The annotated budak

Tide watcher

Noctuidae, the largest family in the order Lepidoptera with more than 35,000 named species, consists of moths of diverse size and shape but bearing the synapomorphies of 'noctuid ocelli' just above the compound eyes and a peculiar branching of the forewing's second median vein. The simple eyes are lost in some species and wild individuals are usually loath to permit close inspection of their finer traits, so other clues come into play when one is making a not ureasonable stab at identifying random moths in field and glade. A well-built abdomen covered with wooly setae; simple, rarely pectinate antenna; mottled forewings that hide pale, broad hindwings; and a kidney-shaped spot near the middle of the forewing – these are among the general features that define owlets in their traditional sense but offer no counsel for a clade that now includes well-known former families such as tiger moths, tussocks and nolids.

Larval noctuids, which may resemble the inching loopers of geometrids, often descend from their host plants to pupate in the soil, under leaf litter or in deadwood. This habit may shield the developing imagos from parasitoid flies and wasps, and has persisted in a genus with at least two species that thrive in tidal woods. Aucha velans, which has a yellow mark on the hindwing, and Aucha villiana, whose hindwings are uniformly brown, can usually be seen when clumsy bodies trudging through mud and mangrove flush dirty grey moths that dart off, fluttering close to the ground, to quickly land on a nearby trunk or pencil root, where they pretend to be one of many knobs or scars on a wall of mud-caked bark. Little is known about the adults' feeding habits, though they are said to be active in daytime. The caterpillars, according to D.H. Murphy, gnaw at the edges of Avicennia leaves until they tire of briny foliage and rappel unto the forest floor. There, on a landscape of growing mounds and perpetual waste, they crawl under rotting branches or algal mats, weaving in their beds a case of silk to cloak from wind and water their breakdown and transformation into creatures of powder that take no prisoners as they turn awry and watch the sea's slow, sure rise.

Paradoxa botanica

Rhizophora mucronata, Lim Chu Kang mangroves.

"In Persia in the Carmanian district, where the tide is felt, there are trees of fair size like the andrachne in shape and in leaves; and they bear much fruit like in colour to almonds on the outside, but the inside is coiled up as though the kernels were all united. These trees are all eaten up to the middle by the sea and are held up by their roots, so that they look like a cuttle-fish."

– Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants IV, translated by Sir Arthur Holt.

"On the Red Sea, which at this point we have called the Persian Gulf, the tides of which are carried a long way inland, the trees are of a remarkable nature; for they are to be seen on the coast when the tide is out, embracing the barren sands with their naked roots like polypuses, eaten away by the salt and looking like trunks that have been washed ashore and left high and dry. Also these trees when the tide rises remain motionless although beaten by the waves; indeed at high water they are completely covered, and the evidence of the facts proves that this species of tree is nourished by the brackish water."

– Pliny the Elder, Natural History, translated by H. Rackham

"Whether the mangrove landscape was experienced by the travellers or was discovered by the readers of their narratives, it no doubt surprised them because it did not fit their ordinary perception of the world. Some sentences show clearly how much the Graeco-Romans were amazed by those trees rooted in the sea instead of the ground. The surprise is also expressed through a stylistic antinomy. In reality, from the ancient point of view, this unbelievable marine forest belonged to the category of paradoxa (marvelous, incredible things), which are indeed the major criterion in understanding landscape geography in antiquity.

– Pierre Schneider, The Discovery of Tropical Mangroves in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Science and Wonder, The Journal of the Hakluyt Society, February 2011.

In Mandai's shadows

One of the first creatures to catch the eye when one enters Mandai Mangroves is a medium-sized dragonfly with dark, metallic colours, whose thin abdomen rises and dips with a grace matched only by Risiophlebia dorhni, a midget from inland swamps. Similarly stenotypic and almost as rare, Pornothemis starrei survives only in a few unprotected mudflats along the island's northern coastline, where the males launch themselves from the tips of breathing roots to swoop through gaps between the trees and land far out of reach. Short-banded sailors, whose caterpillars feed on vegetation on both sides of the former railway line, also inhabit these inhuman elevations, cruising with scant effort over the heads of field workers from the Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey of Singapore who sink with each step towards the brink. Glassy tigers, whose blue-streaked wings unleash just enough lift to keep themselves afloat and aflutter, dance at a tamer level but never tire of taunting terrestrial hunters as the latter stumble with their hands full and heels afoot in clouds of long-legged flies and halophilic moths.

Tiny pools, some no larger than a footprint, litter the floor of this littoral forest. The valves of Geloina, a heavily built clam that can survive for long periods in stagnant sediments but succumbs in vast numbers to nocturnal predators, languish amid a maze of pneumatophores and the ephemera of modern life: television sets, fuel gauges, beverage containers, decaying upholstery and video cassettes that serve as piecemeal retreats for agile crabs. Shovels plunged into the mud by paltry trickles yield broken polychaetes, flexing amphipods and squirming tanaids, the last being a minor subdivision of peracarid crustaceans that resemble segmented worms with jointed legs and stout chelae. Doubling as a handnet, a plastic sieve allowed bright-eyed fry to slip past its gaps but trapped minute shrimp and a bumblebee goby.

