Far Eastern Curlew: Endangered species on passage in Hong Kong

Two days ago AJP spotted this Far Eastern Curlew (Numenius madagascariensis) on the tidal flats of Shiu Hau, a village on the south coast of Lantau island. This species of curlew is now classified as Endangered having suffered a large fall in population which IUCN attributes mainly to the loss of mud flats by land reclamation around the Yellow Sea in China and Korea. This is a juvenile which would have been on passage from the breeding area of northeast Asia,  Siberia to Kamchatka and Mongolia, to where it will spend the northern winter in Australia, southern Indonesia or even New Zealand. Juvenile curlews have short but still growing bills. The bill of the adult is the longest of any curlew.

The specific name, madagascariensis, is the result of a 1760s cock-up. It was first used by Mathurin Jacques Brisson (1723– 1806) for this species. His latin names did not correspond to the binomial system of Linnaeus but the latter adopted and adapted many of them. Unfortunately, in naming the bird Brisson thought the site of collection of his specimen to be Madagascar. It was in fact Makassar, now in Indonesia.

Torrent Ducks: Rio Otún, Colombia, November 2025

Torrent Ducks. Male on the left; female on the right

An iron bridge to a property crosses the Rio Otún at a right angle to the road, Via la Suiza, leading into the Otún Quimbaya reserve. All birdwatching group stop there to see what they can see in the river. The river flows westward from the peaks of the Cordillera Central into the valley of the Rio Cauca. The Cauca flows northwards between the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Central to join the Magdalena and then into the Caribbean.

The Torrent Duck (Merganetta armata) occurs) along the Andes with pairs holding territories. It does indeed  live in and beside torrents. We first saw them along the Urubamba River which flows alongside the railway track from Cuzco to Macchu Picchu in Peru neasrly 25 years ago.

It is a matter of luck where the ducks may be out of the water during a brief stop. This pair was nowhere to be seen  at first but then the male was seen climbing onto a faraway rock with the female following a short time later. Not an ideal spot for a photograph given the rocks that were nearer the bridge but never than no ducks at all.

Francis Downes Ommanney: Becoming a zoologist in MacBride’s department at Imperial College and beyond

Earlier this year I wrote about Francis Downes Ommanney (1903-1980), universally known as ‘Dick', his short period as head of the fisheries research unit at the University of Hong Kong and his account of that period of his life in his book Fragrant Harbour. The last major book he wrote, The River Bank, was an autobiography of that part his life after leaving school up to the start of the Second World War. It was a follow-on from The House in the Park, an account of his very early life where his family lived in the ‘grave and favour’ house in Richmond Park on a lease given to his great-grandfather, Richard Owen by Queen Victoria.

The River Bank, subtitled An Autobiography of the 1920s, published in 1966 reflects on his seemingly sad life, observing but never quite fitting in, succeeding but never quite so well as expected and haunted by the realisation of his homosexuality that was hinted at but never overtly acknowledged in his earlier books.

Ommanney was a very good writer as the awards for several of his books testify but when I read the book I found it also cast a great deal of light on that powerful, opinionated but woefully wrong character in academic zoology of the early 20th century, Ernest William MacBride FRS (1866-1940) who held the chair of zoology—Thomas Henry Huxley’s old chair—at Imperial College, London, I have written on MacBride previously HERE and quoted some of the  trenchant views of those who worked with him as a man obsessed with still promoting the Lamarckian means of evolution, of his opposition to Mendelian genetics and denial of the existence of genes, and his promotion of eugenics which he saw as a natural extension of Lamarckism.

Ommanney’s account of student life at Imperial College provides interesting information on what student life was like in the 1920s but also on the nature of MacBride’s interactions with his students and his lasting effect on them.

After a miserable time in a job in the City of London, Ommanney’s father thought the time had come for young Dick to be set on the course towards a proper, well-paid job. Surely with Richard Owen as a near ancestor something like entomology would provide a proper job in somewhere like the tropics went the argument. The financial state of the family had declined under Ommanney senior thus ruling out Oxford or Cambridge. Imperial College was deemed the place for Ommanney junior to study biology but the first step on the way to a biological income was the matriculation exams for London University. Crammers had the sole aim of success in the various examination papers. A pass in all papers of six subjects at a single sitting was required for matriculation. Ommanney had great difficulty with mathematics but was relieved to find his name on the pass list that was pinned on the notice board on the appointed day in August 1921, He was in.

For anybody keen to get to biology in 1922, the Royal College of Science component of Imperial College did not make it easy. He have to try to fit into life as a student, noting the division that existed in the student body along class lines:

On the one hand there were the middle-class boys, mostly from public schools, who for one reason or another had not gone on to one of the senior universities on leaving school, and on the other hand there were the working-class boys who, usually through hard work at a grammar or secondary school, had come to the Imperial College determined to make good and complete their technical education. The two groups looked down upon each other with dislike and contempt.

Furthermore, for aspiring biologists the first year was only chemistry, physics and maths. He managed chemistry (but cut his finger to the bone when trying to push a piece of glass tubing through a rubber bung—almost a beginner’s rite of passage) and physics but failed the compulsory maths. He therefore had to repeat a year with additional tuition, another expense for his father. In that year he had time on his hands and therefore sought the advice of MacBride on how to fill it.

I suppose Ernest MacBride (known to his friends, his enemies and his students as MacB.) would have been in his middle fifties at the time I first met him, but he seemed to me to be much older. His round bald head was fringed with a short stubble of white hair and his large furrowed brow jutted over a pair of small, shrewd, blue eyes. He wore a white bristly moustache. His round, tubby frame was compounded of a series of intersecting circles but he had a dropped shoulder which caused him to carry himself slightly lopsidedly. He had a flat-footed walk and a rasping cough which could be heard a long way off. His zoology department was at the top of the Victorian building and students, waiting in his lecture theatre, could hear the Professor arriving on the ground floor by his cough and his clear precise voice as he entered the lift eight floors below.

Although on analysis MacBride presented an eccentric, even odd, appearance, it never occurred to me at that first meeting, or at any time afterwards, that he was in the least an ugly man. The fire of his spirit burnt in those small blue eyes and there was a warmth in his manner that made even a humble student such as I was, coming to ask him how I should spend time before beginning his course, feel instantly comfortable and at ease. He was a pugnacious Ulsterman who, during his scientific career, made many enemies because of the directness and incisiveness with which he put forward his unpopular views, and in his seamed face there shone a keen, combative intellect. It is often said by the irreverent that scientists, especially zoologists and botanists, who develop a passionate life interest in a particular group of animals or plants, grow by degrees to resemble the objects of their lifetime study in appearance. MacBride's special and lifelong interest lay in the great group of five-rayed animals, 'nature's pentagonal experiment, the group that includes the sea-urchins, the sea-cucumbers and the sea-lilies. His rotund figure, large round head fringed with a short stubble and his prickly disposition where his own particular subject was concerned, caused the irreverent to compare him with one of the thorned, rounded sea-urchins about which he became so lyrical and eloquent in his lectures.

Ernest McBride
in
The Radio Times

Then, having started the course in zoology:

No two people could have been more different than my two zoology teachers. One, the Professor, was Ernest William MacBride, then at the height of his fame and pugnacity. The other, the Senior Lecturer, was Graham Cannon, at that time a young man of twenty-five but a rising star in the zoological fırmament. Later he became professor first at Sheffield and then at Manchester. When he was teaching me he was laying the foundations of his future fame with a series of beautiful and meticulous papers describing the filtration feeding mechanisms of very small crustaceans. These were masterpieces of technique and draughtsmanship and I remember thinking them magnificent but uninspiring.

The Professor himself, as seemed to be the custom in all departments of the college, lectured every morning to his elementary students, most of whom would go on to take degrees in other sciences after their preliminary zoology course. Cannon lectured to more advanced second and third year zoology students who were reading for a degree in zoology. There were seldom more than three or four of these in any one year. I was one of them because I had to graduate in zoology before I could go on to the insects (on the very top floor of the building) in my fourth year. As it turned out, owing to setbacks in mathematics, I did not in fact get there until my fifth year.

