PUBLICATION UPDATE 3: FOR WANT OF A BETTER FIELD GUIDE TO THE FRESHWATER SNAILS OF BORNEO

04 June 2017

In Malaysia, invertebrate ecology students often have trouble finding good field guides to identify species they are studying. They usually have to resort to less relevant identification guides from neighbouring areas or worst still, from sources halfway around the world (especially from the United States and Europe, where invertebrate field guides are far more common). This has often led to grossly misidentified taxa and implications for interpretation of results.

The freshwater snails of Sabah, northern Borneo. Photographs by Ng. et al. (2017).

Thus in 2016, colleagues Ting Hui, Jasrul, Manuel, Alexandra, Liew and me teamed up to address this issue specifically for the freshwater snails of Sabah, on the north-western tip of Borneo. We catalogued and photographed all freshwater snails in the BORNEENSIS collection of the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. We then made a KMZ file which contains data and photographs of each collection lot. This KMZ file (published under a Creative Common license CC BY 4.0) can be downloaded for free and viewed on Google Earth, creating a useful and accessible reference for everyone. You can read our paper here.

The KMZ file uploaded onto Google Earth, with each pin representing individual collection lots complete with photographs and data. (Google Earth screen capture reproduced under fair use for educational purposes.)

While this is by no means a done-and-dusted work, we hope this study will be a useful guide for invertebrate ecologists in Sabah as well as being a platform for further in-depth studies on the vastly under-explored freshwater snails in Borneo and elsewhere.

Featured publication:

TH Ng, J Dulipat, JK Foon, M Lopes-Lima, A Zieritz, TS Liew (2017) A preliminary checklist of the freshwater snails of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) deposited in the BORNEENSIS collection, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. ZooKeys 673: 105-123. DOI - PDF