6 June 2010 Kinabalu Park Headquarters, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Hi gang!

For the next 9 months or so I will be conducting biological field work in some pretty cool places—Mt. Kinabalu in Sabah, central Thailand, Danum Valley in Sabah, and a remote part of southeastern Sarawak. It’s such an amazing job and I felt like I should share it with you. I’ll do my best to write a bit each week to tell you about my work on frogs, the biodiversity in each of the places I work, the various cultures and histories of the areas, the food, and what life is like in the field.

Tonight was our 3rd night of field work, and it marks the end of my first week in Sabah. With field work, there is always some level of administrative hoop-jumping in terms of getting your permits and arranging logistics like renting a field vehicle, finding housing, and sorting out field work schedules. Most researchers will complain about the permitting process in some way (I certainly have!) but in all honesty it’s not that bad—it just takes a long time and requires going to several offices, filling out forms, getting signatures, and repeating that about 10 times—both at the beginning when you submit your application, and at the end when you want to pick up your permit! But I now have permits for every place I will be working, so I’m happy.

The purpose of my project, and the reason I get to go to all of these great places is to survey frogs, in order to determine whether abundance and diversity throughout SE Asia have changed in the past 20-80 years. For the most part, this requires me to go out at night and look for frogs in a standardized way (which allows me to compare my results from each of the different sites). At most of the sites, I will also be conducting diurnal forest plot surveys—we mark off a standardized area and search the entire quadrat for every frog we can find. By doing this over a period of about 2 months at each site, we hope to find the majority of frogs that are at each place. Then we can compare our results with previous surveys in order to determine whether frog populations in SE Asia are declining. Let’s hope not!

Last night was a great night for field work. It was just about to rain when we started our survey, and all the frogs seemed to know it. We saw two species of Megophrys, several Leptobrachium montanum, and a cool Kaloula baluensis that seemed to prefer walking in very very slow motion rather than hopping. I heard him calling so we turned off our lights and waited until we could hear him again. When one of our team switched his headlamp back on, the little frog was crawling very very slowly, as if trying to escape unnoticed! It was super cute and I had to stifle my laughter so as not to disturb him too much. The other cool thing about this species (and all members of this genus) is that they exude a very very sticky substance as a defense mechanism, so when you pick them up to measure them, your hands often get covered in a sort of frog glue. The frogs use it to avoid being eaten by snakes—the snakes often drop the frog because of the mouthful of bad-tasting sticky goop they get. Not a bad way to avoid predation! To top it all off, we heard tarsiers calling throughout the night! I still haven’t seen one, but I haven’t given up hope.

As I’m getting reacquainted with the forest here, I’m reminded of all the great things I love about Sabah and Mt. Kinabalu. The mountain itself is stunning; it is home to the world’s largest moss—Dawsonia, which I love; the variety of birds and frogs and invertebrates is amazing; and the people here are some of the nicest and funniest I have ever met. I’ll do my best to write about all the great things here in the coming weeks, and I look forward to getting your questions! Have a great week, and as we say here, selamat tinggal!