The teaching methods and approach to their subject of my two teachers were as different as their two characters. MacBride was all fire and poetry and he could strike sparks out of the most recondite subject. His discourses were a delight, peppered with quotations and apt allusions, often literary, because, like many of the great men who held chairs at South Kensington at that time, his head was among the stars. Unfortunately, however, the stars are not a very suitable vantage point from which to impart knowledge to elementary students struggling to acquire a first grasp of the subject, so that while the Professor's audience listened with rapt attention, they rose from their seats at the end of the lecture with their heads filled with ringing phrases but their notebooks blank. Cannon, on the other hand, attempted no flights to the stars. His lectures were pedestrian and unexciting to listen to, but admirably concise and clear and accompanied by splendid diagrams on the blackboard in coloured chalk which he gave his audience time to copy down, their heads buried in their notebooks. Whereas we rose from the Professor's lectures slightly dazed but enchanted, we rose from Cannon's feeling we had filled our magazines with ammunition for the exam which loomed ahead.

The students did have an outing:

The Professor was Vice-President of the London Zoo and Chairman of its Aquarium Committee. The aquarium was new in those days and once a year the Professor took his students on a conducted tour round the tanks. He was enormously proud of his aquarium which he had played a large part in bringing into existence. The tour was always a most enjoyable occasion for the Professor's vociferous eloquence often attracted quite a crowd of the general public. They were amazed to see this stout, white-haired old gentleman holding forth in stentorian tones and with such a proprietary air.

'I reckon 'e must be somebody,' said a woman on the out-skirts.

Another member of the paying public was less impressed. "This fellah's just a bloody nuisance," I heard a voice growl.

An apocryphal story relates that one year the Professor was conducting round the aquarium a party of students which included a lady research worker who was studying the breeding habits of small sharks and dogfish. In one tank two speckled dogfish were caught in the very lists of love on the sandy bottom while their fellow inmates glided unnoting to and fro. The Professor became quite transported with joy at this spectacle. 'For God's sake!' he stormed, shouting as usual at the top of his voice. 'For God's sake, where's Miss Smith? They're copulating!’

There was also the field course in marine biology at Plymouth where he found himself eating alongside Julian Huxley and Carl Pantin.

Then, of course, there were the seminars:

Once a month there were larger and more formal occasions than these which were more like serious scientific meetings. These, known as MacBride's tea parties, became famous, almost notorious, functions in the lively zoological world of London. They became so popular, attended by visitors from all over London, that tea became quite elaborate and was served in one of the laboratories. The old laboratory attendant put on a white coat and clumped around in his enormous boots with plates of cakes. The Professor and Cannon waged war over him.

Cannon wanted him got rid of and said so, but the Professor, who was a soft-hearted, kindly man, refused and sheltered the old scoundrel under his wing. After tea we all trooped up to the main zoology lecture theatre to hear a distinguished member of the company read a paper on a zoological subject. 'Read' was the operative word in many cases, for on the whole zoologists seem to be extraordinarily bad speakers and often have the gift of making the most interesting subject tedious beyond description. Many a scientific meeting have I slept through…Much of the floor space behind the seating was occupied by human and animal skeletons, stuffed apes, mammals, birds and reptiles. It must have been fifty years since that red stag was shot and now it stands there with glass eye and moth-eaten fur. There were dusty, scruffy birds and fishes hanging from the ceiling, poised for half a century in a moment of flight or swimming. But these grim spectators did not in the least inhibit the discussions that took place after the lectures, and the Professor could be relied upon to ginger things up. I used to experience a kind of thrilling embarrassment at seeing the sparks fly among these giants of science. It was the same sensation as that which I had experienced years before when, as a child, I found myself present at squabbles between my grandmother and my mother or my aunts. I wondered if I ought to be there and tried to make myself as small as possible lest they should suddenly remember me and send me out of the room. I remember feeling rooted to my seat when a famous professor from another college, whose name was a household word, an Olympian figure to me, stormed out of the lecture theatre, saying, 'Well, if that's your attitude there's no point in continuing the discussion.' Or when another irascible but renowned zoologist said he thought the Professor was talking absolute poppycock'.

The storms nearly always arose around the imperturbable figure of MacBride who, when the light of battle was in his eye, had the peculiarly Irish gift of infuriating his adversaries. His views were extremely controversial and he advanced them with all the provocative punch at his command…

The effect of a charismatic, opinionated but wrong-headed professor on the naive mind of his or her students is a worrying in the 2026 as it was a hundred years ago. There were only three students in Ommanney’s year on the advanced zoology course. He wrote: 'Naturally I was a Lamarckian like my professor'. Another, Thomas Arthur Manly Nash who worked mainly on Africa and became the expert on the tsetse fly, agreed. The third, an Egyptian, remained neutral. But all these students faced a oncoming problem. Internal examinations for a diploma were set by MacBride and Cannon. After the final year though they all sat for the London honours degree:

…and here was an agonising dilemma. If a question on evolution were set, as it almost certainly would be, would it be set by MacBride or by one of his opponents? What was a poor student to do who only wanted to please the examiners?

Ommanney’s time with MacBride was coming to an end; his final year was to be spent with the entomologists on the top floor. He passed the college finals ‘with flying colours’ and ‘over 95% marks’. It was he wrote, ‘the first real success of my life’:

…’My dear boy!’ said MacBride, ‘a masterly paper! My heartiest congratulations. You will go far.’

The next year dampened Ommanney’s enthusiasm for entomology. The year after that saw him in the job of Assistant Lecturer at the East London College, later Queen Mary College, on the Mile End Road. He was paid £300 a year:

The zoology department of the East London College was fairly new in those days and was housed in a corrugated-iron building tucked away behind the college near some tennis courts and overlooking the back-yards of a long row of little black houses. It contained a lecture room, a laboratory and several other smaller rooms, including one all for me with a large desk and a work bench along the window, so that I felt very much coming up in the world.

The majority of the students to whom I dispensed my so recently acquired learning were first year medicals doing elementary zoology. They had to do a preliminary biology course at the college before going on in their second year to the medical course at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. In the cause of medical science, and so perhaps in that of suffering humanity, these boys and a few girls, mostly from the east end of London, eviscerated each year several dozen earthworms, crayfish, dog-fish, frogs and rabbits. While they did this I walked up and down the laboratory behind their bent backs and occasionally helped them on by applying a needle or a scalpel myself, hoping not to make their confusion worse confounded by doing so. Sometimes, indeed, the butchery was so frightful that the only thing to do was to sacrifice another earthworm or frog in the cause so that a fresh start might be made.

I did not really like teaching very much and found it difficult to get into the minds of the young men peering in sad puzzlement or faint, amused scorn at the mangled specimens pinned out in their dissecting dishes…I am afraid I found most of the students rather dull and slow-witted. Some of them were plainly uninterested and unable to understand why a course in elementary biology should be necessary as a preliminary to medicine…

I suppose it would be churlish to ask how many of these incompetent dissectors (and do not ask me how I ran out of patience while digging out the cranial nerves of my school dogfish) made it into the Royal College of Surgeons.

Ommanney had only one academic colleague, the senior lecturer in charge of the tiny department, John Henry Dobb*. He only attended on three mornings a week; he also lectured at a polytechnic institute in the West End of London. Dobb confessed to knowing little zoology and yet Ommanney noted he had the reputation of being one ‘of the finest, most successful and most experienced teachers of elementary zoology in London’. There was, however, a problem; a large and embarrassing problem. Dobb was a loud, confrontational anti-semite. He hated the Jews—and they constituted half his class. He often launched into a tirade at the top of his voice while students were waiting in the lecture theatre. Ommanney wrote:

For some mental or psychological trauma, acquired perhaps during the First World War, in which his only son had been killed, had implanted in his mind an idée fixe which, in the course of years, had grown into the proportions of a mania. He believed, with all the conviction of which a simple man is capable, that all the evils of the world without any exception, both temporal and spiritual, must be ascribed to a single basic cause, a worldwide Zionist plot. To the machinations of world Jewry he attributed every misfortune in modern society, the last war, mounting unemployment, the rising cost of living, high income tax and any other circumstance you might like to mention….

