The family connexion between ‘the father of American mammalogy’ and Hong Kong Country Parks

I have known the name Merriam for 65 years since I kept a Merriam’s Kangaroo Rat (Dipodomys merriami), a wonderful animal, for several years. For anybody unfamiliar with kangaroo rats, they are essentially bipedal, parallel evolution versions of the jerboas. Until I was looking up pocket gophers a few weeks ago after out trip to Mexico I had not given Clinton Hart Merriam much attention. To my surprise I found there was a family connection to an important figure in the conservation of Hong Kong and world wildlife in the latter half of the 20th entry.

CLINTON HART MERRIAM (1855-1942) is remembered as important figure in American mammalogy. However, he had wide interests in just about anything alive before while working as a family doctor. By what was clearly a bit of political help from his cousin, a senator, and his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, he became the first chief of what became Division of Biological Survey of the US Department of Agriculture, a post he held for 25 years. In later life though he abandoned these pursuits for ethnology, having become fascinated by the indigenous inhabitants of California and the western parts of the USA.

These days Merriam is often referred to as an out of control ‘splitter’ and erector of new species. Thus he described 86 species of jus the one Brown Bear in North America. Clearly though Merriam was important in both the natural history of North America and in the conservation of wildlife.

Clinton Hart Merriam

It was Merriam's grandson, LEE MERRIAM TALBOT (1930-2021) who was to have such an important role in world wildlife conservation, becoming head of IUCN from 1980 to 1983 and leading key pieces of U.S. and international legislation. Talbot was the action man of conservation in the early 1960s while working for IUCN, researching the status of endangered animals and habitats in many parts of reports while producing reports for governments and conservation bodies. In that work he worked closely with his wife, Marty (born 1932). South-east Asia was a particular focus in the early 1960s and his report for the Agriculture and Fisheries Department of the Hong Kong Government was produced as the result of, what I read, was a three-week trip in 1965.

Reports indicate that the work for the report was not without incident:

“While conducting an aerial survey for the government of British Hong Kong in the early 1960s, his plane experienced mechanical problems, and crash landed in a harbor, hitting rocks and pinwheeling through the cold, frothing water,” explained his son Russell. “He swam to safety, later describing in vivid detail the difficulty of determining which direction was up, while escaping the still-tumbling wreckage.”

Lee Merriam Talbot
from HERE

Lee Talbot was also a racing driver. He began at the age of 18 and had his last race at the age of 87. It seems 1965 was an unfortunate year. An account of motor racing accidents shows that in 4 July 1965 while he was based in Hong Kong he walked away from an accident that may well have killed him. In a Formule Libre race in Malaysia his Lotus Super-7 ran off the road and overturned into a drain, pinning Talbot under the car. His high quality helmet kept the weight of the car off his head. Another driver was killed in the same race

The Talbots’ work in south-east Asia all came together at a conference in Bangkok on 29 November-4 December 1965 organised by IUCN. The Talbots edited the proceedings which appeared in 1968. By the time the conference was held he had been recruited as ‘Smithsonian Field Representative for International Affairs in Ecology and Conservation’ in Washington DC.

Nothing happened to implement the Talbots’ report until the 1970s. The Hong Kong government was soon dealing with the communist-inspired riots of 1967 and their aftermath. The administrators of the time were not known for alacrity in their attitude to change and it was not until Murray MacLehose was appointed governor in1971 that much was done. Then work started on the Country Parks for recreation and conservation envisaged in 1965. The Country Parks Ordinance came into effect in 1976 with the first parks officially designated in 1977. At present there are 24 covering an area of 440 square kilometres.

Reading between the lines I suspect the Talbot report was the necessary icing on the cake of a movement within Hong Kong to create areas suitable for recreation and conservation. The pressure to obtain an external expert report seems likely to have come from individuals within the Hong Kong government itself, from the several amateur societies concerned with wildlife and the countryside (of which government officials were also members) and members of the university (there was only one then) staff from the botany, geography and zoology departments. Plans for some protected areas/parks had already been drawn up by the time the Talbots arrived for their short visit.

In 2013 Lee Talbot himself explained (HERE) the intergenerational interest in wildlife and conservation:

I grew up in a conservation family with endangered species conservation as part of my heritage. My maternal grandfather was Dr. C. Hart Merriam, founder and first head of the Biological Survey which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A pioneer ecologist, he may be best known for the life zone theory of distribution of plants and animals which was a foundation of ecology for perhaps a half century. My mother was an ethnologist and naturalist, very concerned with conservation. And my father, M.W. Talbot, was a pioneer range and wildlife ecologist who, after years of field work in the southwest, was director of the California Forest and Range Experiment Station, the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service, and a professor at University of California, Berkeley. A lifelong conservationist, in 1924 he worked with his Forest Service friend, Aldo Leopold, initiating the Gila, the nation’s first wilderness area; helped with the early days of the Wilderness Society; was a founder of the Society for Range Management; and constantly worked for conservation and science-based sustainable management of the nation’s forests and rangelands.

