This anatomical paper, with as much physiology as the authors could do at the time, was about a physiological and evolutionary question. In short, as the title states it was about the conducting system within the heart responsible for the co-ordinated contraction of the heart muscle. In mammals and birds there are specialised muscular fibres within cardiac muscle which conduct the signal to contract from the pacemaker in the sino-atrial node to all parts of the ventricle. However, Davies and Francis could found no trace of these tracts, like the Bundle of His, or the smaller Purkinje fibres, in mammals. Thus they concluded that the wave of contraction that passes through the amphibian heart is the result of one contracting cardiac muscle cell setting off its neighbour, as in a line of falling dominos.

The implications for the way the heart works has very great implications in terms of the force of contraction and maximum heart rate that can be achieved. The wave of contraction is slow in amphibians compared with the rapid conduction to all parts of the heart in mammals and birds. In turn, the rate of metabolism of amphibians and reptiles is constrained making them ‘slow animals’ as opposed to the mammals and birds which have higher metabolic rates. There has been some suggestion that the development of specialised conducting fibres may also be related to the complete separation of the two sides of the heart in mammals and birds since in crocodilians, which have a full septum between the ventricles, there appears to be the rudiments of a conducting system. Davies and Francis later turned their attention to the crocodilian conducting system but that is a story for another time.

Despite Pantin missing the point completely, the paper was then sent to a third referee of the background Pantin suggested,  James Thomas Wilson FRS (1861-1945), Emeritus Professor of Anatomy in Cambridge. Although he was ill and felt unable to provide a detailed report, he considered it ‘a work of considerable interest and importance’. Wilson was a good choice. He had a reputation as a comparative anatomist with considerable knowledge of monotremes and the evolution of mammals gained while working at the University of Sydney.

The Davies and Francis paper was published in Philosophical Transactions, with a historical introduction that was still too long. It, together with later work on crocodilians, is still widely quoted since Davies and Francis were onto something of major importance in the evolution of vertebrates (Pantin was very much and invertebrates man) and of how animals work and why they work the way they do. The working of the heart, sadly only possible to address by exercises in armchair physiology, is also vital to understanding how dinosaurs managed to work at all.

The letters and reports from Drury, Pantin and Wilson certainly provide a snapshot from 1940 of science in the making.

A Leopard in Wartime Hong Kong

Henry Wong recently posted a cutting on the Facebook Group, The Battle of Hong Kong 1941 To 1945. It described, complete with photograph, the appearance and killing of a Leopard (Panthera pardus) in the New Territories on 26 November 1943. Yes, you read that right: a Leopard, not a Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) which is still extant in Hong Kong and the size of a domestic tabby (not that its size has prevented it from being mistaken for a Tiger in the past). It is difficult to search newspapers or other material online because searching for ‘leopard’ and not getting ‘leopard cat’ is very difficult seeing that both are cats.

I hesitate to write that the source of the article was a ‘newspaper’ since it was the English-language propaganda sheet, The Hongkong News. This publication started out as a Japanese-owned English-language newspaper. It was revived in January 1942 at the start of the Japanese Occupation from the offices of the South China Morning Post. Amongst attempts to persuade its readers that all was well, by reporting on the resurrected horse racing at Happy Valley, for example, while the local inhabitants were starved, beaten, tortured, killed or forced into mainland China, there were some news items, like this one on the Leopard.

Leopard Killed At Taimoshan

Exciting Hunt By Gendarmerie Police

     Measuring five feet six inches from nose-tip to his tail-end and weighing about 70 catties, a male leopard was killed by a posse of Gendarmerie Police at the foot of Taimoshan (about seven kilometres from Taipo, in the New Territories) on Friday.

     The first report regarding the presence of the animal was made at 9.30 a.m. on Friday. The report stated that the spoor of a tiger had been found at the foot of Taimoshan. The message was

eventually sent to the Hongkong Gendarmerie Headquarters, which immediately dispatched a posse of Gendarmerie police to the scene in order to capture the beast.

     While searching for the tiger, one of the Chinese Gendarmerie police, who displaying fine presence of mind, drew his revolver and shot the leopard under the chin, although he was injured by the leopard's claws on the right shoulder and leg.

     The leopard, although hit, managed to get away, and it was not until 5.30 p.m., which was about seven hours later, that the leopard was sighted again, this time by an Indian Gendarmerie Policeman, Amaru Khan. This time the police marksman made no mistake and riddled the leopard to death with a number of shots.

Seven km from Tai Po would make the position south of the mountain Tai Mo Shan and at its foot would suggest somewhere around the position I have marked on a modern satellite view of Hong Kong from Google Earth.