Depressions near the feet of large trees, where the water is buffered from scorching rays, provide refuges for fish that slide under fallen leaves and half-buried shells. In these puddles are other foliar bodies: reddish brown flatworms and dirty green slugs that cling to the bottom and assume shapeless guises when clumsy soles wreck the stillness of their holes. The polyclads appear to languish at the margins, in slivers of moisture that envelope their folds and exaggerate their curves. In certain pools, Limnostylochus occurs in palpable densities, gliding over each other like listless mercenaries awaiting the turn of the tide that will signal their assault of deadwood and lobster mounds for hidden quarry.

The slugs, which readily let go of their perches to roll with the wake when lashed by invisible waves, belong to a clade of opistobranch gastropods that survive by sucking the contents of marine vegetation. A larger congener familiar to local reefwalkers is Elysia ornata, which can reach more than 12 cm in length and is often found amid the filaments of Bryopsis on southern flats. The lavish parapodia of Elysia bangtawaensis, named in honour of a village that defied economic imperatives to protect traditional resources, are similarly infused with active chloroplasts that serve as secondary sources of metabolites. Evenly spaced orange glands line the borders of these unruly capes, which are flecked with white dots and ruddy specks. The animals, which loll in bleak retreats when the swamp is exposed, are thought to ascend nearby roots during high water to feed on green macroalgae and stock up on emergency rations. Confined to the mangroves of the northwest, these sarcoglossids enjoy a life of languor in near-forgotten corners of the island that still harbour in their gullies the scenes of a greener past.

The western banks of the river now house a battery of woodworking factories, but the mudflats beyond the mangroves still abound with horseshoe crabs and other benthic fauna whose bodies, eggs and interstitial larvae sustain a seasonal invasion of shorebirds. Flights of redshank and whimbrel erupted from the lower reaches of Sungei Mandai Besar as ichthyologists approached its mouth. Collared kingfishers cackled between sorties and little egrets gleamed as they stalked fish and crustacea in sunlit creeks. Sesarmine crabs with iridescent face bands lurked near the base of mature trunks or watched from the shadows of fallen boughs.

On slightly raised beds near meandering streamlets, in holes within coarse substrata supported by densely knitted mangrove roots, were small colonies of Metaplax, inch-wide crabs with bright orange pincers that resemble Uca and Macrophthalmus in appearance and ecological niche but are aberrant members of Varunidae, a group of eurytopic shore crabs allied to grapsids and sesarmids and of not insignificant culinary value. Metaplax lacks the outrageous cheliped ratios of fiddler crabs, but males engage in visual displays similar to that of intertidal ocypodids, waving their claws to attract mates and repel rivals before the tide returns to sink their courtship rhythms. Their closest cousins thrive in rocky habitats and salt marshes, so this break from family tradition probably arose in a time when there was still new ground to conquer and land to spare for forefathers who found themselves marooned, and later modified, for life on the soft, shallow outerbelly of tropical seas.

Leea indica

A stroll down many forest trails, through shaded lengths where the trees form a bower that shields their saplings from heavy-handed invasions of botanical nursing grounds, is likely to bring one pass many a shrub with compound foliage consisting of seven long leaflets with a toothed margin. Modest stilts are often present at the base of large treelets, an adaptation that may give Leea indica a measure of support in swampy woods and the soft soils of back mangroves.  

Named after James Lee, a horticultural collaborator of Carl Linnaeus, Leea is an Old World genus of slightly woody shrubs, small trees or erect herbs that thrive in secondary fringes or riparian forests. Four species are known from Singapore, but two are locally extinct while a tiny population of Leea angulata teeters on a coastal hill besieged by harbourfront developments. Imported sprigs of Leea rubra grow at Bukit Timah, their native conspecifics having long lost their foothills to the advances of a garden city, but Leea aequata, which provided the lectotype for the genus, has never returned to its former haunts in Ang Mo Kio and Pulau Blakang Mati. Only the bandicoot berry survives in reasonable numbers, a feat that could be attributed to its catholic taste in habitats as well as its rare appeal to a host of pollinators and seed dispersers. 

