MALAYAN

ANIMAL LIFE

BY

M. W. F. TWEEDIE, M.A., C.M.Z.S.

Raffles Museum, Singapore

AND

J. L. HARRISON, M.SC.

Institute for Medical Research, Kuala Lumpur

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO LONDON <>- NEW YORK <>- TORONTO

C O NTEN TS

Page FOREWORD . Vll

INTRODUCTION IX

Chapter I MAMMALS I

2 MAMMALS (continued) 15

3 BIRDS • 31

4 BIRDS (continued) 44 5 BIRDS (contt'nued) 60 6 REPTILES 75 7 REPTILES AND AMPHIBIANS 89 8 FISH OF THE SEA 101

9 FRESH - WATER FISHES 119 10 INSECTS 131 II INSECTS (continued) 149 12 LIFE OF THE SEA SHORE 172 13 OTHER INVERTEBRATES 194

GLOSSARY 209 MALAY NAMES 213 INDEX 223 .

V

INTRODUCTION

To write a comprehensive Natural History of Malaya would be a task for a team of zoologists with years at their disposal; the results of their work, if ever published, would fill a book-case. An adequate account only of all those more common and con­spicuous animals that a naturalist in Malaya is likely to meet could probably not be encompassed in. one volume. This little book is no more than an introduction to our enormous fauna; its purpose to provide the young reader, uninstructed in natural history, and visitors from overseas, with a brief outline of how this fauna is constituted.

Only a small proportion of our animals have English names, and these names are often neither widely known nor very precisely applied. They are, moreover, only in use among English-speaking people. The Latin or scientific names have the great advantage that they are used by writers and speakers of all languages, and that they are designed to identify positively the animals to which they are applied. These are the names found printed in italics throughout the text of this book.

They are based on a system invented by a Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, two hundred years ago. By this system each species or "kind" of animal is known by two names, a specific name which identifies it precisely and a generic name which defines its closest relationship with other species. A group of animals included under one generic name is called a genus (plural genera); the word species is the same in singular and plural. The genus is put first, the species second, just as "John Smith" is printed" Smith, John" in a directory.

To illustrate this system of nomenclature let us take a familiar animal like our common Grey-bellied Squirrel. Its scientific name is Callosciurus caniceps. The first name indicates its close relationship to the Red-bellied Squirrel, Callosciurus notatus, the

IX

x INTRODUCTION

Black-banded Squirrel, Callosciurus nigrovittatus and others which are placed in this genus. The second name, caniceps, completes its identification. Zoological classification goes further than this, grouping genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes and classes into phyla. All squirrels (including genera other than Callosciurus) are regarded as forming a family, the Sciuridae. This family is included in the order Rodentia or rodents, which includes many other familiar animals such as rats, rabbits and porcupines. The rodents are, of course, mammals and so form a division of the class Mammalia, which is included in the phylum Chordata. This is a very large group of animals comprising the mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and some other smaller divisions.

The Malays have lived in this country far longer, and in much closer association with nature, than any English-speaking people. Not every species of animal has been named by them, of course, but there is a large number of well-established and precisely allocated Malay names of animals, and it is necessary for a naturalist in this country, whatever his own language may be, to be familiar with them. Many readers will probably know the animals better under these names than by their English ones. An alphabetical list of Malay names with English and scientific equivalents is provided. References by number to this list are given in the general index to enable the reader to discover the Malay name of an animal from its English or Latin one.

Zoological terminology has been used as little as possible, but the use of some words that may be unfamiliar, or that are used in an unfamiliar sense, could not be avoided. A glossary of these is also printed at the end of the book.

Remember that the word "animal" is used in this introduction and throughout the book in its correct sense of a member of the animal kingdom, that is any living thing that is not a plant or a bacillus or some other kind of microbe.

CHAPTER ONE

MAMMALS

IT has been pointed out in the introduction of this book that the word" animal", correctly used, indicates the whole range of living creatures which are described in its pages. What

most of us think of as animals, four-legged beasts covered with hair, such as cats, dogs and horses, are correctly termed mam­mals, and it is with the Malayan representatives of this group that this and the next chapter will be concerned.