     Hiking, camping and pack trips in the wilderness with the wonderful conservation and ecological insights and guidance of my parents was an integral part of my early years….

The Country Parks of Hong Kong in 2025
from HERE

Who connects a tropical lizard to a Hong Kong landmark, the U.S. president’s office…and a misspelt name?

For the answer let’s start in Washington D.C. where the president sits at a desk given to him by Queen Victoria. Her Majesty’s Ship Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic by the Royal Navy while searching for the lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin in 1854. The ship broke free from the ice the next summer and was found by an American whaler. It was repaired and returned to Britain by the U.S. government as a gesture of goodwill at a time when the president had been threatening British interests and wanting to annex Canada. In 1879 Resolute was decommissioned and three desks were made from its oak timbers. One of those desks was sent to Washington and was received at the White House on 23 November 1880.

The naval officer in charge of the five-ship squadron sent to search for Franklin was Edward Belcher.

Edward Belcher

It was Belcher, commanding HMS Sulphur, who was given the job of surveying Hong Kong harbour in 1841. He was present, having landed a day earlier, at the ceremony to take over Hong Kong on 26 January. Belcher’s Battery overlooking Hong Kong harbour was named after him when it was constructed in the 1880s. The battery was replaced by housing for government employees in the 1950s. That complex, Belcher’s Gardens*, in turn was replaced by six tower blocks with the name still retained—but oddly phrased—as The Belcher’s.

Hemidactylus brookii, a gecko, was thus named by John Edward Gray (1800-1875) of the British Museum in his catalogue of lizards of 1854. Two specimens from Borneo were given to the museum by Edward Belcher, presumably on his return to London on 31 December 1847. They were collected in 1843 when Belcher was in command of another survey ship HMS Samarang working on the north coast of Borneo. I will return to the gecko later. But first the man linking all these events and many more besides.

I have written previously on Belcher HERE. Edward Belcher was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1793. He joined the Royal Navy, at the usual age for an officer of 13, as a midshipman. His reputation can only be described as dichotomous. He was widely praised as a hydrographic surveyor, geographer and promoter of the natural sciences, his activities continuing after his retirement from the active navy list. By contrast, he was thoroughly loathed by almost all those he came into contact with whether his peers, his seniors or his juniors on board his ships.

Back with the gecko, here is Gray’s description of the beast.

In Borneo—and Sarawak in particular—Belcher was in close contact with and supporting the famous White Rajah, Sir James Brooke (1803-1868), in his efforts to clear pirates from the seas. Subsequent publications treat the gecko as having been named in honour of James Brooke. However it would appear that Gray did not know that Brooke had an ‘e’ on the end because he published the common  name as ‘Brook’s Hemidactylus’ and the specific name as ‘brookii’. In his 1854 catalogue he lists people who had donated specimens to the Museum. He shows Belcher in the list as well as ‘J. Brooks, Esq’. However, searching the volume there is no further mention of Brooks or Brooke. But we have ‘Brook’s’ and ‘brookii’ in the description of the gecko. Perhaps Belcher had intimated to Gray or his boss a patronym for Brooke woukld go down well but that Gray did not know of Brooke and how to spell his name.

Albert Günther in reviewing the reptiles and amphibians of Borneo in 1872 clearly realised the central role of James Brooke:

The first extensive collections received in Europe were from two localities :—1…. …2. From the principality of Sarawak, where Sir J. Brooke, Sir E. Belcher, and Mr. Low paid for a considerable period much attention to the fauna. The collections made by them were presented to the British Museum, and described partly by Dr. Gray, and partly more recently by the author in the Catalogues of the British Museum and in the ‘ Reptiles of British India.’…

Sir James Brooke
late 1850s. By Herbert Watkins
Natonal Portrait Gallery

Because of the evidence that the patronym was coined for James Brooke, some authors now use ‘Brooke’s Gecko’ for the common name.

But what of the gecko itself. When I was a lad Hemidactylus brookii was seen as a very widely distributed species of the tropics that, along with other species of gecko, had been transported by ship to other countries, like South America and parts of south-east Asia to which it was not native. Africa was regarded as its stronghold. In more recent decades H. brookii has been looked at more closely. Is it just one species or a number of different species that had either not been recognised or lumped into H. brookii by the early generations of taxonomists. And what a can of worms H. brookii has proved to be.

