Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Help WWF keep Brumas (our satellite-collared elephant) and her herd safe in Sabah !

Elephants are among the most intelligent creatures on earth and they are able to display remarkable family bonds and social lives. When elephants bump into a familiar herd, they will rejoice with loud trumpets through gestures such as a tilt of the head or flap of the ear.

In 2005, WWF- Malaysia and Sabah Wildlife Deparment set ou on an elephant satellite tracking project to place satellite collars on adult female elephants that are at least six feet tall and weighs approximately one tonne.

Recently, our ranges John Japil and Julian Herman tracked down a magnificent female whom we named “Brumas” after the plantation where we placed a satellite collar on her. I am pleased to report that Brumas and her family were seen enjoying a salad of grass and other tasty plants in a wildlife-friendly oil palm plantation in Brumas, Tawau.

The Borneo elephant is an umbrella species that play important role in maintaining the biodiversity of the ecosystem in which they live in. These mega gardeners are excellent seed dispersers that help regenerate our forests. As their diet includes forest fruits, these seeds pass through their digestive system and are deposited far and wide, thereby helping the spread of new plants and tress which serves as food and shelter for other wildlife in the area!

Friday, March 25, 2016

Protect Freshwater Before It is Too Late

In Malaysia, we are fortunate to receive an abundance of rainfall, averaging from 2,000mm to 4,000mm annually. Having plentiful rainfall each year, many of us may not understand or appreciate where the water that flows from our taps really comes from.

Did you know that 97% of all the water on earth is actually salt water ? With only a small proportion of freshwater left, even then 2/3 of that is unavailable for our use because it is frozen in glaciers and ice sheets. As a result, we only have access to about 1% of freshwater and this little amount is all we have to meet the needs of more than 7 billion people on the planet.

Most of our water resources starts its incredible journey in a catchment area long before it reach the water taps in our houses.

A water catchment is an area where water primarily from rainfall is collected by the landscape such as highland forests and hills. It will then feed the water into streams and rivers that flow through the area.

Our highland forests such as Fraser's Hill and Ulu Muda in Peninsual Malaysia and Upper Baleh in Sarawak are some of the prime water catchment areas that play a vital role in supplying clean water to the population within the respective areas.