It is one thing to give a general idea of what a word means, another to define it precisely. The mammals can be fairly satisfactorily defined by saying that they are warm-blooded animals which suckle their young with milk and whose bodies are wholly or partly covered with hair. It follows from this that we ourselves are mammals. All the Malayan mammals, and almost all elsewhere, bear their young alive. The only exceptions to this rule are certain primitive Australian forms which lay eggs, the Platypus and the Spiny Anteaters.

The term "warm-blooded" implies more than it says. In the mammals and birds the blood and the whole interior of the body is kept not only warm, but at ' a constant temperature which, normally, does not vary with that of the animal's surroundings. The warm coat of hair of a mammal (and the feathers of a bird) play a large part in making this possible. In all other animals the body temperature varies with its surroundings; a lizard or an insect is warm inside on a hot day and cool (and usually sluggish and inactive) on a cold one. Really the higher animals create an artificial climate inside their bodies which is kept constant no matter what the weather outside is like. Man has carried this mastery of his environment still further; he uses clothes to cover his body, suiting their thickness to the climate, and builds houses which can be heated in a cold climate and cooled, or "air-conditioned". in a hot one.

I

2 MALA Y AN ANIMAL LIFE

The fact that mammals bear their young alive, and that the parents and children remain together for some time after the latter are born, is another indication that they are among the high­est animals in the evolutionary scale, for the young mammals can learn the more difficult arts of life from their parents. This is also true to some extent of birds, but in the great majority of the other, "lower" animals, parents and young never meet, and the animal receives no instruction beyond that of inherited instinct and the lessons of its own experience. In the case of solitary mammals parental instruction and personal experience are the beginning and the end of education, but those which go in herds or family groups continue to learn from each other's experience. You may catch one member of a troop of monkeys in a trap, but if the rest saw what happened that trap would never catch another of them.

Here again man has gone very much further than any of the other mammals. Through the medium of speech and reading we learn throughout our lives, not only from our parents nor even only from those whom we meet, but from people who live far away or who have died long before we were born.

Although some mammals, such as the squirrels, are active in the day, most of them are nocturnal, sleeping and resting during the day as we do at night. For this reason they are much less well-known and familiar to most people than are such creatures as birds and butterflies, which are mainly animals of the daytime. Moreover many Malayan mammals, especially the larger ones, are only found in jungle. Big beasts like elephants and tigers are a dangerous nuisance in well-populated country, and creatures like deer yield a handsome profit to people who hunt and kill them for food. When these larger beasts stray from their home in the jungle they are quickly hunted and shot by the most formidable and ruthless animal of all. If all the jungle were destroyed they would soon become extinct, and it is most necessary, if we are to preserve our magnificent fauna intact, to set aside large areas as reserves where the forest must not be felled and the animals must not be hunted. The King George V National Park and the other game reserves are a fine start in the right direction, but there is still plenty of room in Malaya for more natural sanctuaries.

MAMMALS 3

From the . point of view of our relations with them it is con­venient to divide the mammals into two groups. The big ones which we know well from books and pictures, but which we seldom see for the reason given above, form one of these. The other comprises the multitude of small mammals, squirrels, rats, bats and the like, which we often see but know very little about. The remainder of this chapter will give an account of those groups of mammals which include mainly big animals, almost all dwellers in the jungle.

Biggest of all the land animals is the Elephant. There are now only two kinds of elephant living in the world, the African and the Asiatic. Ours belong, of course, to the latter species, which is found wild in southern Asia from India eastward to Indo-China, Malaya and Sumatra. The wild elephants of Borneo are thought to be not native, but to be descended from domesti­cated animals which escaped.

