The annotated budak

Stage flight

Forelegs raised, with white socks that mimic the twitchy flagellomeres of stinging insects, and commanding a level blade on which individuals, or up to three interested parties, parade and attempt to pair up, micropezids offer an accessible doorway to the world of tropical entomology, a field where infinite avenues for exploration lurk behind a wall of niggling gaps. For visitors who want a touch of nature but only in flavours that are artificial and wholly alien to native woods, stilt-legged flies pose imaginary threats from their posts on low vegetation by trails through forests that face a palpable risk of destruction through neglect and a notion of progress rooted in numbers. 

Though conspicuous and fairly common, even in trails that suffer from indifferent users and abusive runs, micropezids betray few of their secrets to casual observers. The most abundant poser, probably a species of Mimegralla, is a creature that wrecks the mental image of dipterans harboured by garden-variety naturalists; in habitus, it mirrors lanky and leggy wasps in the family Ichneumonidae, some of which are known to inflict nasty stings, and thus courts and couples with relative impunity. Pairs in copula – the male atop his mate and the latter with her wings spread out to accomodate the straddler, to whom she is secured by a sternal grip – provide a primer to the facts of life and the faces of dipterans with the power to offend urban sensibilities and arouse parental ire.

Ichneumonoid wasp, Durian Loop.

Paths near forest streams and mangroves are frequented by another, possibly congeneric, micropezid with darker tones and duller eyes. A smaller, paler species is sometimes encountered on broad-leafed herbs such as Alocasia, while an unidentified orange-brown member of the family has been observed in the vicinity of weaver ants on a saline fern.  

Accounts of feeding behaviour are scarce, but micropezids are reported to consume aphids and smaller flies. Some are drawn to carrion, dung or decaying fruit, but it is unclear if these items serve as primary sources of nourishment, supplementary nutrition or magnets for prey. What little is known about the maggots is that they dwell within the rhizomes of wild gingers, under the bark of dead trees or in burrows made by other insects.

Micropezids have a distinctive poise as well as notable proportions; their mid and hind legs are spindly but the forelegs are far shorter and function more often as bluffs than limbs. Thus, two slender flies that pranced about on a leaf by a stream in Sabah's Danum Valley, their wings held at an angle, were initially taken to be stilt walkers, albeit of an exotic bent. The similarity was reinforced by the outstretched forelegs of one animal, which also bore white portions typical of sham hymenopterans. Douglas Yanega of University of California, Riverside, pointed out, however, that these were not "crummy old micropezids" but curiosities from a "much more interesting" group: Nothybidae, a monogeneric family with just nine or so species, and one of the few families of true flies endemic to Southeast Asia. One species, Nothybus longithorax, is known from Borneo.

The mistake was not new, for some earlier dipterists had also tossed Nothybus under the micropezid bus. A more careful examination of the insects revealed crucial differences: the middle pair of legs are markedly shorter than the other two and all three sets of limbs appear to emerge from a common base set far back from the head, an impression created by a particularly elongate thorax with an arch-like precoxal bridge. One of the two was engaged in a persistent effort to woo the other, although his repeated attempts to mount her were rebuffed. Their habitat was a meagre stream, more of a trickle, in primary forest that received thin bursts of sunlight early in the afternoon, by which stenotopic odonates – platystictids, threadtails and spreadwings – were sought. The only damselfly present was a common chlorocyphid, Rhinocypha humeralis, so attention was diverted to the flies as they conducted their pas de deux to the calls of Bornean gibbons and helmeted hornbills. As with these charismatic megafaunæ, Nothybus thrives only in unlogged forests, where the crowns are dense and the understorey humid. But like many other small or spineless things occupying nodes in the web that sustains life under evergreen canopies, nothybids and other neglected branches on the tree of knowledge remain near-cyphers, midgets of mystery with little to hide but the grubs in their guts and a gulf of missing links.