One of the problems stems from the way in which taxonomists worked. Taxonomist A would receive a specimen and decide if it was like anything else he had seen or been recorded. If not he would give it a new scientific name. Taxonomist B probably working in a different country would receive a similar specimen and, unaware of the work of A or disagreeing with him, would give it a different scientific name. Those coming later would gain access to both specimens or descriptions and declare them to be of the same species, or not. If the same they were synonymous and lumped into a single species, the name having priority being the earliest to have reached publication. The problem is that taxonomists usually gave no reason, either quantitative or qualitative, why they had reached their conclusion. Such decisions taken in the past, decided solely on morphological features of pickled specimens, have to be question in the light of the application of quantitative methods and/or non-morphological evidence like DNA. Depending on the ‘species concept’ being used by particular modern taxonomists, decisions are made on whether or not those old taxonomists were right or wrong, or perhaps I should say more likely to be right or more likely to be wrong since there is still disagreement as to what constitutes a species. Some of the concepts used seem nonsensical to outsiders like me and remind me of the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp when he had dropped them further down the road in the dark on the grounds that it was easier to search where he could see. The complexity of what has been going on with regard to Brooke’s Gecko can be seen in the taxonomy section of the entry for the species in the IUCN’s Red List HERE together with the relevant references.

The present state appears to be that H. brookii has been split asunder. The African forms previously included in H. brookii have been assigned to a different but previously synonymised species (H. angulatus described by Edward Hallowell in 1854) leaving Asia as the natural range. Further studies on Asian specimens in museums indicate that other forms regarded as synonyms in the past should be reinstated while others should be brought back in.

Distribution of H. brookii from the IUCN Red List

Distribution of H. angulatus from the IUCN Red Data List

In a final twist to the story of Belcher, Brooke’s Gecko is now known to occur in Hong Kong. First reported in 1978, one location, St Louis School, is a few hundred metres from The Belcher’s; a large warehouse for imported goods once stood on the opposite side of the road.

Brooke's Gecko
from Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles - see below

James Brooke is buried in the churchyard of St Leonard's, Sheepstor, on the edge of Dartmoor: I tooke these photographs in September 2012:

Memorial Plaque to the Brooke Rajahs of Sarawak

*Belcher’s Battery and then Belcher’s Gardens were overlooked by the main teaching laboratory cum museum of the zoology department of the University of Hong Kong when it was in the now-demolished Northcote Science Building.

Gray JE. 1845. Catalogue of the specimens of lizards in the collection of the British Museum. London: Trustees of the British Museum/Edward Newman.

Karsen SJ, Lau M W-N, Bogadek A. 1998. Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles. Second Edition. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council. ISBN 962-7849-05-7

A Pocket Gopher in the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacán in Mexico. But which pocket gopher?

Seeing a rodent in the wild is always a good day—even if the taxonomy is complicated and I am confused.

A  pocket gopher was an animal we were looking out for when we were at the pre-Aztec archaeological site Teotihuacán near Mexico City last month. Lots of signs of their excavations near the entrance at the southern end of the site and eventually one was seen emerging from its burrow every couple of minutes to push earth out of the burrow and on to the soil heap. Pocket gophers can use their upper front incisors for digging because the mouth can be closed behind the teeth.

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán

Pocket Gophers are thus called because they have fur-lined cheek pouches that are used to stash food on their forays above ground. They belong to the all-American (in the proper, wide, sense of the word American) rodent family, Geomyidae.

The excavations of the pocket gophers can be seen in this area near the southern gate

The large teeth can be seen in this frame from my video

The taxonomy of pocket gophers is complicated. The current position, shown in the IUCN Red List, is that Teotihuacán is shown as being in the range of the Smoky Pocket Gopher (Cratogeomys fumosus) but not of Merriam’s Pocket Gopher (Cratogeomys merriami) even though specimens collected there in the past have been identified as belonging to one or the other of the two species. Thus modern photographs of the pocket gophers at Teotihuacán are captioned as Cratogeomys fumosus.

To complicate matters further Merriam’s Pocket Gopher was named for Clinton Hart Merriam (1855-1942) by Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum in London in 1893 while the Smoky Pocket Gopher was named by Merriam himself in 1892.

A paper published in 2005 which showed the results of morphometric, chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA analysis, indicates that specimens, apparently accepted as C. merriami have been collected only about 15 miles to the south of Teotihuacán. Is there then still doubt as to the identity of the pocket gopher to be seen at that ancient site? A specimen held in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in the University of California was used in the morphological analysis of specimens C. merriami but not referred to specifically. Did it fit perfectly the criteria in the key to identification shown in the paper? Similarly, where does a specimen in the collection of the University of Kansas collected at Teotihuacán, labelled as C. fumosus and was used in the analysis in a 2004 paper fit in?