Elephants are by no means rare in the Malayan jungles and their great footprints, and other signs of their passing, are familiar to everyone whose business takes him into the forests. They go in herds and family groups formed of females and young animals. The old males lead a solitary life, visiting the herds occasionally. They live entirely on a vegetable diet; as an elephant may weigh three or four tons, the enormous quantities of this kind of food required to sustain it can well be imagined. They are destructive to cultivation and will sometimes wantonly attack the flimsy bamboo houses of the country people, or any other artificial structure they may encounter. It is difficult to scare or drive them away from a district which they choose to invade except by shooting one or more of the herd, and one of the less happy duties of the game wardens is to do this from time to time.

The teeth of an elephant are very peculiar. Inside the mouth only a single large molar tooth is present at anyone time in each jaw. These teeth have a complicated structure of hard ridges set in softer material, and they work like files, grinding up the animal's food. When it wears out, each tooth is replaced by the next one in the row, which grows forward and pushes the old one out. The front teeth or incisors of the upper jaw have grown out to form the long tusks, which are usually developed in

4 MALAYAN ANIMAL LIFE

the male, less often in the female. They are used by the males mainly for fighting, but also for digging up roots and tubers. : ';~

The term Ungulates or Hoofed Animals is often used to comprise a large number of fairly big mammals whose finger and toe nails have become greatly enlarged and thickened for walking on, and whose actual fingers and toes, or digits, are always reduced in number below the primitive total of five seen on the feet of a lizard or on our own feet and hands. They are all herbivores or feeders on leaves and grass. There are two very distinct groups of hoofed mammals, the odd-toed ones and the even-toed. The study of fossils has shown that the two groups, though similar in appearance, are by no means closely allied, and for this reason zoologists have largely abandoned the term ungulate. It is a convenient one, however, and we will retain it, remembering that it does not designate a natural group of mammals in the scientific sense.

The odd-toed ungulates have the weight-bearing axis of the feet along the middle digit, so that reduction of their number produces the well-known single toe or hoof fou~d in the horse. Three kinds of odd-toed ungulates, primitive relatives of the horse, are ( or were) found in Malaya.

The Asiatic Tapir (Fig. I) is a most curious animal. Its nose is produced into a short trunk which just overhangs the mouth and the adult is quite startlingly coloured, black on the front part and limbs, white on the hinder part of the body, the pattern being sharply defined. In a zoo or a museum the beast looks very conspicuous, but in the irregular light and shade of the jungle scene the bold pattern effectively breaks up its outline and so conceals it. One sees a black patch or a white one, neither having the characteristic shape of a quadruped animal or any particular form that will attract attention. This principle in camouflage, known as the "disruptive pattern", is often applied in war­time to conceal large objects like buildings and ships. It seems to stand the tapir in good stead, for it is wholly defenceless against the attack of such an animal as a tiger, and yet remains common. Curiously enough the baby tapir is quite differently coloured, dark brown all over with numerous tawny spots and streaks. This affords camouflage on a different principle, as it directly simulates the effect of the sun-dappled leaves of the jungle floor.

MAMMALS 5 Tapirs are seldom seen, but their three-toed footprints are often encountered by rivers and on muddy jungle paths.

The other two odd-toed ungulates are rhinoceroses. The Two-horned or Sumatran Rhinoceros is an animal of hilly jungle. It is rare nowadays but still fairly well established in the wilder parts of the country. The One-horned or Javan Rhinoceros is not certainly known to exist in Malaya now and IS an animal on the verge of total extinction throughout its range.

Fig. I. Asiatic Tapir.

The existence of rhinoceroses everywhere is threatened by the enormous value as medicine placed by Chinese people on the horn, blood and other parts of these animals. It is a purely superstitious belief without any basis in fact, but if it persists there will soon be no rhinoceroses left alive. The horn or horns on the nose of the rhinoceros are wholly different in structure from those of other mammals, for they are formed of matted or consolidated hair.

In the even-toed ungulates the weight-bearing axis of the foot is between the third and fourth digits, so that reduction of their number finally produces two toes, forming a double or "cloven" hoof. Pigs, cattle, goats and deer are included in this group of mammals. '

The Common Wild Pig is the only one of our larger mammals that can really take care of itself without any protection from the game laws. It is common in jungle and thrives also in squb and on the fringes of cultivation, where it may be a serious pest,

'.