These cracked beliefs took the form of a continuous outpouring of racial hatred which, ten years later, the most ardent Nazi could hardly have surpassed. Every Jew, it appeared, was guilty from Lord Reading and Lord Rothschild to the humblest bespectacled student in the zoology practical class.

Ommanney found that in his classes the Jews and the Gentiles got on fine. But when standing in for a sick Dobb, he found the lecture theatre occupied in a peculiar way. All the non-Jews were in the front rows, there were then empty benches until the back benches had all the Jewish students. When he asked what was the reason he was told Dobb had instructed them to be so segregated. Ommanney told them to sit in alphabetical order from the front. Things came to a head when Dobb returned and exploded at the revised seating. The whole thing ended in a melée with Dobb sat upon by two Jewish students who were, in turn, pulled off by two of the Gentiles. A full brawl developed and then those made to sit at the back went off to report the whole affair to the Principal.

Ommanney was reluctant to join in a condemnation of Dobb since he was normally friendly and helpful. Those running the college treated Dobb leniently, seeming to recognise he was hopelessly adrift, but on written instruction from the Principal Ommanney’s seating arrangement was imposed. Within a year Dobb retired and died a few years after that.

London Adventures and Family Life

Very slowly, after becoming a student at Imperial, Ommanney was persuaded into taking part in student social life. Living in London his social circle spread and even for a while became a deb’s delight; he was obviously if not perhaps to his dancing partners ‘safe in taxis’. He also describes happenings in his family. His father became odder and odder, the family fortunes thus declined further while the standard of housing they could afford plummeted. He also started to have homosexual encounters and it is clear that he participated, if sometimes more an observer than an active player, in what would now I supposed be called the gay scene in London, with its meeting places and meaningful phrases. He described one gathering place as a large tea-room not far from Piccadilly Circus. Around five pm but not at any other time the “men of a certain character” made their entrance via a raised dais, nicknamed the ‘Lily Pond’. Other venues were the promenade at the back of the dress circle of the Alhambra Theatre and the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, a pub with which I became familiar when in need of a break from meetings of the Society of Endocrinology being held in the old Middlesex Hospital Medical School in the late 1960s and 70s.

Ommanney also commented on the change in meaning or acceptance into daily use of terms between the 1920s and the 1960s; ‘camp’ and ‘send up’ were two examples he gave. It is also clear, though perhaps Ommanney did not realise it, that ‘man-about-town’ has en entirely different meaning now compared with the 1920s. Then it referred to those ‘men of a certain character’.

That chapter of The River Bank ends with:

In my case at any rate few permanent relationships resulted from my casual contacts, though I still count among my friends a few people whom I met all those years ago. Usually telephone numbers and addresses were exchanged. My temporary friend smiled, shook my hand and faded into the blurred and dusty picture which is the memory of troubled youth.

Moving On: The Discovery Committee Expeditions

Ommanney became disillusioned and discontented. He could see no escape from the emptiness and lack of direction. He had completed three years and the prospect of starting all over again on the standard ‘types’ of the zoology course for first M.B. students depressed him. Because he find time on his hands he had early on asked MacBride for advice on a research project that he could do. But nothing of value emerged from the conversation. MacBride had moved on to next year’s brood. He did get a topic from D.M.S. Watson at University College: the development of the ear in the frog. That involved rearing tadpoles through metamorphosis but like many before and since he found that they died in the final stages. Although making piles of serial sections he never took to the task and he abandoned it, unable at the end to remember what the problem was he was meant to be solving.

Then he saw a job advertised in The Times. It was to join the scientific staff of the Discovery Committee which used Scott’s old ship for research expeditions in the Antarctic. He applied, supported by a glowing reference from Dobb, not thinking he stood a chance of being successful. But he was and off he went to South Georgia for the season, then in the southern winter to Durban to continue working on whales and then back to South Georgia. He returned home in summer 1931 to find the ‘Lily Pond’ and the Alhambra still in full swing and a further decline in his parents’ fortunes. Two further trips, each of two years, to the Antarctic followed. Between the cruises and until war broke out in 1939 he worked on specimens collected in the Natural History Museum, passing each day the statue of his great-grandfather. In 1938 he also headed north in a trawler and all these activities were the topics of the books which made his name as an author.

Dick Ommanney’s legacy that of a writer rather than as a zoologist. However, I suspect that he was a much better zoologist than he considered himself to be. And MacBride was probably right. Ommanney did go far but not in the way that either expected.

A website about the Ommanney family provides the following caption:
From The River Bank. Back L to R: Francis Downes Ommanney,
Francis Frederick Ommanney, Rupert John Ommanney,Theoroda
Ommanney. Front L to R: Olive Ommanney (nee Owen), Olive Mary
Ommanney and Lorne Currie. The wedding was that of Olive and Lorne
(2 September 1904 - 29 May 1941) on 29 August 1929.
FDO had just heard of the success of his application to join the Discovery II.
 'I went down to Mary's wedding with excitement and adventure before me
and new a joy and hope almost as great as, though different from, hers.'

*I can find no trace of a John Henry Dobb that matches the dates and details, nor of a son killed in the First World War. Perhaps Ommanney was using a pseudonym.

Flame-rumped Tanager. Colombia 2025

Every day bananas are put on a feeder along the fence line of the garden by the owner of Kumanday Lodge which is situated on the edge of the village of La Florida in Colombia.  The village is at 1,670 metres (5,480 ft) on the western side of the Cordillera Central of the northern Andes.

This eye-catching male Flame-rumped Tanager (Ramphocelus flammigerus) was a regular at the bananas while we were staying. There are two sub-species recognised. The other (R. f. icteronotus), from further west, has yellow instead of red in its plumage. There is a hybrid zone between the two where the colour grades from yellowish-orange to reddish-orange. Recent evidence suggests the two populations had once been separated but had met again without ever becoming different species.

The tanager is found from the south of Panama and along a fairly narrow strip of western Colombia to western Ecuador. It is a true tanager (family Thraupidae).

Morales-Rozo A, Tenorio EA, Carling MD, Cadena CD. 2017. Origin and cross-century dynamics of an avian hybrid zone. BMC Evolutionary Biology 17:257. doi:10.1186/s12862-017-1096-7

 

Salt Glands Revisited. 4. Aaron Myron Taub and the salt glands of sea snakes

Fifty-two years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

—————————————————-

Some scientists make an impact in a particular field early in their lives and then move on to other topics or into other jobs entirely. Their contributions therefore go unsung when histories and biographies are written about particular disciplines. The late Aaron M. Taub falls into that category. I was reminded of his work in the 1960s because it came up in my previous article on the very mild venomous nature of the Smooth Snake and I recalled his work on sea snakes which he did with Bill Dunson at Penn State University.

In the mid-1960s Dunson and Taub discovered salt glands in sea snakes. They did so by dinding a highly concentrated salt solution is excreted from the mouth and then set about finding which gland of the numerous candidates the salt was coming from. The search initially provided a false lead but later work by Bill Dunson after Taub had gone from the scene found the salt is secreted by what the posterior sublingual gland which empties into the tongue sheath. Thus the salt glands of sea snakes were found not to be nasal glands as in birds, nor orbital glands as in turtles.

As the decades have passed it now seems that the posterior sublingual gland has become a salt-secreting gland on three independent occasions during the evolution of snakes that live in marine or estuarine conditions: in the sea-kraits (genus Laticauda); in the common ancestor of the hydrophine sea snakes; in the unrelated snake Acrochordus granulatus. In addition, there is evidence that a different oral gland—the premaxillary—has evolved into a salt gland independently three or four times in those snakes of the family Homalopsidae, the mud snakes of Indo-Australia which live in a salty environment.

The number of glands opening into the oral cavity and their nomenclature has offered great scope for confusion since terms used for structures in snakes named after what were though to be their mammalian counterparts have been shown to be incorrect. For example, the ‘parotid’ gland of snakes was found not to be homologous with the mammalian parotid. The oral glands also perform a number of functions in addition to those like lubrication and defensive against microbes that we associate with mammalian saliva. Oral glands have become venom glands and, as described above, salt glands.