Locations of the 1931 and 1944 (approximate area) Leopard sightings on a 2020s Google Earth satellite view

In 1942 the Japanese reconstituted a police force from local and Indian former policemen as well as new local recruits. This ‘gendarmerie’ operated under the close control of Japanese and was directly involved in terrorising the population. Although the majority avoided official retribution after the Japanese surrender in 1945, it is known that a number of gendarmerie members were quietlyhunted down by local groups and executed Chinese style by a bullet in the back of the neck. I wonder if the fate of the two men of the ‘Chinese Gendarmerie’ and the ‘Indian Gendarmerie’ involved in shooting the leopard is known.

In his book, The Hong Kong Countryside, first published in 1951, Geoffrey Herklots did not mention this incident which occurred while he was interned at Stanley on Hong Kong Island. He may not have been aware of its existence. He describes another leopard being found in 1931:

     …On 20th December, 1931, one was shot near the village of Chung Pui to the north of the Pat Sin range. The villagers had been in the habit of setting traps to catch the barking deer and on the morning of that date a woman, hearing a noise and disturbance amongst some bushes, thought a deer had been caught in a trap and called out the good news to her friends below. Up rushed a party of villagers the first man with a sack which he intended to place over the head of the deer. He went ahead into the bushes to find the animal but the animal found him! A leopard had been caught in the trap by its left fore paw, it had broken the rope which had attached the trap to a tree but was somewhat handicapped in its movements by the trap on its foot. It sprang upon the man mauling his face and head which were badly scratched.

     A council of war was held and one of the party was then sent to the village where lived three men who owned rifles. The men arrived and shot the leopard. An argument now followed as to the ownership of the body; the armed men insisted that as they had shot the animal the body was theirs. This argument prevailed. The beast was skinned and the flesh, bones, skull, teeth, whiskers and claws were sold to bidders amongst the villagers for the large sum of $150 (then about £15.0.0.). The skin remained the property of the villagers but was transferred temporarily to Sha tau kok police station where, through the courtesy of Sergeant Coleman, I was able to examine and photograph it. Three bullet holes were noticed, two in the head, one in the back. Tip of snout to base of tail 4 feet 2½ inches, tail 2 feet 4 inches; total length 6 feet 6% inches; width just behind fore limbs 1 foot 11 inches. The skin was in good condition.

The 1931 animal (sex unknown) was therefore a little longer than the 1944 beast. The weight of the latter converts to 42 kg which would suggest a young male. The geographical form of the Leopard occurring in years past from South China to the Malay Peninsula is Panthera pardus delacouri. It is now thought to be close to extinction in China. Were the ones that did reach Hong Kong wandering young animals seeking to establish their own territory but which met a similar fate to those found in 1931 and 1944?

Herklots prefaced his remarks with:

The visit of a leopard to the Colony [Hong Kong] is a much rarer event than that of a tiger.

I do not know the date of the last authentic record—or any claim of a sighting—for a Leopard in Hong Kong. Could 26 November 1943 have been the final occasion? Their may have been others that went unspotted but the hills were so well worked by grass cutters and trappers that it seems unlikely. It is also possible that Leopards were once—when the human population was really sparse—and along with Tigers and Dhole just part of the scenery in Hong Kong and the surrounding parts of mainland China.

Roland Anderson Coulson. From Vitamins in Wartime London to Pioneering Research on Alligators in Louisiana with Thomas Hernandez

I was at a symposium on energy metabolism two years ago. During a discussion I tried to remember early research on the relation between tissue blood flow and oxygen consumption. I could not remember the name of the people who worked on animals with a slow metabolic rate and who stressed that the rate of delivery of oxygen and metabolic substrates to the cell is just as important as the biochemical events within the cell. A couple of weeks ago something jogged my memory and I remembered who it was and the unusual but classic publication which described it.

ROLAND ARMSTRONG COULSON (1915-2004) and THOMAS HERNANDEZ (1914-2002) of Louisiana State University worked on the Mississippi Alligator for most of their scientific careers. In 1964 they published a book entitled Biochemistry of the Alligator. A Study of Metabolism in Slow Motion. That was brought up to date in 1983 by Alligator Metabolism, Studies on Chemical Reactions In Vivo which was published as a special edition of the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology.