In my confusion I should end with the question: does anybody have definitive information on the identity of of the pocket gopher at Teotihuacán? Were we looking at the species named by Merriam or the one named for Merriam?

…I am not though confused as to the route taken from London to Mexico City. We flew over the Gulf of Mexico.

Hafner MS, Spradling TA, Light, JE, Hafner DJ, Demboski JR. 2004. Systematic revision of pocket gophers of the Cratageomys gymnurus species group. Journal of Mammalogy 85, 1170-1183.

Hafner MS, Light, JE, Hafner DJ, Brant SV, Spradling TA, Demastes JW. 2005. Cryptic species in the Mexican pocket gopher Cratageomys merriami. Journal of Mammalogy 86, 1095-1108.

Merriam, CH. 1892. Descriptions of nine new mammals collected by E. W. Nelson in the states of Colima and Jalisco, Mexico. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 7,164-174.

Thomas O. 1893. On some of the larger species of Geomys. Annals and Magazine of Natural History. 6th Series. 12, 269-273.

‘The Aurochs Lives Again’. A heck of a load of old bullocks

Animal Life, May 1963

Last year I wrote an article about the short-lived British magazine Animal Life from the early 1960s (see here). I found a letter in the July 1963 issue I had written to the editor in response to an article in the May 1963 issue entitled ‘Extinct Animals Live Again’. That article dealt with the cross-breeding done by the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck to recreate the Aurochs and the Tarpan from domestic breeds of cattle and horses respectively The article treated the whole thing as a great success for the Hecks and for zoos in general. But anybody with an iota of knowledge of genetics would have known that the Hecks were naive in their basic premise. Reversing the effects of domestication was never going to occur by selecting for superficial resemblance to the wild type. They simple created other domestic breeds.

Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1900-1981) a journalist and amateur naturalist who looked after letters and queries from readers (and may have been the editor) added a note to say that the topic was a’ stormy’ and that many ‘zoologists’ were convinced by the Hecks’ experiments. Well, there were many ‘zoologists’ often self-styled, around in the 1950s and 60s, who had opinions but little real knowledge or scientific background. In Britain the claims of bringing back the ancestral forms became well known in the 1950s, probably, I suggest as the result of Heinz Heck writing an article for Oryx, the journal of the Fauna Preservation Society, in 1951.

When I located the original article in Animal Life I found that its author was Philip Street.

Fast forward over 60 years and the cattle the Hecks bred are now listed simply as another breed of domestic ox: Heck Cattle. No surprise there.

Over those same sixty-odd years, the truth about Lutz Heck (1892-1983), who was trying to breed aurochs in order to re-wild parts of Europe captured by his fellow Nazi-party members (see my article here and an article in the Smithsonian Magazine here) has emerged, even though the records of the Berlin Zoo, which he ran, are still closed to enquiry. Hermann Göring was his patron with a shared interest in recreating the fatherland’s historical landscapes and in hunting the animals they housed. Heinz Heck (1894-1982) the younger brother, by contrast, was held at Dachau for a time as a suspected member of the communist party and fir having been married briefly to a Jew. Both were responsible for the breeding experiments and it was Heinz who wrote about them after the war.

But there are still people out there who believe that it is possible to recreated these extinct forms by cross-breeding modern breeds. Those same people though must contend that nothing happened in terms of gene mutations and intensive artificial selection during domestication. No… I don’t buy that one either.

Heck Cattle at a wildlife park in Germany in 2011
From Wikipedia. Photo by 4028mdk09

Jean Rostand. Frogs, glycerol, cryoprotection and how he might have scooped Parkes, Smith and Polge

Jean Rostand

In a previous article I described some of the work on frogs and toads done by the French biologist, Jean Rostand (1894-1977), who in later years has been described as ‘brilliant’ and ‘eccentric’. Rostand had another claim to fame that caused a flurry of excitement and embarrassment at the National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) in London. In 1952 Rostand wrote, asking for offprints of papers written by members of the Institute concerning the use of glycerol as the first agent that protected spermatozoa and other cells from the effects of freezing to and thawing from very low temperatures. What happened is described by Sir Alan Parkes FRS (1900-1990) in his autobiography Off-beat Biologist:

     Early in May 1952 a most interesting and friendly new connection opened up - Audrey [Smith] had a request for offprints from Jean Rostand, the distinguished French biologist, who at the same time sent us a copy of a paper published by him as early as 1946 in the Comptes-Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences entitled 'Glycérine et résistance du sperme aux basses températures'. His paper was entirely unknown to us and the mere title put us in a twitter. Had we perpetrated some fearful scientific blunder? However, on reading the paper it seemed that, although we ought to have known of it, the work was in no way similar to ours. Rostand had used glycerol to keep suspensions of frog sperm from solidifying at temperatures slightly below freezing. Under such conditions the spermatozoa regained mobility, but had lost fertilising power. In acknowledging Audrey's reprints Rostand said that he would try removing the glycerol slowly by dialysis, but we never heard whether fertilising power was thus restored.