Laticauda colubrina, Banded Sea Krait
Jens Petersen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

It was Taub who made an early attempt to sort out the glands in the head of snakes. He published that work in 1966 and that is why he has been consistently quoted over the decades. His findings and suggestions for nomenclature, for example, have been discussed by those later on the scene, sometimes approvingly and sometimes disapprovingly. The nomenclature of the oral glands has proved contentious. His suggestion to name the ‘parotid’ of snakes as Duvernoy’s gland, in memory of George Louis Duvernoy (1777-1855) remains the term of choice for many working on the the venom-producing gland of rear-fanged snakes, despite its apparent homology with the ‘venom gland’ of front-fanged snakes.

Aaron Myron Taub was born in New Jersey on 21 December 1935. Searches in the usual genealogical sites and online newspaper archives, together with his own Linkedin profile which remains available have produced an outline of his life and what he did after moving on from matters herpetological. He was educated at Wagner College, New York in 1953-57 according to his Linkedin page. However, these dates may be out by a year since he can be found serving in the US Navy as a ‘hospitalman’ between December 1955 until mid 1957. Taub appears to have done most of his research while a postgraduate student with Carl Gans (1923-2009) at the State University of New York at Buffalo in, according to Linkedin, from 1960 until 1964. Thereafter he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology at Penn State University at least until 1968 when his first son was born. It was there that he worked with Bill Dunson on sea snakes.

Aaron Taub then changed direction entirely. He worked for the Canadian and US subsidiaries of the now defunct British pharmaceutical and fertiliser company Fisons. By 1985 he was Senior Regulatory Affairs Scientist at the Fisons site in Bedford, Massachusetts. As well as being involved in various and apparently well known legal battles involving the company and the Food and Drug Administration of the USA, Taub also arranged the supply of an important leukotriene receptor antagonist the company had developed to those working on asthma and lung function. The Linkedin account suggests he retired from Fisons in 1992 and from 2009 was a patient at Highlands Living Centre, a nursing home in Pittsford, New York.

Aaron Myron Taub died on 18 April 2014 in Pittsford, leaving his wife, Rosemary (née Dessel), two children and three grandchildren.

And I cannot help but note that any ophidiophiles reading this article will realise that Taub’s second name, Myron, is also that of a genus of rear-fanged venomous snakes, commonly called ‘mangrove snakes’ found from Australia through Indonesia.

Publications in order of year published

Gans C, Taub AM. 1964. Precautions for keeping poisonous snakes in captivity. Curator. The Museum Journal 7, 196-205.

Taub AM. 1964. Antivenins available for the treatment of snake bite. Toxicon 2, 71-77.

Taub AM, Elliott WB. 1967. Some effects of snake venoms on mitochondria. Toxicon 2, 87-92.

Taub AM. 1966. Ophidian cephalic glands. Journal of Morphology 118, 529-541.

Taub AM, Dunson WA. 1966. Salt glands in sea snakes (Squamata, Laticauda). American Zoologist 6, 18.

Dunson WA, Taub AM. 1966. A new gland in sea snakes (Squamata, Reptilia). American Zoologist 6, 365.

Taub AM. 1967. Comparative Histological Studies on Duvernoy’s gland of colubrid snakes. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 138, 1-50.

Taub AM, Dunson WA. 1967. The salt gland in a sea snake (Laticauda). Nature 215, 995-996.

Dunson WA, Taub AM. 1967. Extrarenal salt excretion in sea snakes (Laticauda). American Journal of Physiology 213, 975-982.

de Oliveira L, Gower DJ, Wilkinson M, Segall M. 2024. Comparative morphology of oral glands in snakes of the family Homalopsidae reveals substantial variation and additional independent origins of salt glands within Serpentes. Journal of Anatomy 244, 708-721. DOI: 10.1111/joa.14005

Jackson TNW, Young B, Underwood G, McCarthy CJ, Kochva E, Vidal N, van der Weerd, L, Nabuurs R, Dobson J, Whitehead D, Vonk FJ, Hendrikx I, Hay C, Fry BG. 2016. Endless forms most beautiful: the evolution of ophidian oral glands, including the venom system, and the use of appropriate terminology for homologous structures. Zoomorphology 136, 107-130. DOI 10.1007/s00435-016-0332-9

Blue-grey Tanager. Colombia 2025

Every day fresh, ripe bananas are put on a feeder along the fence line of the garden by the owner of Kumanday Lodge which is situated on the edge of the village of La Florida in Colombia.  The village is at 1,670 metres (5,480 ft) on the western side of the Cordillera Central of the northern Andes.

Birders visiting the Otún Quimbaya reserve stay at the hotel and are soon entertained by fruit-eating birds at the feeder, including a group of Blue-grey Tanagers, Tangarus (previously Thraupis) episcopus. The bird is common in its range (northern South America and north to Mexico).

The Blue-grey is a true tanager (family Thraupidae). Many of what were called tanagers because they were brightly coloured and mainly ate fruit have been shown not to be tanagers at all. Some have turned out to be cardinals (Cardinalidae), others true  finches (Fringillidae).

The Smooth Snake. New Research: Now Venomous but still Harmless

The ‘third’ British snake, the Smooth Snake (Coronella austriaca), is one I have never seen. Of limited distribution, heathland in parts of the south of England, it also occurs widely in continental Europe. Until a few weeks ago the way in which it feeds was thought to be simple. In terms of prey though the preference or availability appears to vary. In Britain small mammals are taken more frequently than lizards; in Italy lizards are the main prey. Young smooth snakes seem to rely heavily on small lizards although they have even been known to eat bluebottles and spiders.

All observers have agreed that once caught in the jaws, the prey is manipulated in to a position where it can be more easily swallowed. During this process coils of the body may help to subdue but not constrict the animal that has been caught. The unfortunate mouse, shrew or lizard is then swallowed alive. Thus the smooth snake was considered to neither venomous nor a constrictor. That is the standard story but in their New Naturalist series book Trevor Beebee and Richard Griffiths raised the point, ‘…so how the snake escapes severe bites from these mammals is not at all clear’. The recent research suggests how that how is achieved.

The authors of the new study, Alessandro Paterna and Grégoire Meier, rely, first, on their own evidence from an anatomical study of the teeth and jaws and, second, on experiments on the closely related species, Coronella girondica, the Southern Smooth Snake, the results of which were published in 1922 in France. In both species they found fangs on the posterior maxilla, the bases of which are enclosed by a sheath. The sheath enables secretion Duvernoy’s gland to be delivered into a wound caused by the fangs. In other words there is every reason to suspect that whole arrangement acts for the conveyance of a noxious secretion into the wound, especially in circumstances where the bite is prolonged and there is time for such a low-pressure system aided by chewing motion of the jaws to work.

There has been endless discussion of whether secretions from Duvernoy’s gland should be called venom and I will not prolong that agony. However, using the term venom for any combination of chemicals used by a predator to the detriment of its prey the question is: does Duvernoy’s gland in this species produce venom? Here one the authors provided useful anecdotal evidence:

…in a field study in the Laga Mountains in the province of Teramo (Abruzzo), one of us (AP) was bitten by an adult male Coronella austriaca while handling the specimen. The bite was prolonged, allowing time to take a photograph while the “mastication” action was still in progress…Following the bite, itching and redness quickly appeared in the affected area. A second photograph, taken 11 minutes after the photo showing the bite, shows redness corresponding to the maxillary arch’s shape, where the holes caused by some anterior maxillary teeth and the pair of posterior fangs

are visible. Over time, in addition to the redness, swelling developed at the site of the small lacerations caused by the teeth, which was also accompanied by itching. The most evident symptoms lasted a few minutes, then gradually subsided in less than an hour. As researchers in both field and controlled environments, we both frequently receive snake bites in different contexts. Nevertheless, this case, although extremely mild, represents the only one to date in which we have personally observed a reaction other than bleeding following a bite of a colubrine snake.

