Black panthers - a tribute

Leopards have been and continue to be an obsession of mine since many years ago. Overshadowed by their bigger and more popular cousins tigers and lions, Panthera pardus is the underdog of big cats, smaller, stealthier and far more adaptable, able to subsist on a far larger range of prey animals and requiring less undisturbed natural habitats to get by, even thriving at the fringes of our largest urban areas like Mumbai and Nairobi.

It is this elusiveness that has enabled leopards to persist in larger numbers than their more endangered cousins, and yet makes them more difficult to spot in the wild. Over the years, I have gone to many protected areas in Asia with the hope of sighting wild leopards. This I have managed, with great luck , in the national parks of India and in Sri Lanka. Closer to home, they have eluded me thus far in Southeast Asia, where some of the more prime areas in Java, Cambodia and Thailand have failed to yield any sightings unfortunately, likely due to greater persecution and a diminished prey base.

Just next door in peninsular Malaysia where leopards are almost all of the black variety, the likelihood of encountering one is even slimmer not only because of their dark coloration, but owing to the thick evergreen rainforest environment where they inhabit. However that does not stop me from finding out as much about black panthers as I can, and I am pleased to share the fruits of my labor in the form of two published articles.

1) Natural history of the leopard (Panthera pardus) in Peninsular Malaysia

Having a research paper published in an established scientific periodical is quite an achievement for a non-scientist like myself, and I am truly honored that the Malayan Nature Journal accepted my manuscript!

2) Black panthers of Singapore

A popular account of the history of the species in my home country, sort of an appendix, if you will, to the more technical article above.

Addendum:

In the interest of brevity, I omitted the following observation in the second article:

Compared to tigers, reported leopard sightings started later and peaked in the 1890s and early 1900s. I postulate two reasons for this. Firstly, as tigers were being hunted intensively from the mid 1800s, their population declined significantly, allowing leopard numbers to increase, a phenomenon also known as 'mesopredator release' as competitive pressure eased. Second, looking at the history of land use and forest cover in Singapore, there appears to be a short window of time beginning in the 1880s and lasting till 1910 where forested area actually increased in extent. This was due to the diminishing acreage of pepper and gambier plantations, which were incidentally associated with tiger attacks on people. Fewer tigers and a concomitant recovery in forest coverage likely served to benefit leopards. Then, as the cultivation of rubber took off from around 1910, natural habitat for large animals quickly declined and sightings of leopards also dropped and were limited to the offshore islands.

Source: Corlett 1992 The Ecological transformation of Singapore, 1819-1990

I hope you enjoy reading these two articles as much as I had researching and writing them. Comments are most welcome, I would love to expand our knowledge of this most beautiful and enigmatic of all animals, truly the Prince of Cats!

The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation by Fred Pearce
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It is always interesting to read what Fred Pearce has to say, and I have great respect for his many years of investigative reporting on environmental and nature issues. He writes lucidly and the variety of locations from which he reports adds tremendously to the interest of his accounts.

Having already read two of his previous books, I noticed he tries to be deliberately controversial and contrarian in his views on these topics. Whether it is merely an attempt to generate more interest for his publishers and audience, or if he truly believes in the conclusions he writes about I do not know. This book is ostensibly about invasive species, a subject that evokes strong feelings in many. Pearce argues that labeling species as such is entirely arbitrary and artificial since it all depends on the time frame in which one is referencing. Go back far enough and every organism has to come from somewhere else, so arguably every species 'invaded' its current home. This much I agree with. But he goes further to opine that given this, we should therefore embrace ecological change, since nature is never static, habitats and their creatures are always evolving. We should not be too bothered by 'novel' ecosystems created out of brownfield sites where hybrid and alien species thrive. In any case there is nothing humans can do to stop this change as nature does not go back to previous states.