     Early in July 1955 Ruth Deanesly [Lady Parkes] and I were at a conference in Paris and took the opportunity of calling on Rostand. He received us most kindly at his combined home and laboratory and proved to be a delightful person. On leaving Paris on the Sunday morning we bought a newspaper which, to our surprise and pleasure, carried a detailed article about him, illustrated with sketches, from which we learnt that Jean was the son of Edmond Rostand, the playwright who had immortalised Cyrano de Bergerac, that on Wednesday of the previous week (the very day we had called on him) he had been awarded a prize of three million francs by the Singer-Polignac Foundation and that at one stage of his researches he had fallen foul of the gendarmes when he set free 70,000 toads in the woods of Saint-Cloud.

Thus Rostand is recorded as a pioneer in cryobiology. The work at NIMR became famous because, when applied to agriculture, it revolutionised artificial insemination and enabled the rapid genetic improvement of livestock. It was no accident that two of the triumvirate involved started off with degrees in agriculture, Parkes himself and Chris Polge, later FRS, (1926-2006). The other member was Audrey Ursula Smith (1915-1981) who was medically qualified with a degree in physiology.

Audrey Smith, Alan Parkes and Chris Polge
see below for sources

Accounts of how glycerol was found to be affective differ slightly. The Parkes team was following up work which suggested that some sugars might be protective against freezing and thawing. Fructose or laevulose, to use the terminology in use at the time, had been used to some effect in the early 1940s and this work was being checked. However, nothing of any great significance was found and the sugar solutions were put in the cold store for some months.

Parkes in 1956 wrote of what happened next:

Some months later work was resumed with the same material and negative results were again obtained with all of the solutions except one which almost completely preserved motility in fowl spermatozoa frozen to -79°C [the temperature of ‘dry ice’ solid carbon dioxide]. Further experiments confirmed this result and at this point, with some trepidation, the small amount (10 or 15 ml) of the miraculous solution remaining was handed over to our colleague Dr D. Elliott for chemical analysis. He reported that the solution contained glycerol, water, and a fair amount of protein! It was then realized that Meyer's albumen[*] - the glycerol and albumen of the histologist - had been used in the course of morphological work on the spermatozoa at the same time as the laevulose solutions were being tested, and with them had been put away in the cold-store. Tests with new material very soon showed that the albumen played no part in the protective effect.

Although we never discovered exactly what had happened it is very likely that during the long spell in the cold-store the labels had fallen off some of the bottles, a habit they have in cold-store, and had been replaced by some zealot on the wrong bottles, though there was no evidence that any of our own technicians had been involved. Be that as it may, there can have been few experiments in which blind chance stepped in more effectively.

Other accounts indicate that it was Audrey Smith who deduced that glycerol was a constituent of the ‘wrong bottle’ as the result of her accidentally dropping the bottle in the lab sink. A droplet of the contents flew out of the sink and landed on a hotplate which was indeed hot. She immediately recognised the smell from the puff of smoke as acrolein, the thermal degradation product of glycerol.

Labels falling off bottles was commonplace in laboratories of the time. Labelling glass was difficult. The usual method was a water-soluble gummed paper label for reagents. Sellotape, the UK equivalent of Scotch Tape may also have been used but at the time but was expensive and not widely available. It too suffered on bottles and the labels also often fell off especially in the cold. A mystery remains in who put the labels back the wrong—but fortuitously right—way round.

It would appear that in using glycerol to suspend frog spermatozoa, as Parkes indicated, Rostand also accidentally discovered its cryoprotective effects but only took his experiments to slightly below freezing point.

*The recipe I have is 50 ml white of egg, 50 ml glycerol, 1 g of sodium salicylate

Hunter RHF. 2008. Ernest John Christopher Polge. 16 August 1926 – 17 August 2006. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 54, 275–296. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2008.0006

Parkes AS. 1985. Off-beat Biologist. Cambridge: Galton Foundation.

Polge C, Smith AU, Parkes AS. 1949. Revival of spermatozoa after vitrification and dehydration at low temperatures. Nature 164, 666.