If the bite resulted in irritation to human skin, what about potential prey? Here Marie Félicie Phisalix (née Picot)(1861-1946), who worked in Paris and was one of the leading experts on snake venoms in the first half of the 20th century, provided experimental evidence which I am surprised nobody gathering information on smooth snakes seems to have taken on board earlier.

Marie Physalix
in 1929
Autochrome by
George Chevalier

Marie Phisalix prepared material for injection from whole, dried Duvernoy’s glands. The gland is tiny. She noted in the largest snakes it only weighed 1 mg when dried (equivalent to around 4 mg wet weight). Since it is not known how much secretion would reach a bitten animal, the results show the sort of maximum effect that could be achieved. The findings though were pretty spectacular. An extract from two glands given intravenously to a rabbit put it into a state of torpor for 10 minutes. It then died after 15-20 minutes of respiratory arrest. Six glands-worth killed an adult guinea pig. A green lizard showed transient narcosis after a two-gland dose.

These experiments do suggest the presence of powerful agents in Duvernoy’s gland of smooth snakes. However, I can hear my former and late colleague sitting on my shoulder warning that some of the effects could be due to the presence of extraneous substances like bacterial toxins from the mouth and I do hope that the recent work is being followed up to see what biologically active substances are present in the Dubernoy’s gland of smooth snakes. Secretions from the gland of other rear-fanged species have been studied, for example by Robert Hill and Stephen Mackessy in 2000, and a comparison with such findings is now essential.

Smooth Snake
The colour plate from Malcolm Smith's The British Amphibians and Reptiles published in 1951
in the Collins New Naturalist Series
Photograph by Walter Sydney Pitt (1900-1983)

It would seem though that the evidence is highly suggestive of a rear-fanged, low pressure venom delivery system. Observations on C. austriaca collected by Malcolm Smith for his New Naturalist series book published in 1951 indicate that some items of prey, small lizards for example are caught and swallowed quickly. However, larger prey like small mammals with the capacity to bite back may be held onto for longer, allowing noxious agents from Duvernoy’s gland to seep into the wound, enter the bloodstream and render the mouse, vole or shrew quiescent.

Thus it seems we should now consider the Smooth Snake to be Britain’s second venomous snake with the proviso that the venom is so weak that even if a human being were to be bitten the only effect would be slight and temporary inflammation in the area surrounding the puncture marks. Perhaps we should just say Britain still has two snakes that are entirely harmless to the human population.

Paterna A, Meier G. 2026. Reclassification of the smooth snake. Analysis of the rear fangs, venom system, and the cephalic anatomy of Coronella austriaca (Serpentes: Colubridae). Zootaxa 5873 (1): 145–160. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5873.1.8

Phisalix M. 1922 .Animaux Venimeux et Venins. Vol. 2. Paris: Masson et Cie,

Beebee TJC, Griffiths RA. 2000. Amphibians and Reptiles. A Natural History of the British Herpetofauna. London: HarperCollins.

Smith M. 1951. The British Amphibians and Reptiles. London: Collins.

Hill RE, Mackessy SP, 2000. Characterization of venom (Duvernoy’s secretion) from twelve species of colubrid snakes and partial sequence of four venom proteins. Toxicon 38,1663-1687 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0041-0101(00)00091-X

Purple-throated Woodstar. Colombia - November 2025

This female Purple-throated Woodstar (Philodice mitchellii) was gathering nectar from the flowers in the garden of the Hotel Kumanday on the edge of the village of La Florida, a popular place for those visiting the Otún Quimbaya reserve on the western side of the Cordillera Central of Colombia. The village is at 1,670 metres (5,480 ft).

The bird occurs from 700-2,200 metres along the chain of the Andrews from Colombia into Ecuador. There is what appears to be an isolated population in southern Panama. 

Barely 3 inches long with their flight resembling a bee, this one spent a great deal of time keeping its energy supply up - for all that flying and hovering. Their demand for sugar and they way their body bodies handle that sugar to keep up with demand can really be appreciated by seeing and watching hummingbirds in the wild.

Western Bluebird: a colour plate from 1937

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 24th in the series.

– – – – – – – – – –

 

The plate is by Roland Green (1890-1972) a well-known bird and mammal artist who lived in Norfolk. He was the son of a taxidermist. He illustrated a number of books, including one of his own.

The author of the accompanying text was the well-known aviculturist and very wealthy, Alfred Ezra (1872-1955). He understood that the bird had never been imported into Britain before those brought by Jean Delacour. A pair bred in one of Ezra’s aviaries.

The Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) is from western North America and Mexico.

Avicultural Magazine September 1937

A Comma in the garden

Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. 1 August 2026

It is difficult to imagine the look on a 1950s lepidopterist’s face had she or he been told a Comma butterfly had been spotted in Ayrshire. Even in England the butterfly then had a limited distribution in the south, although it was spreading back to earlier haunts as the 1951 edition of that classic The Observer’s Book of British Butterflies explained:

Up to about 1924 this butterfly had been gradually disappearing from all its old localities, and was more or less confined to Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Monmouthshire. Since then there has been a remarkable increase in its numbers, and it has been reported from the southern, western, and midland counties and even the London district*.

The Butterfly Conservation website takes up the story:

…the most remarkable feature of the Comma has been its severe decline in the twentieth century and subsequent comeback. It has spread northwards through England and is now widespread in south-east and central Scotland and its range is expanding.

Over the past years there have been a number of reports of Commas in Ayrshire and this one is the second we have seen in the garden.

The Comma, Polygonia c-album, has an unusual specific name in that it it hyphenated. However, that was the one given to it by Linnaeus himself and the Comma was a species with which he would have been familiar since it occurs throughout Europe and into western Asia.

Informative studies have been made on the genetics of the food preferences of the Comma caterpillar. At present in Britain the preferred food plant is common nettle with hops, elms, currants and willows following on behind. The great decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries was thought to have been caused by a major reduction in the cultivation of hops. If that decline was responsible then the shift to nettles and subsequent recovery could have been an event as significant as industrial melanism and its reversal in the Peppered Moth.

The underside shows how well the butterfly is camouflaged when its wings are closed
The white marking is in the shape of a comma; hence the name

*The Oxford comma (no pun intended) was alive and well in this Observer’s Book. Described as the compiler of the book William John Stokoe had drawn the information from The Butterflies of the British Isles by Richard South (also published by Frederick Warne). The first edition of The Observer's Book of British Butterflies book appeared in 1938 when Stokoe was 74; it ran for many editions, some long after the compiler’s death. William John Stokoe was born on 30 July 1864, the son of a railway signalman. In the 1921 Census and the 1939 Register he was living in Finchley with his wife. In 1921 he was art manager for Frederck Warne and in 1939 ‘Book Publisher’s Editor’. Stokoe died on 16 March 1947. His name continued to be associated the the various Observer’s Books he had compiled.

John Anderson’s Newt on the Road from Mandalay

The first of what are now known as crocodile newts to be described in the scientific literature was Tylotriton verrucosus from Yunnan Province in China. A welter of new species of Tylotriton has been described in the past few decades—38 at the latest count—but how many would pass as proper ‘biological species’ is open to question. Newts from south-western China have been studied because tectonic shifts during the Pleistocene have resulted in mountain ranges and deep river gorges within a relatively small area, leaving plenty of opportunities for the isolation or partial isolation of breeding populations and the emergence of new geographical variants and new species.

A considerable amount of knowledge has accumulated on the natural history of T. verrucosus which at present goes under the common names in English of Western Himalayan Crocodile Newt or Longchuan Crocodile Newt. Indeed some studies have been made at or near the sites of its discovery. However, little attention has been paid to the circumstances under which John Anderson saw, collected, described and named the species. Anderson found the newt while medical officer and naturalist to the British mission into Yunnan from Burma in 1868. The party led by Captain Sladen travelled by steamboat from Mandalay to Bhamo and then by land. Anderson published his account of the new species in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1871. The bland description by Anderson does not cover the tribulations of the mission which have been described recently by David Leffman in his book A Murder in Yunnan and in the account by Anderson himself in 1876.

from Anderson 1871

Particularly noticeable in these newts are the large skin tubercles which form a line each side of the body. Underlying each glandular tubercle is a blunt rib and it is presumed that the ribs help press toxic secretion from the glands if the newt is compressed by the grasp or bite of a predator

Anderson wrote of his newt:

Hab[itiat]. Nantin, Momien, and Hotha valleys, Western Yunan, China. 