From Biochemistry of the Alligator

Coulson and Hernandez worked not only how alligators work but also compared their physiology with that of small and large mammals. They explored the differences and uncovered mechanisms that were seemingly different but which on closer analysis proved to be similar. In so doing, they explored biochemistry in its widest sense, i.e. physiology, trying to see if studies on enzymes in vitro could be with interpreted in terms of integration of function in the whole animal. Experimental evidence obtained was combined with armchair physiology to come up with new ideas. Although their thinking has been superseded to some extent by greater knowledge of the nature by which metabolic substrates are transported into cells, their work is still relevant to the fundamental question when comparing species of how and why metabolic rate does not increase linearly with increases in body size. It is also relevant to the control of metabolic rate within a species and to the changes that may occur at different stages of life and in different habitats.

Coulson and Hernandez started their work on the alligator in 1948. Their collaboration in the lab lasted for 35 years; their final paper together was published in 1989, 39 years after their first. Coulson continued to work on the alligator with others and the last paper I can find in PubMed was published in 2002; he was 87.

Coulson was Professor of Biochemistry and Hernandez Professor of Biochemistry and later of Pharmacology at Louisiana State University. But then you notice that Coulson had a wartime PhD from the University of London. How did that come about?

Coulson was born in Rolla, Kansas, near the Santa Fe Trail. He was born in a ‘sod house’ which I found was that very thing, a house built of sods into which normal doors and windows were included. During the great depression of the 1930s he worked on ranches and farms, and as a miner for gold and tungsten. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Wichita moving to Louisiana State University for a master’s degree and continuing into a research fellowship in zoology. A Google search shows what looks like a thesis (no further details) entitled ‘Electrophoretic studies on Antuitrin S’ (now known as Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, HCG) suggesting he was working on the chemistry of the hormone for his masters degree. Then in 1941, before the USA declared war, he, with a number of other Americans, joined the British war effort. The accounts of this period in some of his obituaries have turned out not to be accurate and after an amount of digging, I discovered a largely forgotten branch of the Royal Air Force and of how and why Coulson arrived in Britain. In June 1941 the British Government launched a campaign in the USA for skilled American mechanics and technicians to join the RAF’s Civilian Technical Corps (CTC). They were needed, particularly, to service and maintain RAF equipment like radio and radar. More than 200 applied to join on the first day. Members  of the CTC were non-combatants and signed on for three years or for the duration of the war, whichever was shorter. They were subject to military-style discipline and had their own uniform based on that of the RAF. Headquarters were in Bournemouth and the Commandant was also a civilian, Donald Lee Gill of Brooklyn, New York, a leading light in the American Chamber of Commerce in Britain and in the American Red Cross.

Highland Princess

Coulson volunteered for the CTC and arrived in Glasgow on 3 November on board the Royal Mail Lines ship, Highland Princess, from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Passage to Britain was a dangerous activity and the press reported that 19 members of the CTC had been killed when their ship was sunk at about the time Coulson disembarked in Glasgow. Recruitment must also have included junior scientists in biological and chemical fields because Coulson was assigned to work in nutrition at the Lister Institute in London. I write ‘London’ because during the war the various departments of the Lister Institute were widely scattered and he may, or may not, not have been at the site in central London. I do know that some of the nutritionists at the Lister were moved to Cambridge but not whether this applied to all of them. When the USA entered the war, Americans serving in the CTC were permitted to delay their call-up into US forces until they had completed their three-year contract.

At the Lister laboratories Coulson worked with Philipp Ellinger (1887-1952) who had escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 and who worked on the B vitamins. Ellinger’s obituary in Nature shows his main interest at this time was nicotinic acid, now better known as niacin or Vitamin B3, only then having recently been isolated as the agent that prevents pellagra:

…he interested himself in the metabolism of nicotinamide in man and animals, and studied very thoroughly, during the next few years, the elimination of nicotinamide methochloride in normal and nicotinamide-deficient persons. The results of these researches revealed that the intestinal bacterial flora can form a very significant extra-dietary source of nicotinamide.

Ellinger and Coulson jointly, or Coulson alone, published seven major papers from the Lister between 1944 and 1946, including three in Nature. He continued to work on nicotinamide when he returned to Louisiana State University’s medical school and until he began work on the alligator and, occasionally, other reptiles with Hernandez.

In one of his papers with Ellinger, the background to the work was explained:

This work forms part of an investigation on nicotinamide deficiency carried out on behalf of the Air Ministry. We wish to thank Air Marshal Sir H. E. Whittingham, K.B.E., K.H.P., Director-General of the Medical Services of the Royal Air Force, for facilities provided, and Flight Lieutenant G. A. Smart for collecting samples from airmen. Our thanks are also due to L.A.C.W. [Leading Aircraft Woman] A. E. Wrigglesworth for technical assistance and to members of the Scientific and Technical Staff of the Lister Institute who volunteered as experimental subjects.