Rostand J. 1946. Glycérine et résistance du sperme aux basses températures. Comptes-Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences 222, 1524-1525.

AS Parkes photograph: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Portrait of Alan Sterling Parkes outside the Family Planning Offices, June 1957.  POlge photograph: Royal Society - from Hunter 2008.

Elliot’s Pheasant: a colour plate from 1962

In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 21st in the series. 

 – – – – – – – – – –

The artist was John Cyril Harrison (1898-1985). For most of his life he lived in Norfolk. He trained at the Slade after the First World War and became well known for his wildlife paintings, especially birds. He was a regular visitor to Scotland, parts of Africa and Iceland. He was prolific and his work often appears in auctions.

The article accompanying this plate was written by Philip Wayre (1921-2014) who in 1959 had founded the Ornamental Pheasant Trust. He also had a small zoo at Great Witchingham, the Norfolk Wildlife Park.

Elliot's pheasant (Syrmaticus ellioti) was decreasing in numbers at the time Philip Wayre wrote his account. It is now classified as Near Threatened by IUCN because of forest habitat loss across its range in south-east China. It is relatively easy to breed in captivity.

Avicultural Magazine 68, 1962

 

THE LAST TIGERS OF HONG KONG by John Saeki

I am late to the party with this book which was published in Hong Kong in 2022. I was thanked by the author for providing our recollections of what we had been told about the 1965 sightings and evidence for what was possibly or even probably the last wild tiger to be seen in Hong Kong a few months before our arrival in 1965.

John Saeki did a great job in pulling together accounts of sightings and hunting of tigers in Hong Kong during the 20th century. He did so against a background of an incredible degree of incredulity on the part of journalists for the local newspapers who never seemed to be able to get it into their heads that Hong Kong was well within the natural range of the Tiger or that villagers or expats were not all stupid in mistaking tigers for domestic tabbies. Saeki also drew on evidence from regions and provinces in south China which indicated just how common and dangerous to the human population tigers had been and how steps had been made throughout China to wipe them out, an occupation that reached its peak in the 1950s with skins sold for foreign currency and body parts for the Chinese medicine trade.

Tigers in Hong Kong killed people: two villagers in 1937 and the policemen Ernest Goucher and Rutton Singh, who had a tiger cornered, in 1915 together with two more villagers.

Reports of Hong Kong Tigers were characterised by each incident, proven or otherwise, being of a relatively short duration.from days to a couple of months. Hong Kong did not have many wild ungulates and the reports often came to light as a results of attacks on domestic cattle, water buffalo and pigs. Tigers wandering across the border from mainland China would have to work very hard to find food.

It is possible that not all reports of tigers were tigers. Large animals in which the stripes were not seen could have been leopards, particularly melanistic ones, which did visit or live in Hong Kong in the past (see HERE). 

Not only have tigers now gone from South China, were they there their chances of even reaching the Hong Kong border have now also gone. In the mid-1960s tourists and newcomers were taken to the village of Lok Ma Chau to look across the closed border area and the Shum Chun, Sham Chung or Shenzhen River into China. There were fields, more fields, a small town and hills in the distance. Across that whole area is now the city of Shenzhen with more than 17.3 million people.

Coincidentally, there was a report from Lok Ma Chau of a tiger being seen at Lok Ma Chau in September 1976. The report said it was about three feet high, four feet long and dark; it had been seen ‘twice in ten days, roaming about after dark’. The old questions loom: was that a Tiger, a Leopard, a much smaller Leopard Cat or large domestic cat looking bigger in the dark? 

1966. The view from Lok Ma Chau into China. The river is the border 

2023. The view from the mouth of the river across the border with the city of Shenzhen behind

Saeki J. 2022. The Last Tigers of Hong Kong.Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books. Available on Amazon

Greater Painted-Snipe. Hong Kong January 2025

AJP spotted these Greater Painted-Snipe (Rostratula benghalensis) in Hong Kong last week. They were lurking at the edge of a reed bed. That’s a male in front—see the golden eyestripe—with a much more brightly coloured female almost hidden behind—see the white eyestripe. The species, found across South-East Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Africa, is polyandrous with the male incubating the eggs and rearing the young.

Honduras: Proboscis Bats hiding in plain sight

 

This sign board amongst the mangroves lining the Rio Cuero of the Cuero y Salada Wildlife Refuge in Honduras appears to have nothing goimg for it in the wildlife line. However, roosting in plain sight is a colony of Proboscis Bats (Rhynchonycteris naso). This bat goes by a variety of common names in the countries of Central and South America where it lives, often in wetlands: Brazilian Long-nosed Bat, Sharp-nosed Bat, River Bat and Long-nosed Proboscis Bat, the latter surely tautological. From the angle we viewed them it is not possible to see, because of foreshortening, the long nose.