I first met with this remarkable Newt in the flooded rice-fields about the little Chinese town of Nantin, where, however, it was not very common. In the more elevated and subtemperate valley of Momien, at about a height of nearly 5000 feet above the sea, and in the high sequestered valley of Hotha (5000 feet) it was far from uncommon.

I have marked these places on a map from Anderson’s book. They are all along the Taping or Daying River or one of its tributaries. The Taping flows from the east to join the Irrawaddy near Bhamo in Burma (Myanmar). Later reports also show T. verrucosus occurs in that part of northern Burma. 

A map from Anderson's 1876 account of the two missions to Yunnan
Th red dots show the sites Tylotriton verrucosus was seen
Yunnan-Fu is now Kunming. Momien is Tengchong. 

The 1868 Mission was fraught with uncertainty and danger. Anderson described the following incident in one of the areas the newt was found. The background to this particular episode is that a Muslim Revolt was in full swing in Yunnan against the Qing Dynasty and the Panthay rebels held towns and villages along the route the mission was taking. Near one of the places the newt was found the party rested a for a while at hot springs:

After enjoying our halt, which had been made with the full approval of the Panthay officers and the Hotha chief, we started to overtake the cavalcade, which had marched forward. Just as we rejoined the rear-guard, four shots were fired in front, but as the road only admitted of single file, and lay along a thickly wooded hillside, marked by the ruins of many villages, no one could advance to reconnoitre. Word was presently passed down that the mules had been attacked and two Panthay officers wounded but on proceeding onwards, we discovered that the affair was more serious, and that the two officers and another man had been killed. We soon came up to the bodies of the officers wrapped in their large turbans and tied to bamboos, ready to be carried back to Nantin. The poor fellows bad both been great favourites with their comrades and the governor of Momien; and a sad group surrounded the bodies, including their female relatives, who had ridden out from Nantin only to lament their murder, for so it was. As they were riding at the head of the mules, at a corner in the narrow path, a lurking body of Chinese rushed out from the trees, shot down the first, and the second, hurrying to the rescue, was shot through the leg and cut down with a dah. Eight mules had their loads thrown off and looted, and were then driven up the hills. A little further on, the scene of the disaster was marked by the ransacked packages lying on the roadside, and among them two boxes containing my clothes and note-books. One of these had escaped unopened, and was left in charge of a Panthay officer who promised to see it brought on. At the head of the valley a halt was called, to enable all the Panthays to come up, as a second ambuscade was suspected in a thickly wooded hollow in the steep hillside above.

Newts and other specimens of the local fauna were not the only things Anderson brought back from Yunnan. The British Museum has a Shan dao, a knife made of metal, wood and string, from Hotha presented by Anderson. It is I think of the same type used in the above account to kill the Panthay officer.

The dao presented by John Anderson to the British Museum

Newting in Yunnan in 1868 was not a gentle pursuit for a spring afternoon.

from Hernandez 2016

Anderson J. 1871. Description of a new genus of newts from Western Yunnan. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1871, 423-425.

Hernandez A. 2016. Crocodile Newts : The primitive Salamandridae of Asia (Genera Echinotriton and Tylototriton). Frankfurt: Edition Chimaira.

Lord Derby’s Woolly Opossum. Colombia, November 2025

I find the marsupials of the Americas fascinating. The opossums with their long rat-like tails cannot compete in the cuteness stakes with the possums of Australia. Although I have been to the USA many times (to sit for hours in a darkened lecture theatre) and the countries in Central and South America, until Colombia in November last year I had never seen an American marsupial. Then along came three species.

A delight of a mammal-watching trip* as opposed to a birding one is the greater emphasis on night spotting. Birds, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates are seen as well of course. On our first night walking along the road through the Otún Quimbaya Sanctuary on the western slope of the Cordillera Central we saw this Derby’s Woolly Opossum (Caluromys derbianus) by the light of the spotlamp. It is a terrible photograph since I had the camera set for a bird before darkness fell and pressed the shutter release anyway in the hope of getting something on the camera’s sensor.

Derby’s Woolly Opossum occurs from Mexico through the countries of Central America and then as far south as Ecuador. The alternative name of Central American Woolly Opossum as used in the IUCN Red List therefore seems misleading. In Colombia we were seeing the animal at the eastern edge of its range since it is confined by the Cordillera Central to the Cauca Valley. The river Otún flows westward into the Cauca.

The species was named for the well-known politician and zoologist the13th Earl of Derby (1775 – 1851) who had a large menagerie and museum at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool. Seeing his eponymous opossum in South America or his Derbyan Parakeet in the wilds of Sichuan in China does feel incongruous—and very unLiverpool.

On the other side of the Cordillera in the Magdalena Valley we saw a Brown-eared Woolly Opossum (Caluromys lanatus) briefly before it disappeared behind a tree trunk. 

Another species at Otún Quimbaya was the Common Opossum (Didelphis marsupialis). It was around the lodge and restaurant at the end of the road. We saw the same species on the rafters of our accommodation at Hato La Aurora in the Llanos, the wetlands of north-eastern Colombia. 

Opossums often produce more offspring than mammary glands. Therefore any that do not find a teat in the female’s pouch die. As in marsupials generally the young remain attached to the teat for virtually their entire development.

I did not know opossums were popular items in the human diets of the Americas, from the USA southwards. I cannot say I fancy the idea.

*Naturetrek’s Colombia’s Endemic Mammals

Edward Bosc Sladen’s eponymous animals from the 1868 mission from Burma to Yunnan

Sir Edward Bosc Sladen spent much of his career as a soldier/colonial administrator/diplomat in Burma. He was the natural choice to lead the mission to Yunnan in 1868 which was sent to explore the possibility of establishing a trade route between British India, Burma and China and on which John Anderson was the medical officer and naturalist. At the time of the mission to Yunnan Sladen was a Captain in the (British) Indian Army and In 1866 he had been appointed agent of the chief commissioner in Mandalay. In that year he narrowly escaped insurgents who had murdered three of the royal princes. During the subsequent disturbances Sladen gathered nearly all the Europeans and ‘other christians’ on board a steamboat and and evacuated them safely to Rangoon. After his return to Mandalay he persuaded the King of Burma, by then only in control of ‘upper’ Burma, not to execute three young princes. Only two survived, the third having been beheaded before news of the reprieve. After that he obtained the King’s assent to a new treaty covering commercial activity and extradition. It was against this background of hard and soft power that Sladen was chosen to lead the mission to China in 1868 described in David Leffman’s A Murder in Yunnan.

Sladen was born in Madras in 1827* to Dr Ramsey Sladen, Physician General of Madras in the East India Company, and his second wife, Emma Bosc. After Oswestry School he became a cadet of the East India Company in 1849 and on returning to India was appointed subaltern in the 1st Madras Fusiliers, a European regiment in the Company’s army. He served in the 2nd Burmese War. In 1853 he was appointed an assistant commissioner in Tenasserim. He was severely wounded during operations against insurgents in 1856-1857. In 1858 it was back to regimental duties. His regiment was heavily involved in the relief of Lucknow and further operations against the ‘mutineers’ in Oudh. Once back in Madras, Sladen reverted to the work of a district officer in Burma. The Staff Corps formed in the three Indian armies in 1861 enabled eligible officers to take up civil and political placements. When the 1st Madras Fusiliers became a royal regiment (i.e. a British Army regiment in India) Sladen became a member of the Indian Staff Corps but in 1878 still appeared in the Army List as in the Madras Staff Corps.

Captain Sladen of the Yunnan mission was promoted to major in 1869 and lieutenant colonel (without the hyphen in the modern style) in 1875. From 1876 until 1885 he was commissioner for the Arakan division. Then he was chief political officer to the force sent to depose Hing Thibaw in ‘upper’ Burma—the third Burma War. On 28 December Sladen arrived with the British troops sent to Mandalay. He entered the royal palace and took Thibaw’s surrender. The whole of Burma then became part of the Raj. Sladen was greatly praised by the viceroy for his courage and knowledge of the people of Burma. In 1886 Sladen was knighted and retired to England in 1887.