     …One of the authors (R.A.C.) is a member of the Civilian Technical Corps of the Air Ministry attached to the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine for an investigation of nicotinamide deficiency.

The work on nicotinamide formed the basis of his PhD thesis awarded by the University of London. By working for the CTC Coulson completed a PhD in a little more than half the time needed in the USA. He completed his three years’ service and crossed the Atlantic on board SS Nieuw Amsterdam, fitted out not as the luxury liner but as a troopship, which left Gourock in the Clyde on 19 October 1944. He arrived in Boston on 25 October, en route, it was noted, to Canada and, presumably, the CTC transit centre there. 

This photograph from the Imperial War Museum shows the uniform
of the CTC being worn by William Henry Manning of Del Rio, Texas,
He was being presented with the British Empire Medal by Sir
Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, on 19 May 1944.
On the left is Donald Lee Gill of Brooklyn, Commandant of the
Civilian Technical Corps. Image: IWM (CH13143)

In 1946 it was announced that those who had served in the RAF’s Civilian Technical Corps were being awarded the Defence Medal.

While Coulson and Hernandez seemed ahead of the game in stressing the integrative approach to physiology and biochemistry. They must have made the medical school at Louisiana State University a very different place to that is most universities.

Coulson was invited to London in 1983 to speak at a joint Zoological Society of London/British Herpetological Symposium held to mark the retirement of Angus Bellairs. I remember not being able to attend because I was already booked for another event. I regret not being able to have been present all the more now since It may have been my only opportunity to have heard and met Coulson.

A symposium, The Biology of the Crocodilia, was held at the annual meeting of the American Society of Zoologists held in New Orleans in 1987. An appreciation of Coulson’s achievements was given by Herbert Clay Dessauer (1921-2013), Coulson’s former student and also a professor of biochemistry in the same department—and a pioneer in molecular systematics of anole lizards. Dessauer (who also provided a list of Coulson’s publications up to 1989) concluded: 

Research has been central to Coulson's career, but he has many other interests and skills. He has been a champion of academic excellence at the Louisiana State University Medical Center: the organizer and first dean of its Graduate School, and a valued counsel to University administrators. He is somewhat of an eccentric, a wonderful story teller, and a warehouse of information on virtually any subject. He is a professor in the best sense of the title: a stimulating teacher, a "silver-tongued" lecturer, and a productive, innovative and imaginative scientist.

From Dessauer 1989

Coulson RA, Hernandez T. 1964. Biochemistry of the Alligator. A Study of Metabolism in Slow Motion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Coulson RA, Hernandez T. 1983. Alligator Metabolism, Studies on Chemical Reactions In Vivo. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology B 74, 1-182. doi: 10.1016/0305-0491(83)90418-2

Dessauer HC. 1989. Roland Armstrong Coulson. American Zoologist 29, 823-829.

Angled Red Forester. A Butterfly in Hong Kong

 

AJP found this butterfly in Hong Kong last week right next to the Great Barbet nest he found earlier.

The Angled Red Forester (Lethe chandica) was first recorded was first recorded in Hong Kong in 2011. It is not known if these butterflies have simply expanded their range in southern China or if they were introduced as eggs or caterpillars on imported plants. Given they are found in Guangdong, my bet would be on the former.

Eastham Guild and the Introduced Birds of Tahiti

In 2012 I wrote about Eastham Guild and his introduction of foreign birds to the wilds of Tahiti in the 1930s, the descendants of which can still be seen (see here and here).

David Bartell has now made a video on the life of the socialites Carrie and Eastham Guild entitled Out Of This World: A Deep Draught into the Woman Who Named the Mai Tai.

Oriental Dollarbird in Hong Kong

AJP spotted this Oriental Dollarbird from his flat above Kowloon Tong in Hong Kong. The Oriental Dollarbird (Eurystomus orientalis) is a passage migrant in Hong Kong, heading north in spring and south in winter. It heads as far north as Russia, northern China and southern Japan. Its stronghold is southeast Asia but it is also a summer visitor to eastern Australia, reaching the coastal areas of Victoria. It is a member of the roller family and was known in Hong Kong as the Broad-billed Roller. It is now much more common in Hong Kong than in the early decades of the 20th century. Geoffrey Herklots noted that he had only one seen this species in over 15 years. That was on 27 September 1945, his first birdwatching walk after release from Japanese internment at Stanley.

We did not see this species in Hong Kong in the 1960s but have done so since 1997 when we first went back. We have seen it in Borneo (Sabah) and on Langkawi, Malaysia.

