Singapore is a treasure trove of rare and exotic wildlife, and NTU students are braving the elements to better understand and conserve them
by Derek Rodriguez / Animation by Vivian Lim
More than the generations that came before them, today’s youths are passionate about protecting the environment. But some NTU students are taking it a step further, come rain or shine, early or late.
Instead of working in air-conditioned comfort, they are rolling up their sleeves and venturing into the wild to preserve nature’s wonders.
PhD student Regine Tiong, for instance, is up in the wee hours of the morning at the beach, while most people are still curled up in bed.
Hawksbill hatchlings finding their feet in the world.
There, she patiently waits beside the sandy nests of critically endangered hawksbill turtles until the turtle hatchlings break through their shells and head for the sea.
She then collects the unhatched eggs and broken shells, and takes them back to her lab in NTU where she studies the genetic diversity of these turtles, as having good diversity indicates how they can better adapt and survive in different environments and against diseases.
The hope is that through these studies, scientists can figure out how to best safeguard these animals, whose numbers have fallen sharply in over a century.
“The project aims to help the conservation of the hawksbill turtle,” says Regine. “It’s fascinating that we find them nesting in Singapore. Beaches here are man-made or reclaimed, and are narrow with heavy human traffic. Yet they still choose to nest here. This gives us the opportunity to protect them.”
Photo: Marx Yim and The TEE Lab
For insect whisperer Calvin Leung, who studies ecologically important insects that live in wood called saproxylic insects, collecting the critters for research is “quite tedious”, he says.
The PhD student goes into the woods every week and a half to collect samples, taking segments of logs from the forest floor to bring back to the lab, where he dissects them and picks out insects like beetles, ants and termites. At the same time, he sets traps in the tree canopy to catch flying insects.
But his luck with bugs runs out when it comes to the weather.
Almost every time he goes into the field, rain clouds won’t be far behind. His “rain curse” means toughing it out in wet conditions is par for the course.
“It rained a lot in Hong Kong when I was doing fieldwork there. And when I was in Nepal in summer, I looked up and there was a snow cloud above. And some weeks ago, in Bukit Timah forest, it started raining, so I waited it out and went back when the rain stopped and the clouds dispersed. But after setting just two traps, I heard thunder and then lightning struck a tree nearby, so I ran for my life,” he laughs.
But it’s all worth it – Calvin says the saproxylic ecosystem is an exciting one, with a single piece of log housing hundreds of critters.
“Some feed on wood, some are predators, some can be future pollinators, and others use it as a hotel. I want to know about their diversity and try to quantify their ecosystem functions,” he says.
Like Calvin, PhD student Ong Xin Rui sets traps in and off the ground. However, her quarry is the dung beetle, never mind how good or bad they smell.
But beyond the bugs that create balls of dung from animal poop to chow down on later, Xin Rui often bumps into animals in the forest like wild boars and macaques.
Wild boars usually turn tail and flee, but macaques can be tricky to deal with and will sometimes mess with traps. She says it’s best to not engage with them, but sometimes sticky situations arise.
Watch Xin Rui set up a trap.
“Macaques in some areas are used to being fed, so they will come up to you to look for food. Once, in Pulau Ubin, I was retrieving my pitfall traps and left a plastic bag filled with traps and dung on the ground. A macaque thought it had food and rushed over and grabbed the bag. But obviously it wasn’t food, so it got angry and started throwing everything around,” she recounts.
Despite these challenges, studying dung beetles is no monkey business for Xin Rui.
“Dung beetles provide key services in nutrient cycling and secondary seed dispersal. Hopefully, they can be recognised as a group that’s really important for forest ecosystems,” she says.
Turtle talk
As a child, Regine Tiong dreamt of being a vet. Then turtles came into her life. She began her relationship with them as an undergraduate at NTU’s Asian School of the Environment. Through a programme offered by Singapore’s National Research Foundation, the animal lover spent a month in a research institution in Cyprus studying green turtles (above) and loggerhead turtles.
Watching turtles come up at night to lay their eggs, and finding and protecting the nests while waiting for the eggs to hatch, affirmed her mission to help turtles.
This led to her studying the genomics of the hawksbill turtle as her final-year project. After she graduated, she convinced Asst Prof Kim Hie Lim, her final-year project supervisor, that developing the hawksbill turtle’s reference genome, and using it to study their population, was worth pursuing as a PhD project.
“She saw potential in this, the first such study at that time, which I’m very grateful for,” says Regine, who now works with NParks to monitor turtle nests on beaches in East Coast Park, Sentosa and Sisters’ Islands, including at the hatchery on Small Sister’s Island.
Apart from contributing to science, she hopes to raise awareness of turtle conservation in Singapore.
“When I started, many Singaporeans didn’t even know we have turtles here. I think this project has created awareness about them. Being in NTU has also given me access to high-quality genomic data, strong sequencing teams and high-tech equipment that other turtle researchers might not have.
“Moving forward, I hope to collaborate with researchers around the world who do not have the same resources by helping them to sequence turtle DNA with samples they have collected.”
“Turtle tracks are often the first sign of turtles. If you see sand flying, that might be a turtle digging. And look out for sand domes – turtles push the sand back and create these little domes after they have nested.”
– Regine on how to spot a turtle nest, which should not be interfered with
Beetle mania
Photo: Sean Yap
Calvin with a home-made flight interceptor to catch flying insects, such as longhorn beetles that prefer feeding on wood in the forest canopy.
Bugs don’t bug Calvin Leung. The PhD student wants to cross paths with saproxylic insects – insects that live in wood.
Part of his research is finding out how the saproxylic community is recovering over time in younger forests in Singapore. To do this, he compares the diversity of saproxylic communities he collects from log samples in forests manually restored in the 1990s and secondary forests – forests assumed to be regrown after World War II – against those he gets from primary forests, which are more than 150 years old.
The budding taxonomist is almost certain he has discovered a new species of beetle too.
Says Calvin: “Earlier this year I found some stag beetle larvae. Usually these are quite huge. But the ones I collected were just about three millimetres long. They look like they’re from a very primitive lineage of stag beetles, not like the ones we are familiar with. It must be a new species. We just have to go through some procedures to confirm it.”
Another rare insect he has collected is the longhorn beetle. Coincidentally, within Singapore, this beetle has only been found in NTU, in the forests next to Nanyang Crescent.
“Some people collect insects like stag beetles and jewel beetles, because they find them cool. But these insects are valued based on their appearance, not what they actually do. So I want to demonstrate their importance to the ecosystem and show that they are worth more than as pets.”
– Calvin on what motivated him to study saproxylic insects
From dung to discovery
Photo: Marx Yim and The TEE Lab
Xin Rui fills plastic cups with dung as bait for beetles. To get a trap into the canopy, she throws a weight with a rope over a branch, ties the free end of the rope to the trap, and hoists it up.
Ong Xin Rui is the cheerleader for an unsung hero of the forest – the dung beetle, which she calls “nature’s clean-up crew”.
“I use dung beetles as indicators of the mammal population in Singapore, as well as other parts of Southeast Asia,” the PhD student adds. “Dung beetles get excrement from different kinds of animals as a source of food and for nesting purposes. So I collect them, bring them back to the lab and sequence the DNA of their gut contents to find out what animals can be found in the same forest.”
“When people talk about insect conservation, they focus mostly on bees and butterflies because these creatures are nice to look at and are pollinators, but what about other equally important insects like dung beetles?”
– Xin Rui on helping the unsung heroes of the forest gain recognition for their role in the ecosystem
This story was published in the Sep-Oct 2023 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.