Sladen married Sophia Catherine Harrison in 1861; she died in 1865; they had a son and a daughter). Fifteen years later he married Kate Carew of Carpenders Park, Hertfordshire, in London; they had a son.

Sladen died in London on 4 January 1890, aged 63. He was living at 30 Lowndes Square, Chelsea. Newspaper reports provided the level of detail required by Victorian readers. 

We also have to announce the death of Colonel Sir Edward Bosc Sladen, which took place of pneumonia, after a very short illness, in Lowndes square, on Saturday night. He and Lady Sladen were present at the Marchioness of Salisbury's ball on the 20th ult., but on returning to town next day he found himself attacked with the influenza epidemic which is now so prevalent, and which culminated in the disease to which he succumbed so quickly.

The press, following the money, also reported:

…The late Sir Edward was in receipt of a good service pension for distinguished and meritorious services; had the Indian Mutiny medal with clasp for Lucknow, and the Burmah medal with clasp for Pegu…

John Anderson who served as both medical officer and naturalist to the 1868 mission clearly thought highly of Sladen. H e named a number of species for Sladen as well as suggesting his name to those who he asked to work on the insects and fish collected during the trip. Those names have of course been subject to many later revisions of taxonomy and have either been entirely subsumed as synonyms into other species or retained as subspecies.

THE RAT

Anderson’s Mus sladeni, latter Rattus sladeni is a species I have written about previously. The original—but not necessarily those rats from other parts of Asia that came to be known as Sladen’s Rats—is now lumped in Rattus tanezumi, the Asian House Rat.

THE SQUIRREL

A Sladen eponym missing from the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals is Sciurus sladeni. This beautiful squirrel is now lumped into Pallas's squirrel (Callosciurus erythraeus) which has major geographical differences in coloration. Some schemes retain the subspecies C. e. sladeni.

THE PHEASANT

Also missing from the books on avian eponyms is the pheasant Phasianus sladeni, now regsrded as a subspecies from northern Burma of the Common Pheasant: Phasianus colchicus sladeni.

THE FISH

Anderson appears to have handed over fish collected during the mission to Francis Talbot Day (1829-1889) a fellow medical man who became Inspector General for Fisheries in India. He named a freshwater fish for Sladen but got the name wrong: Salmostoma sladoni. Interpretation of hand-written labels after immersion in spirit is not easy.

THE TIGER MOTH

Frederic Moore (1830–1907) who worked at the East India Company’s museum in London sorted the insects. He named a tiger moth for Sladen: Syntomis sladeni. It survives as a full species, Amata sladeni.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

I thought that is all I had to write about Sladen and his eponymous animals. However, I now find that his son had a major role in a great public health problem of the 19th and 20th centuries. Edward Sydney St Barbe Sladen was medical scientist, soldier and zoologist, I can argue that I would not be sitting where I am today had he and his colleagues not tackled a zoonosis that still costs the UK millions of pounds every year to combat.

The colour plates are from: Anderson J. 1878. Comprising an Account of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975 and a Monograph of the Two Cetacean Genera, Platanista and Orcella. Second Volume - Plates. London: Bernard Quaritch.

White-browed Spinetail of the Colombian Andes

This White-browed Spinetail (Hellmayrea gularis) was searching the bark of trees—and taking proffered mealworms—at Hacienda El Bosque, a popular birding lodge at an altitude 11,000 feet (3,350 metres) in the Cordillera Central of the Colombian Andes. It is one of many species in the Central and South American ovenbird family, Furnariidae.

This species is found in damp forests along the Andes from Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to Venezuela at altitudes from 2,300 to 3,900 metres

A Murder in Yunnan by David Leffman: a book - and the zoologist, John Anderson

David Leffman has written a cracking book on the murder of a British diplomat, Augustus Raymond Margary, in China near the border with Burma on 21 February 1875. He begins by outlining the problem of finding out whodunnit:

Margary may have been beheaded. Or not. Perhaps he shot one of his attackers before being killed, though this same man - or somebody that officials claimed was the same man - later denied it. Margary's Chinese servants all died alongside him, or were picked off elsewhere, or one of them escaped. The attack happened inside Mangyun at a banquet, outside the town on the way to some hot springs, or up in the far-off hills.

His killers were regular Chinese soldiers, lawless bandits, tribal "savages", former Muslim rebels or a civil militia; they might have been led by a warlord, were acting independently, were under orders from the Chinese provincial governor, or were obeying the wishes of the Burmese king. The men arrested for the crime all confessed their guilt, or they were innocent villagers whose admissions were fabricated by a court interpreter. It's possible the interpreter himself was the murderer.

So whose version of events to believe? …

I will leave the story for you to read in David’s book. The background which he describes, having sorted out everything from modern places names to all the people involved called Li, was that Margary was moving ahead of a what is perhaps best described as a political mission looking into the possibility of opening up a trade route from British India, through Burma, to southern China. It was led by Colonel Horace Albert Browne (1831-1914). It turned back when attacked after Margary was killed by a large band although who the assailants were working for can be discussed along just the same lines as trying to work out who murdered Margary. The attack was repulsed. The squad of fifteen British Indian Army Sikh soldiers specially selected to escort the mission earned their pay and praise.

The medical officer/naturalist for the mission was Dr John Anderson. Anderson had the same role in an earlier mission with the same purpose and through the same country in 1868 that was led by Colonel (later Sir) Edward Bosc Sladen (1831–1890) and it was Anderson who wrote a an account of both missions in his book, Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875 under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne.

I have come across Anderson before since he named a rat collected in the first expedition for Sladen. The identity of that rat and probably wrongly identified as a species occurring in Hong Kong I discussed HERE. But who was John Anderson?

John Anderson 

John Anderson was born in Edinburgh in 1833. Both he and his elder brother, Thomas, were interested in natural history and both worked in India for a part of their lives. On leaving school John worked for the Bank of Scotland. He left in order to study medicine ,like his brother. Also like his brother he became more interested in the basic biology part of his education, in his case zoology and comparative anatomy, in his brother’s case botany. Over this period John dredged for crustaceans and other marine organisms in the Firth of Forth and described their morphology and proposed changes to their classification. He presented his work to the now extinct and poorly named Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh and published his findings in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He also included it in his M.D. thesis on nothing medical but entitled Contributions to Zoology. For that he was awarded a gold medal at his graduation rom the University of Edinburgh in 1861.

One paper began with:

Three years ago, I drew the attention of this Society to the fact of the frequent occurrence of Sacculina and Peltogaster on some of the Crustacea of the Firth of Forth. For some years past the subject of the affinities of these parasites has been occupying the minds of many foreign observers; and the following observations, therefore, are brought before the Society in the hope that they may tend to throw some light upon this difficult question…

In 1863-1864 he was professor of natural science at the Free Church College, Edinburgh (now the Edinburgh Theological Seminary). He left there for India.

I am slightly confused because notes on him from the Royal Society of Edinburgh show he was employed by the Indian Medical Service for his entire 21 years in India from 1865. If so then we can only assume that the post to which he was recruited was allocated for administrative purposes to that service. The background to his appointment in Calcutta was that the government  of India (the Raj) had taken on the collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal to form the nucleus of a museum. The government in India asked the Secretary of State for India in London to find somebody suitable for the job of curator. Anderson was appointed and a few years later upped in status to Superintendent. In addition he became Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Medical College, Calcutta. He held both offices until his retirement from India in 1886. The present building was completed in 1875. When we visited the museum in 2007 we made straight for the zoology collection. We suspected it had altered little since Anderson’s day. The legs of each cabinet of stuffed animals stood in a small trough of water as was always advised in the tropics to prevent destruction by insects. Later we crossed the Hooghly by the Howrah Bridge and visited the botanical gardens where Anderson’s brother Thomas had been Director in the 1860s before returning ill to Edinburgh where he died in 1870, aged 38.