Spindly-Leg Syndrome in Captive-bred Amphibians. A recurring problem and a new Commentary

A problem I thought had been solved in the 1990s continues to bedevil efforts to breed frogs and toads in captivity. Tadpoles seem to growing and metamorphosing normally until the stage at which the front legs appear. Then the front legs emerge as spindly, weak limbs on which the fully metamorphosed frog cannot stand or move about to feed. There is no known remedy. I was heavily involved in breeding amphibians in the late 1980s and early 1990s and have now taken the opportunity to review the evidence base on the possible cause or causes of this condition and how it may be prevented.

The Commentary can be found in pdf format on my other site, Reptiles, Amphibians and Birds: A Historical Perspective of their Care in Captivity, HERE.

Tadpoles developing within the egg of the poison-dart frog
Dendrobates truncatus which lays its eggs in small clutches on land

Who was Commander A M Hughes RN, Illustrator of Bird Books of Hong Kong, Burma and Borneo?

Birdwatchers arriving in Hong Kong in the 1960s were lucky if they could find a copy of the book by Geoffrey Herklots, Hong Kong Birds. It had been published in 1953 and was been reprinted numerous times as stock ran out. It was nothing like a modern field guide. There were relatively few illustrations and even fewer in colour. There were descriptions of the various species written by Herklots in the Natural History Museum while on home leave in Britain in 1938. His other notes had disappeared while he was interned at Stanley during the Japanese Occupation. He intended the book to pull together the notes and articles that had appeared in the Hong Kong Naturalist, a journal he had founded and which was published from 1930 until 1941. The small pen-and-ink drawings together with the colour plates, including the frontispiece of a Great Barbet, are by Commander A.M. Hughes OBE RN (Retired). Hughes also drew the cartoons for Herklots's The Hong Kong Countryside published in Hong Kong in 1951. Herklots, noted that Commander Hughes had been stationed in Hong Hong between 1929 and 1931. He had contributed plates to the Hong Kong Naturalist from its first issue in 1930. Herklots noted that the Hong Kong Government had made a grant to cover the cost of the colour plates, one appearing in each issue, for the first year of publication. Thus, even after he had left Hong Kong, Hughes continued to paint the birds he had seen there.

But who was Commander A.M. Hughes? What was his rôle in Hong Kong; what else did he draw and paint and what did he do after being in Hong Kong?

The frontispiece of Hong Kong Birds
Painted in 1933

One of the many black-and-white drawings in
Hong Kong Birds
Common Tailorbird

The first thing I discovered that an illustration of naval life that he drew is sometimes sold by art dealers. Art dealers also try to provide the dates of birth and death of the artist. However, the dates of death provided by different dealers were so broad (spanning 1931 to 2001) as to be useless. However, a date of birth of 1900 provided a good starting point for the search of the usual genealogy sites and public records, including naval service records.

ALFRED MARCUS HUGHES was born on 12 September 1900 at Brinkley, five miles from Newmarket, Cambridgeshire. He was the son of Mary Charlotte (née Harrison) and Herbert Edgar Hughes, co-founder of Mann, Egerton & Company Ltd of Norwich, motor and aircraft engineers (and, incidentally, patentee of a picnic tray), and the grandson of Sir Alfred Hughes, 9th Baronet. The Hughes Baronetcy was created in 1773 by George III for Sir Richard Hughes, a naval officer, as was the second baronet. Hughes followed the conventions of the time in attending naval training establishments for three years from the age of 13. He passed out of Dartmouth in 1916 and made his way from Midshipman and Sub-Lieutenant to Lieutenant by 1921 aged 20. During that time he served in several ships, ranging from the battlecruiser HMS Tiger to the sloop HMS Eglantine but there were no engagements with the enemy while he served in the First World War.  His superiors noted his interests in natural history and in drawing. In 1920 he had applied to join the Surveying Service. His request was granted and on 26 June 1921, Lieutenant Hughes was appointed to the lowest grade of assistant surveyor in that service.

In what appears to have been a family tradition, Hughes was admitted a Freeman of the City of London as a Member of the Worshipful Company of Grocers on 11 January 1922.

Naval records show, sometimes illegibly, his movements to various ships and places, for example a survey of the River Severn and time in Malta. The personal details range from the routine, through embarrassing and extremely embarrassing to extraordinarily embarrassing. By 1929 Hughes was a 1st class assistant surveyor and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on 10 January 1929, i.e. shortly before his arrival in Hong Kong.