This species is known to roost with the whole colony of 5-10 individuals lined up along branches, for example. It is small bat, around 6 cm long, nocturnal and insectivorous.

The Multi-Toed Frogs of Jean Rostand. An old problem solved by a fluke, literally by a fluke

I was looking at old copies of Animal Life magazine, published in Britain in the early 1960s when I came across an article I remembered reading 62 years ago. It was by the French author and self-funded biologist Jean Rostand  (1894-1977).

Animal Life No 2. October 1962 pp 34-38

 

Jean Rostand was wealthy enough to give up an ‘official’ career in science in order to continue research in his laboratory at home. Well known as a writer about science, the history of science and the human condition in the light of scientific discovery, much of his own research was on the development of amphibians from the egg. Some of his findings were overlooked, ignored or forgotten, only to be rediscovered decades later. He did achieve recognition in France, however, both scientific and literary.

In this article I will only consider one aspect of Rostand’s research: polydactyly in frogs and toads. He had found polydactyly of the hind limb (six toes in this case) in the Common Toad (Bufo bufo) and established it to be genetically determined. But then, in his own words:

...in a pond near Concarneau in Brittany I was surprised to find frogs with six, seven, eight and even nine toes. There was in fact a massive variation, affecting from ten to fifteen per cent of the population of the pond. Unlike the polydactyly of the toad, the polydactyly of the frog is not transmissible to its descendants: it is not, at any rate, transmitted in accordance with the accepted rules. It is simply the benign symptom of a much more serious anomaly which strikes the tadpole larvae and causes therein a considerable modification of the bone structure, the growth of supernumerary feet and the formation of various types of excrescence. All the tadpoles that are severely attacked perish before changing into frogs: the polydactylic adults are therefore survivors. What is the cause of this singular anomaly, which, in some respects, recalls certain malignant proliferations? Must one blame a physico-chemical factor, such as chemical substances or radiations, which are present in the surroundings? Or is it due to an infectious agent, a virus? The first hypothesis seems rather unlikely, because we know of no inorganic factor capable of producing such effects. If the second hypothesis can be proved—which is what I am trying to do at the moment—it is possible that the study of these abnormal larvae will throw some light on the formation mechanism of certain tumours. In any case the exhaustive study of anomalies, whether hereditary or acquired, among toads and frogs could, in one way or another, assist the study of human anomalies.

Rostand had in fact redescribed the syndrome. It had been first observed and reported in France in 1937.

Some observations were compatible with the variable presence of some agent. In some years ponds which had shown the anomaly in tadpoles were completely free of the condition but the cause remained unknown.

In 2017 Alain Dubois reviewed what was known and what was not known about Anomaly P. It has been found in a number of countries in Palaearctic water or green frogs, now separated off in their own genus, Pelophylax but not in frogs of the genus Rana. It may affect all species of Pelophylax including the kleptons between some of those species. The Edible Frog, Rana esculenta, now Pelophylax kl. esculentus, was the form studied by Rostand. Dubois wrote:

Much still remains to be known about the anomaly P: its cause, its geographic distribution, exactly which taxa are affected and why, what is the impact of this syndrome on frog populations, etc. Although this problem attracted the attention, especially of an amateur naturalist, Jean Rostand, mostly in the years 1950-1970, no studies are apparently under way nowadays, in any laboratory or European country, to elucidate these questions. This is surprising and even shocking, especially in view of the strong interest raised in recent years by amphibian anomalies in conservation biology.… Given the fact that this syndrome involves facts of cellular abnormal multiplication and tissue differentiation and growth, its understanding might throw interesting or important lights on some developmental biology problems. More attention should certainly be paid to this unsolved problem by the international scientific community.

But then things did start to happen. A group of Russian workers, later joined by the French, including Alain Dubois, found that Anomaly P is caused by the trematode Strigea robusta, i.e. a fluke. That work was mirrored by studies in North America which showed the devastating effects of trematode infection on some amphibian populations. 

The life cycle of S. robusta involves three hosts: planorbid (ramshorn) snails as the first intermediate, then the larvae of amphibians as the second intermediate, with anatid birds (ducks, geese and swans) as the definitive host. An important clue was the occurrence of Anomaly P in water frog tadpoles when raised in tanks containing a species of planorbid snail.