Plants in bloom, which risk dismissal by shallow primates for their plain, greenish-white flowers, are magnets for creatures of greater discernment. The inflorescences, bursting from long peduncles on a broad, complicated cyme, consist of small heads with a bell-shaped calyx and a corolla with reflexed lobes. Within these tiny vases are receptacular tissues and glands that emit no discernible scent but must reek of ambrosia, for butterflies, bees, wasps, beetles, ants and true flies flock to these stations and indulge themselves at length, lowering their usual guard to the approach of curious bodies and risking, in their apparent intoxication, the snares of crab spiders, praying mantids, agile salticids and assassin bugs. Posies, boldly coloured hairstreaks in the genus Drupadia, abandon their restless fluttering to partake of extrafloral secretions, but most other butterflies – quakers, bluebottles, fluffy tits, yellow veined lancers, Malay lacewings, planes, snow flats, common grass yellows, chestnut bobs, ancyra blues, common four rings, starry bobs, chocolate grass yellows and Malayan five rings – simply land on the fleshy buds, unfurl their proboscises and drink in their fill. Hoverflies, blue-banded bees and potter wasps also join the feast, which continues late in the day and probably concludes only when the jugs run dry and commence their transformation into purplish black berries, which fit the gapes of bulbuls and fruit doves, returning, as it were, the favours of a community that's always on the wing but seldom, if ever, in concert.

Wild thing

Johan Christian Fabricius, a Danish natural historian and student of Carl von Linné who single-handedly dragged entomology out of the dark ages and set the discipline on the path to modern systematics, used the Greek word agrios to describe a group of insects that thrive not in the confines of domestic holdings but in meadows and marshland. The term no longer survives in taxonomical ranks, save as a suffix for widespread genera, but Agrion – those that live in the open fields, the savage and the wild, the untamed, uncultivated and unreclaimed – was the name he bestowed on the insects we commonly call damselflies: the sprites, wisps, coraltails and sylvans that dance on delicate wings and form in their coital union a heart of broken proportions.

She came as a wild thing, a sliver of grey and frightened growls who slipped under a door and hid under a weekend of furniture before worming her way into a household of older cats and still healing hearts. At first, she cowered in her carrier, which served as a temporary crib, and shrank before fatter housemates, who regarded her with disguised curiosity or the capricious impulses of feline spirits with an excess of kinetic energy in their veins. But she soon learnt that lazy Sundays began with a can of savoury goodness, that the comforter offered adventure under soft covers, that given an ounce of audacity, a cozy end of the bed was hers for the taking.

Muffin was never a heavyweight, but she grew to hold her own against cohorts of bad habit and bounce her skinny frame off couch and coffee table for first dibs at the breakfast bowl. Doors, cabinets and bags were fair game for sharp claws, essential supplements to a mauled scratching post, and verbal reprimands were met by indignant retorts, mischievous swipes and a look of innocence that never surrendered to gentle intimidation. A long, lithe tail doubled as a tool for diversion in lieu of a favourite string, and the fur on her underside was much more feathery than that of her back, but ruffling this unruly tangle was usually a risk except when she was lost in slumber on the quilt, her limbs stretched out and heaving belly exposed and inviting, lying wedged between a warm torso and the threads of a revolving chair, or nestled against naked arms on cold, grey afternoons when all that mattered was the stirrings of a curled figure of contentment in common repose. Now she rests forever from hours of play and never needs to endure the chidings due to a kitten with blackened pads who entered our lives for a few short months before slipping away with a broken heart and a body of restless dreams.

Daisy Sunday

Plants often play second fiddle in the mental ensembles of those who search the woods for things that fly, leap and sing, forgetting in their thrill of discovery the things that grow by the trails and move with the wind, whose shoots, sap and sexual bodies fuel many of the creatures they take delight in. In their defence, it has to be said that the science of botany employs quite different jargon and terms of reference from that of zoologists and many of its subjects lend themselves to confusion, being of like habit and indistinguishable form, when not in bloom. But flowers can confound too, especially when they belong to a family whose members often bear highly similar inflorescences. Sphagneticola (=Wedelia) trilobata, for instance, is a low creeper with firm, hairy leaves whose composite heads often peep from garden beds where these herbs are used as ground cover. In parts of the far east, however, these neotropical asters have escaped horticultural confinement to pose an existential threat to old world cousins and other incumbent vegetation, though it is reported that they fail to seed in local soils.

Southeast Asia is far, in plain distance and temporal biogeography, from the regional centres of diversity for Asteraceae, but one native species can be mistaken, and missed, for the ill-named Singapore daisy by casual observers seeking more exotic fare. Found in the dry rump of mangroves or on sandy beaches in the shadow of coastal shrubs, the sea ox-eye is a scrambling herb with ovate, slightly hispid foliage and pretty yellow blossoms that superficially resemble those of its invasive former congener. But Melanthera (=Wedelia) biflora presents an unruly contrast to its rogue kin as it clambers over sturdier vegetation or erupts from saline footholds, and its inflorescence, though typical of the sunflower family, has rather less close-set marginal rays and a broader capitulum. The serunai laut is no show-stopper, but its florets enjoy the homage of flies, wasps and danaids, including a tiger that is absent from local mangroves. Ants, too, sift the array for sweetmeat, and the resulting achenes, each housing a three-cornered nut, ride not the wind but the waves on a hull of cork to seed fresh banks and set fruit on distant shores.