HMS Herald

The survey ship stationed in Hong Kong and active throughout south-east Asia from 1929 was HMS Herald. Ten years after Hughes left, Herald was damaged in the Japanese assault on Singapore and scuttled off Seletar. The Japanese raised her and after repair became the Heiyo. However, under that name she hit a mine and was sunk in November 1944.

Ninety-five years after Hughes began painting and drawing Hong Kong birds, it is difficult to imagine how difficult those activities were. My guess is that he confined his activities to the winter months. In the heat and humidity of the summer—and without air conditioning—paint or ink can swiftly be diluted by sweat running down the arm, hands and fingers to form an unsightly blob. Take it from somebody who was there 35 years after Hughes.

At the end of his posting in Hong Kong, Lt Cdr Hughes returned to the Britain via the USA. He travelled across the Pacific on NYK Line’s Tatsuta Maru. He arrived in San Francisco on 8 April 1931.

Alfred Marcus Hughes married Hope Frances Pritchard on 6 April 1934 in London.

The only photograph of Hughes I have been able
to find is that of his wedding in 1934 where he was
in Full Dress uniform. It appeared in the local press

Hughes was given command of HMS Fitzroy, another minesweeper, like Herald converted to a survey ship, on 1 March 1934, according to his naval records. In the capacity of captain of the vessel it was also noted that he was in charge of the survey work. He was blamed for the loss of the port anchor (‘not running more cable’). He is shown as holding the appointment until April 1936. However, a secondary source available online suggests he took command in August 1933.

HMS Fitzroy

In April 1936, Hughes became Naval Assistant to Hydrographer of the Navy, Rear Admiral John Augustine Edgell, later Vice Admiral Sir John Edgell KBE, CB, FRS (1880-1962). The Far East though beckoned. Hughes applied for a post with the Commissioners of the Port of Rangoon having been informed by the navy that he was free to apply but if successful would have to retire on the date of his leaving UK. Thus on 6th November 1936 Commander and Mrs Hughes sailed from Liverpool on board the Bibby Line ship Cheshire for Rangoon while the London Gazette recorded that he he been placed on the Retired List ‘at his own request’. That, one may surmise, was the end of his life as a naval officer but as we shall see later that was not so.

In 1937 Hughes realised that in his new job he would need a civilian ticket of Master Mariner. This, the navy arranged and sent it out to him. It was in Rangoon that he illustrated his first book on birds. Bertram Bertram Evelyn Smythies, the (reluctant) author of Birds of Burma and professional forester (1912-1999) explained how the book came about in his preface to the second edition, published in 1953:

The first edition of this book (1,000 copies) was printed in Rangoon in 1940 by the American Baptist Mission Press and sold out by the end of 1941; it was intended to be a concise guide to the birds of Burma, primarily for the use of field naturalists, to encourage the study of natural history in general and of birds in particular…

The book was originally planned in 1937 by Mr. H. C. Smith, I.F.S., who was to arrange for the illustrations, and Mr. J. K. Stanford, I.C.S., who was to write the text. Not every artist can paint life-like studies of birds from stuffed skins (by which I mean, not those examples of the taxidermist's art that you see in the show-cases of museums, but the rough skins that our average Burmese skinner turns out); fortunately there happened to be one stationed in Rangoon at the time—Commander A. M. Hughes, R.N., who was working for the Port Commission and had already done some notable paintings of Asiatic birds in Hong Kong and elsewhere in previous years.

The list of birds to be illustrated, and the lay-out of each plate, was decided by Smith and Hughes jointly, and the next problem was to secure the models; for to paint a bird you must have either a live model, or a stuffed skin, or a previous painting. Bearing in mind the fact that there is no museum in Burma whence skins can be borrowed, the difficulty of assembling models for each of the 290 birds illustrated in this book can be appreciated; some birds were painted from live examples in the Rangoon Zoo, chiefly waders and game birds; a few were copied from paintings in other books; but the majority had to be collected in the fields and the forests and the marshes, by those responsible for the book, in their spare time.

Some birds down on the list eluded us altogether, and substitutes had to be found; thus the only reason why the comparatively rare rufous-bellied hawk-eagle appears on Plate XIX is that it is a substitute for the hobby, which we could not obtain. Others, when I look at their portraits now, bring back memories of long and anxious quests, extending over a year or maybe two; there was the great barbet, not a rare bird, but a shy one, which we chased unavailingly up and down the slopes of Nattaung for a week and more without success; the greater adjutant, which fell to No. 4's, and the choked barrel on the mudflats of the Sittang estuary after days of sweat and glare in the blistering October sun; the masked finfoot, a rarity that we hardly hoped to find except by despatching a special mission to its known haunts in the flooded jungles of the Myitmaka drainage, but which gaily swam into Smith's ken, much to his astonishment, in a totally unexpected place on a back-water of the Pegu river; and there was the sad story of the argus pheasant, pride of the Rangoon Zoo, which died mysteriously in its cage immediately after its portrait had been painted and was forthwith skinned and stuffed by the artist (roast argus, it was hinted, was delicious); and the three vultures, freshly skinned and exuding a foul and sickly odour, are to this day a vivid and unhappy memory for the artist's wife, who had to endure them in the house till their portraits had been finished.