Yes, it is true that humans have altered the landscape on a massive scale for thousands of years, even in such seemingly wild places like the Amazon and the African savanna. However the book totally misses the point at looking at the RATE of change we are imposing on the natural world. It is this that makes the whole argument for letting go of traditional attempts at preserving nature fall flat. "The New Wild" is the author's version of that other controversial book "Rambunctious Garden" by Emma Marris, in that it also envisions and supports a new state of nature marked by human interference and the giving up of preserving 'pristine' nature because it was hardly pristine to begin with. For this conclusion and its anti-conservation (in the traditional sense) message it does not warrant a high rating from me.

One simply cannot deny that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction because of the rapid rate of species extinction, up to 1000 times the background rate, due to our activities in the Anthropocene. How can one argue that this does not matter since change is the constant? Of course it does because we are the agents of change at a pace that is out of proportion to the change that the environment is used to. There is no time for nature to adapt to the destruction, we are for all intents and purposes akin to the meteorite that struck out the dinosaurs. Sure nature will EVENTUALLY come back, but in what time frame? What about the species lost FOREVER? The danger in Pearce's and Marris' writing is that it is okay to let go, and let our destructive habits continue unabated, let nature 'take its course' so to speak. Yes we are part of nature anyway so is it therefore natural to let humans wipe out other living beings on this planet?

It is well and good that forests are regenerating on abandoned farms as urbanization takes hold. Good that animals are once more returning to suburban landscapes in Europe and North America. What the author does not mention is the continued habitat destruction that has been exported by the developed countries of the west to the global South in places like China, India and Indonesia, where the opposite is occurring much like the massive die offs that took place in America and Europe during their industrialization. Nature simply cannot withstand the scale and pace of industrial development. It is merely wishful thinking and misplaced optimism that unbridled development is all right since nature can recover as is now happening in some places of the global North. We will all live in a biologically impoverished world as nature gets wiped out, notwithstanding the handful of hardy species that can live with us.

Pearce's book is still worth reading for educating readers about common misconceptions of nature being untouched, virgin and pristine, and how no species can be seen as absolutely native and more recent arrivals as dangerous and undesired. But this does not imply that we should not care about the rapid change we are imposing right now on the natural world and that anything goes since nature has always been resilient and will bounce back somehow. I hope readers do not get misled into this dangerous way of thinking.

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Book review of "Nature Contained, Environmental Histories of Singapore" by Tim Barnard

Nature Contained by Tim Barnard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a collection of essays on the history of various subjects relating to the natural environment of Singapore. Some of the topics are interesting, like how the island came to become a hotspot for man-eating tigers in its earliest days since British colonization, or how farming was so widespread that it surprisingly did not have to import much food from elsewhere up till as recently as the 1980s! Other drier topics include the history of the Botanical Gardens, Alfred Russell Wallace's years spent using the country as a base for his wanderings in the surrounding archipelago, the brief but failed attempt by the colonial government at controlling trade in wildlife, and the episode of how Singapore was coerced into signing CITES by the United States after flatly rejecting pleas from local environmental activists.

The overwhelming impression is that of how the natural environment as manifested in the original primary rainforests and its wildlife had always taken a backseat to more pressing economic concerns. Indeed, from the sad chronicle of how the collection in the natural history museum was shunted from one basement storage shed to another, the aforementioned passive stance of the authorities with regard to wildlife trade, to the rapid closure of very productive market gardens and pig farms in favor of more economic industrial and housing developments, makes the use of the word 'contained' in the book's title rather lenient. I would've chosen 'Nature Subjugated', 'displaced' or 'eradicated' as a more apt description of the country's history as far as wild nature is concerned. In the final chapter about the state's drive to green the island by planting non-native trees, the lead author falls short of being really critical of the direction the government has taken in making nature a man-made product and equating planted trees with 'nature'. The culmination of it all he rightly points out, is the monstrosity that is Gardens by the Bay, basking in the glory of its artifice and proud to be a showcase of how nature can be built from scratch.

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