Daylight robbery

For about a century, the phosphate mines of Christmas Island welcomed labourers from China and Southeast Asia, in particular Malaya and Singapore, who journeyed to this craggy isle, a solitary rock on the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean, to dig, ship and die for the profits of colonial overlords. Aiding them in their, often final, tour of duty were chandlers such as Ong Sam Leong – Baba man about town, amateur mariner and tycoon extraordinaire – who rounded up recent, mostly Cantonese-speaking, migrants, ferried them to this coralline outpost and granted them all the rights of indentured men, coolies bound to the service of mining concessionaires and marked by a tattoo on their hand, who worked 74 hours a week to repay the debt of their passage and survived on little more than rice, salted fish and a dash of vegetables, for which they were charged a princely sum. Armed foremen caned laggarts, beri-beri culled the lame and those who had cash to spare sank into opiate dreams or plunged themselves into the flesh of painted ladies at a house of distant repute.

The settlement grew rather more complacent after the Second World War, though life on the island retained much of the social stratification of more glorious eras. Workers from Malaya and Singapore continued to drain the island's natural reserves, earning for their efforts the discrimination of second-hand employers and later, a battle of Conradian proportions that turned the colonists into citizens of a luckier state. There were, presumably, lots of coming and going, by steamer or flying boat, between the mines and Singapore in those decades, and it's possible that some of these commutes included the occasional free rider, oceanic wanderers that had reined in their pleopodal segments and would have never reached these parts on their own. Some probably perished in backyard kitchens, while a few may have eluded their handlers to roam local coasts until they ambled within sight of curious crowds, to which they almost certainly responded with backward lunges and the threat of stabby feet.

Widely dispersed in the Indo-West Pacific, Birgus latro is absent from the South China Sea, a biogeographical trait that may stem from a zoeal aversion to near-shore flavours or exist as a relict of once unhindered currents. Native fans of terrestrial decapods, who might fancy stumbling upon a beast in blue in ill-maintained coconut groves, must therefore content themselves with the rustlings of Coenobita, good-sized but markedly smaller anomurans that prowl unswept beaches and steal little more than the coils of dead snails. Young robber crabs also strap on – with the likely aid of their strongly chelate fourth pereiopods – empty shells, broken husks or film canisters, but as they grow, their naked abdomens deposit chitin to withstand danger and dessication, while layers of fat accumulate under the telson, the reserves of a diet of rich fruit, carrion and organic scraps. On Christmas Island, in the absence of now-extinct native rats, Birgus rule the slopes as the dominant non-bipedal predator, though this counts for little against the wheels of vehicles driven by dutiful visitors, which now squash a thousand or more crabs each year. In this age of climatic change and economic miracles, even the toughest of robbers must cede privilege to the laws of asylum, which offer a far more humane, though perhaps no less hopeless, end to desperate souls than that rendered to dispensable minions by long-dead barons and their heirs, now asleep and awaiting their fate in tombs on a hill.

Straight and blue

Other than dashers and dropwings, parasols and baskers, the dragonflies one is most likely to encounter on streamside vegetation or the banks of suburban ponds belong to a group known as skimmers, a rather more fetching appellation than the straight-laced name bestowed upon the genus in 1833 by Edward Newman, an English entomologist who sought to split Libellulla, Linnaeus's epithet for all Odonata, into more meaningful branches. Those with a laterally compressed abdomen he christened Sympetrum (sympiezein=press together and ētron=abdomen in Greek), while others, having laterally parallel rear segments, he dubbed Orthetrum (orthos=straight).

The taxonomic utility of abdominal profiles would prove to be dubious, as species were soon found that defied their generic description, and many more appeared that fit the bill but bore no relation to the genus, which is defined by traits that include the following: no less than 12 antenodal crossveins, including a distal antenodal that extends into the subcostal space of the forewing; a non-metallic frons; a prothorax fringed with long hairs; and a closed anal loop. In the field, Orthetrum can be reasonably distinguished by their robust bodies, slender, tapering abdomens, shortish legs, largely hyaline (save a basal tint) wings with long, pigmented pterostigmas, and a preference for perching on flat or laminar surfaces with their torsos roughly level, rather than on the tips of reeds and emergent shoots.

The abdomens of the two red species that occur in Singapore, Orthetrum chrysis and O. testaceum, are also conspicuously broadened towards the base. Males of the latter, which can be told apart from the look-alike Crocothemis servilia by the lack of a dark dorsal line, frequent artificial marshlands and degraded pools, darting about in tireless pursuit of rivals or hovering above a mate as she flicks batches of eggs into silty banks. Spine-tufted skimmers, which favour less disturbed habitats, can be found in coastal woods as well as shady brooks by well-trodden trails, which they may share with forest-loving odonates such as Euphaea impar, Prodasineura humeralis and Trithemis festiva. A tuft of bristles on the second abdominal segment and a darker thorax separate chrysis from brick-toned testaceum, which also burns with a duller fire than its slightly smaller cousin.