When all other means failed an appeal was made to Dr. C. B. Ticehurst, who sent out from England the skins required to fill the remaining gaps; and even when the plates had been completed there was the difficulty of keeping them in good condition in a damp, tropical climate; only constant care and attention by the artist (and frequent use of his wife's hair-drier) prevented them from being ruined by the damp. The final crisis was the outbreak of war; some of the plates were still incomplete on that date, and were only just finished by the time that the artist had to leave for England. Thus ended the first chapter in the story of the plates.

Meanwhile Mr. J. K. Stanford had been at work on the text, but the outbreak of war made it impossible for him to continue, and I was asked to take it over. I feel sure that he would have produced a more interesting book, for he is not only one of the most competent field naturalists Burma has had, but also a gifted writer, as his various books and papers (ornithological and otherwise) bear witness. However, it was a question of writing the text rapidly or shelving the book indefinitely, and I therefore took up the task on New Year’s day 1940 and finished it on the 7th October of the same year, carrying on my normal duties as a forest officer at the same time.

The rare 1st edition

The book was on sale by New Year's Day 1941, and most of the copies were bought by Europeans living in Burma, and left behind by them when they evacuated before the Japanese invasion in 1942. It is interesting to record that the Japanese collected as many as they could and shipped them off to Tokyo, where they housed them in the library of the Royal Veterinary College, later destroyed in an air raid; this information was given to Lord Alanbrooke by a brother of the Emperor of Japan, and passed on to the Bombay Natural History Society, who informed me. Not many copies were sold outside Burma, and the book became scarce after the fall of Burma.

Meanwhile, what of the precious paintings and the valuable blocks used for printing the plates (each plate is printed from a set of four copper blocks)? On the 19th February (as it turned out, only two days before the authorities ordered the evacuation of Rangoon) I visited the Mission Press ; the whole place was deserted, except for the acting superintendent (Mr. Crain) ruefully contemplating the probable loss of much valuable printing machinery; together we searched the building and found twenty-one sets of blocks stacked together in a room, but the remaining eleven sets were not to be found, and what became of them is a mystery to this day. I took away the twenty-one sets and was fortunate in getting them out to India, thanks to Lieut.-Commander E. J. Dunkley of the Burma Navy, who shipped them aboard one of his vessels. The loss of eleven sets of blocks was serious, but not irreparable, for the blocks could always be re-made from the original paintings. Where were the paintings? They were in Mr. Smith's possession, and were eventually rolled up in a bundle and taken out to India by Mrs. Smith when she left Burma by air, as part of the 30 lbs. of kit allowed to evacuees. They came to rest in a Bombay safe deposit, and the twenty-one sets of blocks were stored in my father's house in Katmandu, the capital of Nepal; and there they stayed till the end of the war…

From Birds of Burma

Mrs Hughes not only had to cope with putrefying vultures in the house and the use of her hairdryer; their daughter was born in 1939, three months before the outbreak of war and while Hughes was trying to finish the paintings. With the threat of war, retired naval officers were being recalled to service.

Hughes’s naval record begins again on 27 August 1939. He was attached to HMS Gloucester II, the shore establishment in Colombo and headquarters of the East Indies Station of the Royal Navy. However he was still based at Rangoon, responsible for Naval Control of Shipping. In May 1940 Hughes retuned to UK on the P&O liner Strathallan which had been requisitioned as a troop transport by the government. Then after a course at HMS Vernon on mines he was with HMS Badger, the shore establishment at Parkestone Quay near Harwich for duty under the Captain (Minesweepers). Then he was given his second command, HMS Corfield, a converted collier, officially designated as a ‘mine destruction vessel’. Such vessels had a large electro-magnet in the bows to trigger magnetic mines. It would appear that Corfield operated in the North Sea along the coast of Britain.