It was while curator of the museum that John Anderson was medical officer and naturalist to the two missions to Yunnan.

Having written general accounts of both missions he turned his attention to the animals he had collected. He described them in papers and in a book that put them alongside other Asian animals: Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an Account of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975 and a Monograph of the Two Cetacean Genera, Platanista and Orcella. He didn’t go in for short titles. Nor short volumes since that was published with the text, over 900 pages, in one volume and the plates in another.

Anderson collected specimens whenever he could but apologised:

It is necessary that I should here give a short account of the two Expeditions, in order to bring out the difficulties with which I was beset as a naturalist, and which, to my great regret, were of so formidable a nature, that they restricted my investigations within the narrowest limits in a country the fauna of which is extremely rich and all but unknown.

The First Expedition was despatched in the end of 1867 from Calcutta, and returned in November 1868; and the Second Expedition left Mandalay on the 3rd January 1875, and returned thither on the 10th March of the same year.

By the permission of the Trustees of the Indian Museum, my services were placed at the disposal of the Government of India to accompany the two Missions as Naturalist and Medical Officer.

The ‘difficulties’ were indeed great as David Leffman covers in his book. Survival was not guaranteed on a mission opposed by two central governments and local vested interests.

I will return to the animals Anderson collected below other than to point out here an unforeseen problem with pickled reptiles during the first mission. The largely Muslim Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873) was in full swing in south-west Yunnan and followers occupied key towns and villages along the route. The Panthay governor ‘bearing the title Tu-tu-du’ and a Chinese chief who had joined the cause visited the travellers.

They demanded either a list of the presents intended for Momien or permission to search our baggage, both of which requests Sladen stoutly refused, and referred them to Momien for instructions. In the course of the day it came out that reports had been circulated that our boxes contained live dragons and serpents and fearful explosives. The fears of the Tu-tu-du were quieted by a peep at some bottled snakes and frogs, and he begged us to pay him an official visit. This, he said, would strengthen his influence over the townspeople, whom he described as thieves and ruffians.

In Calcutta Anderson must have had a far quieter life. His obituarist for the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Alfred William Alcock CIE, FRS (1859-1933) of the Indian Medical Service and a successor at the museum, noted:

He will also be remembered as one of the earliest advocates of a Zoological Garden for Calcutta, and as one of the experts who greatly assisted in giving shape to that Institution when it was started.

The zoo is now known as Alipore Zoo.

Alcock also noted that much progress was made in the discovery and description of Indian animals during Anderson’s time there:

The time at which Dr. Anderson arrived in India was fortunate in another respect. It coincided with a great impulse given to Indian zoology by the publication of Jerdon's "Birds of India," the last volume of which appeared in 1864, and with the presence in Calcutta of a larger number of men interested in the study of the fauna than were assembled there at any time before or since. Amongst these men were Jerdon himself, Ferdinand Stoliczka, Francis Day, and Valentine Ball, all of whom have now passed away.

Probably at no time has so much progress been made in the study of Indian Vertebrata as in the years 1861-74, and in this work Dr. Anderson took an important part.

Between the two missions to Yunnan, John Anderson, aged 37, married Grace Scott Thoms (1834-1917) in Dundee on 8 December 1870.

John Anderson was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1879. After that he undertook his only other collecting expedition while based in India—to Tenasserim and the Mergui Archipelago in 1881-82. A multi-author, two-volume, account of the fauna was published in 1889. He also published a historical account of commercial and political interactions between British India and ports in Burma and Siam under the title English Intercourse with Siam in the Seventeenth Century. 

During home leave one can deduce from the address Anderson gave in the preface to books that he stayed in his home city of Edinburgh (he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1874). Number 6 Royal Terrace is now listed as part of a long terrace of town houses designed by William Playfair and built between 1823 and the early 1830s. However when he retired from India in 1886 aged 53 he settled in London after travelling in Japan with his wife.

In London Anderson was in poor health and he spent several winters in Egypt. He did not idle away his time, embarking on a study of mammals, reptiles and amphibians occurring there and in neighbouring countries. The first part was published in 1898; the second was completed after his death and published in 1902.

Anderson also began a collection of fish from the Nile and its tributaries after his death that work was continued with support from the Egyptian Government.

In London John Anderson lived at 71 Harrington Gardens, South Kensington. He continued zoological work and was well-known at meetings of the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society and Linnean Society. He had been a fellow of the Zoological Society of London since 1869 and a vice-president for many years.

Ethnography was another of Anderson’s interests not just in terms of objects for the Calcutta museum. For example, in the Mergui Archipelago he studied what are now called the Moken and in Japan collected Ainu artefacts; that collection was given to the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

John Anderson died of cardiac failure after two days of pneumonia at the Old Hall Hotel, Buxton, a spa town in Derbyshire on 15 August 1900; he was 66. His sister from Edinburgh was present and she informed the local registrar. He left an estate of £13,767, 5s. 7d.—worth about £2 million in 2026. His wife died in London on 2 October 1917. They are buried together in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Alfred Alcock in his obituary summed up Anderson’s contributions:

Both in our Indian Empire and in North-Eastern Africa, Dr. Anderson contributed much to the solution of one the chief biological questions of the present day, an accurate knowledge of the distribution of animal life.

Anderson's Tombstone
Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh
Scotland, Burial Monument Inscriptions, 1507-2024

Dolphins, Rats and Captain Bowers

A substantial part of Anderson’s book on the zoology of the missions was taken up by a monograph on two cetacean genera. He compared the anatomy of the Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcella brevirostris) with that of the very different in appearance Ganges River Dolphin (Platanista gangetica). He obtained a specimen of the former at the town of Bhoma, the highest navigable point of the Irrawaddy (now called the Ayeyarwady in Myanmar) on the first mission. He saw lots of the dolphins cavorting in the water but could not get his hands on a specimen since the fishermen ‘regard them with a superstitious respect, and each village is believed to be under the protection of a particular dolphin, which guards the fishery’. Not even the offer of 100 rupees worked.

…it was only by the fortunate acquisition of a dead carcass thrown upon the bank, and secured by Captain Bowers, that I was enabled to make a thorough comparison of the structure of this remarkable inhabitant of the river.

Captain Bowers was one of three delegates from the commercial community of Rangoon, in other words, the certain beneficiaries of increased trade to and from China along the Irrawaddy.

Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcella brevirostris)

From Volume 2: Plates Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an Account
of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975…

One of the species collected and described by Anderson was named for Bowers as Mus bowersi. The name has survived as Berylmys bowersi or Bowers’s White-toothed Rat.

 Berylmys bowersi. Bowers’s White-toothed Rat (current name)
From Volume 2: Plates Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an Account
of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to Western Yunnan in 1868 and 1975…

Captain Alexander Bowers (born 1826, Greenock, Scotland; died 1887 Mergui, Burma) was a master mariner who produced his own report after the Sladen Mission. A copy of Bhamo Expedition. Report on the Practicability of Re-opening the Trade Route, between Burma and Western China, Rangoon, American Mission Press, 1869, sold at auction for £2,400 in 2026. However, Alexander Bowers  who died in 1887 has another but tragic place in history. His son, Henry Robertson ‘Birdie’ Bowers (born 1883) died with Captain Scott and Edward Wilson in the Antarctic. Both father and son have now appeared in these jottings independently (see HERE).

Anderson also named animals from the first mission for Sladen. I will cover Sladen and his eponymous rodents in another article.

Eponyms

In recognition of his work Anderson’s name was assigned to species described by others from the 1800s to 2018. In some cases his name has been used as part of the common name but not the scientific name. Particularly poignant is Anderson’s Gerbil, Gerbillus andersoni, named by William Edward de Winton (1856-1922) who completed the second volume on North African mammals after Anderson’s death.

Leffman D. 2025. A Murder in Yunnan: The Unsolved Killing of a British Diplomat on China's Southwestern Frontier. Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books. ISBN 978-988-76749-1-7. Available on Amazon HERE.

The now critically endangered Burmese Roofed Turtle (Batagur trivittata)
Once common and collected by Anderson at Bhamo

UPDATED: 6 July 2026