Ochreous tones are, at least to odonatologists more familiar with European and African taxa, exotic hues for a genus associated with caerulean hues. As if to balance the spectral scales on the local front, Orthetrum glaucum and O. luzonicum offer a brace of blue that recall their near eastern kin, which similarly acquire a waxy cloak upon maturity. Glaukos is Greek for blueish green or grey, and the specific name certainly suits the common blue skimmer, a dragonfly that is said to hang around forest edges, even at some distance from water, but can also be seen clinging to the walls of hillside drains and rural clearings. Teneral females maintain a drapery of brown and dull yellow, but a powdery bloom coats of the bodies of both sexes as they age and the rigour of a life on the wing takes its toll on frayed and failing veins. 

Slender blue skimmers stay close to waterbodies, where they dash from blade to blade, occupying the middle ground, as it were, between the dwarves of their order and giants that prey upon fellow odonates. The smallest local representative of the genus and similarly pruinose at maturity, Orthetrum luzonicum is noticeably more lightly built, sports sky blue, as opposed to greenish blue, eyes, and lacks the dark hindwing base of its glaucous congener. The only other libellulid that could be mistaken for them is Brachydiplax chalybea, but this species has a markedly stouter build and a predilection for more commanding perches, from which males survey their turf for matches and mates.

The final rogue in the native gallery, Orthetrum sabina, is a dragonfly in a class of its own, a wanderer matched only by Tramea and Pantala, and a voracious, at times exclusive, hunter of other odonates. At home in city parks, lowland swamps and volcanic slopes, and the dominant aerial predator on the beach at Lim Chu Kang, where sordid flies and jitterbugging sandhoppers feast on carrion and the discards of weekend fishermen, these monsters in green and black lord over habitats that have run aground, erupting in furious whirls under a grove of sea hibiscus trees and staking their claims on sun-soaked twigs that cast slim shadows over a flat of buried treasures.

Missing, or missed, if ever it was here, from this island of migrant hawkers is a skimmer which appears to be the result of a biogeographical cut-and-paste job. In Orthetrum pruinosum, a scarlet tail, far more fiery than those of chrysis and testaceum, sprouts from a body of violet-blue, resulting in an insect of striking contrast and rather more fastidious requirements than its other lowland cousins. Singapore, having lost its riparian fringes, offers no refuge for these bold flyers. In Borneo, Sulawesi and the Malay peninsula, however, these dragonflies abound in the unfelled interior, where they patrol bubbling streams, seeding their young in still side pools or the stranded beds of seasonal rivers, and squander the final, frenzied stage of their natural lives on manœuvres that hold no water and appeals to history that carry no weight.

Bug bites

Singaporeans have, of late, become somewhat acquainted with Chironomidae, a family of nematoceran flies whose aquatic larvae trigger the appetites of captive fish as well as the immune systems of individuals with an acute sensitisation to oxygen-rich pigments. Adult bloodworms may also affect individuals who muck about in freshwater marshes, but otherwise pose little threat to humanity, save when they erupt en masse from eutrophic waterbodies to sow terror in suburbia and fuel the paranoia of a population already at odds with the natural and native elements of life beyond a living.

The systematic distinctions between midges and mosquitoes probably matter little to park visitors who double as unwilling donors to blood-sucking dipterans. There is also small comfort in the fact that their minute tormentors are, in turn, bugged by pests who pick on creatures several times their size. Female mosquitoes, whose thirst for animal protein adds unwanted buzz to urban wetlands and coastal swamps, engorge themselves on tetrapod corpuscles and suffer for their efforts the stabs of ceratopogonid midges that plunge dainty mouthparts into culicid vessels.