BOAC Clipper Bangor at Poole, Dorset
from here

Hughes was promoted to Commander (retired) on 12 September 1940 but the records show he continued in the actual rank of Lt Cdr for most of his work. On 17 February 1941 he was appointed Naval Assistant to the Hydrographer of the Navy (still Read Admiral Edgell). He then worked in the Topographical Section. In June 1942 her flew on a civilian BOAC flight from Poole to Baltimore on the Boeing Clipper flying-boat Bangor. His visit must have been important since seats on such flights were not allocated lightly. Could it have been connected with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch) of November 1942? In the summer of that year the US general staff opposed the plan but the sharing of topographical information on the landing sites with the USA st the planning stage could have been an important reason for his presence.

It is, incidentally, from US Immigration that we have a description of Hughes: complexion, fair; eyes, blue; hair, brown; height 5’ 11”.

In March 1943 Hughes was with the Naval Intelligence Division as Head of Section. The Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) was based in Oxford (where his son was born in 1944). It was responsible for providing topographical intelligence for future operations.

In March 1944 Hughes was moved to India, to the ISTD station there. For administrative purposes he was on board HMS Hathi, a shore station a long way from the sea—in Delhi. In these jobs with ISTD he was in the acting rank of Commander, even though he was also Commander (retired). I suspect this was all to do with the arcane ways of the navy in matters of pay and job grading. His work was clearly important in the advances against the Japanese in 1944-45 after the tide had been turned in Burma since he was appointed OBE for ‘distinguished services in South East Asia’. In addition he was awarded the King Haakon VII Liberty Medal by the King of Norway for ‘services rendered to the Norwegian High Command during World War II. He was given ‘unrestricted permission’ to wear this foreign decoration.

Hughes was back on the retired list on 17 February 1946. But he returned to service again six years later. In September 1922 he was back as a  qualified hydrographer (‘H Charge’). His re-appointment appears to have been connected with the 19-day Exercise Mariner, the largest NATO exercise ever held, in the waters off Iceland from 16 September to 4 October 1953. The weather was atrocious. Commander Hughes reverted to the Retired List—again and finally—on 5 October 1953, the year Hong Kong Birds and the second edition of Birds of Burma were published.

In 1949 Smythies, the author of Birds of Burma, was posted to the forestry service in Sarawak. He was persuaded to produce another book, this time on the birds of Borneo. It is clear that the old team of Smythies and Hughes must have been a success because Hughes during the late 1950s produced 50 colour plates for the book, The Birds of Borneo, which was published in 1960. Smythies wrote:

I was fortunate in securing once again the services of Commander A.M. Hughes, O.B.E., R.N., as artist. He himself has written an account in the Sarawak Museum Journal No. 12 of some aspects of the task (which took four years), and of how he became very ill half-way through owing to an allergy to the D.D.T. used on the bird skins.

The book was widely acclaimed and thus Hughes illustrated three major works on birds that remained the go-to for in their areas for decades. Birds of Borneo went through a number of editions with different editors into the 1990s. Eventually, of course, as field guides they have all been superseded by more recent publications but not entirely replaced as richer and wider sources of information.

Perhaps as a result of Smythies’s being in Sarawak, in 1953 Hughes was appointed as a trustee administering the terms of the will of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak.

From The Birds of Borneo

I have found no other reference to paintings by Hughes after the publication of the Borneo book in 1960—not surprising given his reaction to handling the bird skins in the late 1950s. However, art and antique dealers sometimes offer prints of his silhouette sketches of naval life, which appear to date from 1927. Gieves, the naval outfitters, published the prints and the three, depicting the rituals of Grog, Defaulters and Sunday Rounds on board HM ships, were displayed in their premises on naval bases throughout the world and bought by a generation of naval officers. Another is First Command where the name an officer taking on that post could be added. The central colour cartoon is a depiction of a small, callow youth steering a vessel with an enormous, seasoned coxswain standing next to him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid like hitting on the the large warships shown in the background.

The only information I have on Commander Hughes after 1960 is that his son was killed in an accident in 1963, aged 19. The family were then living at Rook Cottage (a late 16th century house and now Grade II listed) in Chaldon, Surrey, a village on the North Downs. Hope Frances Hughes died in a Surrey hospital in 1984. Alfred Marcus Hughes died on 11 September 1991 in a nursing home at Leg o’Mutton Corner, Yelverton, Devon, a day short of his 90th birthday.

———————

I have copies of all Hughes’s plates for the Hong Kong Naturalist bar eight in the final two volumes  (9 and 10). I have bound copies of these volumes but the plates had been torn out. I will copy the others and put them on this site from time to time.

The first plate by Hughes published in the Hong Kong Naturalist. Volume 1, No 1, January 1930
Crested Mynah

Hong Kong Naturalist Volume, 1, No 2, May 1930
Oriental Magpie-Robin

UPDATED 6 June 2024