Current evidence is that some amphibians are affected by S. robusta while others are not. In Russia the limbs of other amphibians that live alongside P. ribibundus, the Marsh Frog, and are infected show no abnormalities. Those unaffected are the Smooth Newt (Lissotriton vulgaris)(but see below), Great Crested Newt (Triturus cristatus), Pallas’s Spadefooi Toad (Pelobates vespertinus), Red-bellied Toad (Bombina bombina) and Moor Frog (Rana arvalis). However, there is evidence that when S. robusta appeared in a pond in Germany, the population of Smooth Newts (of which 73% were infected) declined. By contrast, there was no effect on the population of Great Crested Newts, none of which became infected. More recent work indicates that Anomaly P can be induced in toads (Common Toad, Bufo bufo; Green Toad, Bufotes viridis; Batura Toad, Bufotes baturae) by the presence of S. robusta.

Rostand’s experiments in the late 1940s and 50s indicated the existence of a sensitive period for during the early stages of a tadpole’s development for an infectious agent to act. This was confirmed with the experiments in which tadpoles were exposed to S. robusta. Once the toes had formed, the tadpole was safe. There was also evidence that the severe forms of Anomaly P depend on the stage of exposure, the parasite load, the location of the parasites and the degree of immunological protection.

Given the complex nature of the lifecycle of the parasite, variations in the populations of planorbid snails and ducks in a particular pond at a particular time it is perhaps not surprising that the occurrence of Anomaly P at a particular locale varies greatly in intensity.

The mechanism by which the trematode exerts its effect on the tadpole is beyond the scope of this article. However, research on trematode infection on development of the limb in North American amphibians suggested the production by the cercariae stage of the trematode of an excess of a Vitamin A metabolite which affects gene expression adversely.

There are, of course, unanswered questions, many on the ecological consequences of infection with the parasite.  It also seems odd the parasite seems to be acting in a very unparasitical way—the selection pressure on parasites lies strongly against killing their hosts.

Rostand—the great ‘amateur’ developmental biologist—was right to conclude that the cause of Anomaly P is an infectious agent. However, it was not a virus but something much bigger, the fluke Strigea robusta.

From Svinin et al. 2020

From Svinin et al 2023

Jean Rostand
Animal Life No 2. October 1962

Dubois A. 2017. Rostand’s anomaly P in Palaearctic green frogs (Pelophylax) and similar anomalies in amphibians. Mertensiella 25, 49-56

Svinin A, Bashinskiy I, Ermakov O, Litvinchuk S. 2023. Effects of minimum Strigea robusta (Digenea: Strigeidae) cercariae doses and localization of cystson the anomaly P manifestation in Pelophylax lessonae (Anura: Ranidae) tadpoles. Parasitology Research 122, 889-894. doi: 10.1007/s00436-022-07778-z

Svinin AO, Bashinskiy IV, Litvinchuk SN, Ermakov OA, Ivanov AY, Neymark LA, Vedernikov AA, Osipov VV, Drobot GP, Dubois A. 2020. Strigea robusta causes polydactylyand severe forms of Rostand’s anomaly P in water frogs. Parasites & Vectors 13, 381 doi.org/10.1186s13071-020-04256-2

Svinin AO, Chikhlyaev IV, Bashinskiy IW, Osipov VV, Neymark LA, Ivanov AY, Stoyko TG,  Chernigova PI, Ibrogimova PK, Litvinchuk SN, Ermakov OA. 2023. Diversity of trematodes from the amphibian anomaly P hotspot: Role of planorbid snails. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0281740. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281740

Svinin A, Ermakov O, Litvinchuk S. 2022. The incidence of the anomaly P syndrome in water frogs (Anura, Ranidae, Pelophylax) from the Middle Volga River (Russia). Herpetozoa 35, 283–288 doi: 10.3897/herpetozoa.35.e95928

Svinin AO, Matushkina KA, Dedukh DV, Bashinskiy IV, Ermakov, OA, Litvinchuk SN. 2022. Strigea robusta (Digenea: Strigeidae) infection effects on the gonadal structure and limb malformation in toad early development. Journal of Experimental Zoology A 337, 675-686 doi.org/10.1002/jez.2599

Montezuma Oropendola. Honduras, November 2024

Gangs of Montezuma Oropendolas are common in the grounds of the Lodge at Pico Bonito on the Caribbean side of Honduras. The colonial, woven hanging nests we saw at Lancetilla Botanical Gardens were unoccipied because were were not there in the breeding season. Then the males defend large harems of much smaller females and produce a complex warbling song, seemingly quite out of keeping with the size of the bird.

Relationships between the various species of oropendola appear to be contentious, probably unsurprising given the use of only mitochondrial DNA to form the basis of the statistical analysis. Psarocolius montezuma seems in common use along with Gymnostinops montezuma. It is found from Mexico to Panama.