Also known as biting midges, ceratopogonids are tiny insects that inhabit damp areas, including tropical beaches, and usually escape notice until they land on the hides of vertebrate hosts. The bites of genera such as Culicoides and Leptoconops are noted to be highly unpleasant, resulting in prolonged itchiness, and it is likely that many attribute the results of their attacks to sandflies in sensu stricto, namely psychodids in the genera Phlebotomus and Sergentomyia, which may not be actually present in the country, or garden-variety mosquitoes, which they somewhat resemble. Neither blame nor blessing, therefore, accrue to these flies, which are happy to ignore man for the most part, sipping nectar when not consumed by gravidity and serving as unwitting vectors of pleasure, being pollinators of fruit divine as well as the trees that secrete the raw materials for safe thrusts.

Entomophagy, or more correctly, ectoparasitism, is the hallmark of one ceratopogonid subfamily, Forcipomyiinae, many of whose members feed off lacewings, caterpillars, orthopterans, stick insects, blister beetles, moths, butterflies and odonates. One species has become the dipteran equivalent of ticks, while another, undescribed, Forcypomyia is said to dine only on freshly dispatched termites that are thought to be the sole prey of a tiny Ecuadorian spider. How female forcipomyiines sidestep the appetites of fast and formidable victims is unclear; palpable numbers plagued a female Orthetrum and male Libellago daviesi by a brook near Duloduo in North Sulawesi, which bristled with endemic chlorocyphids, metallic blue demoiselles, gaudy coenagrionids, and green-eyed libellulids. Do the midges, to run this aerial gauntlet, emit some signal of discouragement that renders their prey docile while their veins are pierced and haemolymph possessed? Or do they home in only after dark, when there is a lower chance of having the tables turned on them and little room, perhaps, for the nursing of fancies that remain captive to shadow and shroud?

Trash talking

Land hermit crabs are more easily heard than seen, for these supralittoral wanderers seldom bother to hide their tracks, shuffling as they do and clicking their heels against the debris of the high shore with little regard for aural sensitivities. They abhor seafronts that have been pick over and rendered plain for the sake of visitors who regard every speck and spot on the sand as well as unruly grasses as blights on a landscape awash in green delusions. It's a shame, for these anomurans gladly labour without recompense to cleanse the waste of coastal life, including perhaps the droppings of unretentive beach apes, leaving the inorganic portions to the mercies of gloved crews.

A stern breakwater now links Lazarus Island to St John's, stifling a passage of fringing reefs abutting a rocky strand. Overlooking the shore is a ridge of Callophyllum, sea almonds, pandans and figs, whose terminal buds and tough husks litter the gravel below. Pied songbirds and sea eagles erupt from the canopy long before sunrise. Where the embankment meets the hill, there is a nook into which the tides have shoved a midden of jetsam. The debris is a magnet to hermit crabs of rare bulk, which clamber over foam and foliage and even brave the lower reaches of the seawall in their nocturnal scurry. Some lug the remains of nerites and turban snails, while not a few individuals are at home in lightweight imports. When picked up, some stretch out in a frantic grasp at damp air or even bail out, ditching their shelters for a flight of naked panic. But most just scoot into their coils, sealing the aperture with a stout claw and betraying their impatience by peering out within a minute and resuming, if the coast appears clear, their seedy patrols.

Such armies now thrive only on islands with little afoot, where food abounds and the sea laps at the base of lowland woods. Where these conditions are met, hermit crabs can rival their landlocked cousins in numbers and vie with earthbound arthropods for choice spots on low trees. Large concentrations of small coenobites can be found thus in the littoral forest of Tangkoko Duasaudara Nature Reserve in North Sulawesi, where a thin corner of the peninsula has been preserved for the natives of a fiery region. Fuelled perhaps by the ash of nearby volcanos, Terminalia, Barringtonia and Morinda attain monumental proportions in a strip of land between a stained beach and volatile slopes.

The darkened soil is coated by layers of bark, leaves and fruit, which support troops of black crested macaques as well as shy terrestrial crabs that forage for vegetation and carrion. Coenobita occurs here in disturbing densities, forcing those who wander off the path to watch their step lest heavy boots deliver a crack of doom. A few are so well-built they tread on the ground with little fear, but their undersized compatriots often cling en masse to sturdy saplings, creating the impression of a house plant infected by festive baubles. Others grip the trunks of more mature trees or dawdle near recesses that may serve as daytime retreats. A partial diet of scale insects is said to drive this rhythm, but others have caught no rhyme to this restless spirit, which has led to accusations of truancy that bounce off the hermits as they laze on the stems of tropical lianas or wing it on dangling vines. Encouraged by the onset of indiscreet hours, a few engage in conversations that waver between conflict and resolution, their antennules twitching with trepidation as fingers touch and feelings are exchanged via olfactory clues. But the signals are mixed and any semblance of pillow talk in this cinq à sept is soon quashed by the awkwardness of a tryst that spells surrender to the moon and spawns a rush to the sea for a moment of release in the dip end.

Big black ape

Kacang, meaning nut in Indonesian, is the name of a crested black macaque born on 4 April 2007. Four months later, he placed his right hand, by accident or with the curiousity of young primates, in a trap set by men hoping to snare jungle fowl in Tangkoko National Park in north Sulawesi. The rangers who found him had to cut off his limb between the wrist and elbow to save him. Now a young adult, Kacang forages with his troop in a coastal forest hemmed by a dark beach, coconut estates and burgeoning villages whose hogs join the monkeys in their daily search for food. He makes light of his loss, though, climbing and twirling through the vines and saplings with little visible handicap, using his stump as a prop and resting in the shade of familiar thickets as midday approaches.

On this island of lakes and mountains, where creatures from two worlds meet and march in retreat before a wave of humanity, seven species of endemic Macaca are thought to have arisen from ancestors resembling the pig-tailed macaque of mainland Asia and Borneo. Over time, as adventurous, or exiled, individuals crossed hilly ranges and rafted or swam to new territories, the rise of unassailable barriers and sundering of links over land and sea led to palpable shifts in both the genetic make-up and visible traits of isolated populations. The monkeys that ventured into the volatile arc of Sulawesi's northeastern extremities succumbed to the dark side, with one species, confined mainly to Dumoga-Bone National Park, sporting a deep grey wash, and the other, trapped in the tip of a crowded peninsula, turning jet black, save a pair of hairless rump pads, which turn pink in sexually receptive females.

Visitors familiar with the long-tailed pests that infest parks elsewhere in the archipelago would find Macaca nigra a beast both familiar and foreign. Like Macaca fascicularis, black crested macaques live in large groups, scouring the forest floor for plant matter and occasional bodies of protein, and scaling the canopy for figs and succulent leaves. But these monkeys are at least a third larger than local cercopithecids, with the barrel-chested males approaching waist-level on all flat fours and weighing 18 kg or more. The effect is heightened by a tuft of hair with an attitude of its own and a tailless posterior, which recall the great apes of Africa than the crab-eating inhabitants of Malayan coasts. One's gaze is also drawn to the animal's strong brow, which frame close-set red-brown eyes aglow with fire and smouldering in silent accusation. A long muzzle hides cheek pouches for food storage and fangs that threaten with every yawn.

A long fallen trunk served as a pitstop for Kacang's troop, which occupied its length, dozing, stretching, nursing, grooming and chewing. One male indulged in a little masturbation, licking the results with unabashed intrigue. Females with bare-faced infants and mothers with unruly children sat together, exchanging notes and combing each other for parasites. Staring is thought ill in simian society, so visitors are advised to avoid eye contact as well as maintain a wide berth, a warning unheeded by young punks who seem to delight in tagging human shins as they chase each other in mock rage. Other injunctions, against littering and feeding the macaques, suffer from the presence of uncovered troughs from which the odd monkey plucked unfinished snacks and sweet skins.

Kacang's is one of several troops roaming the reserve, which is home to several hundred individuals. Across their native range, only about 6,000 macaques remain after years of deliberate hunting, incidental trapping, habitat loss and persecution for crop raiding. But even at Tangkoko, the species' final stronghold, the monkeys face the risk of poachers, bird snares and repercussions by neighbours whose smallholdings gnaw at the boundaries of the park and who may still fancy the traditional delicacies of a tropical yuletide. A perennial tension of culinary fascination and fear for local livelihoods threatens these imposing primates, which face a bleak future in their little corner of a world with no room to spare for beauties in black and monkeys that mirror the motions of man. Unfazed by existential perils, Kacang's extended family rose from their siesta to resume their patrol, romping towards the entrance gates and entering a domain of apes at odds with their presence and abundance lost to their kind.