Long snout. Darting, sticky tongue. Black-button eyes. Scaly armor. Formidable claws. Tapering tail. Pangolins look like some alien species of mammalian warriors dreamed up by a cartoonist with an overactive imagination for a Japanese Manga Comics series. Yet for all their scales and claws, pangolins are gentle, inquisitive creatures that…
Picture yourself, if you will, as a fish swimming nonchalantly near the surface in waters off Sabah state. There you are, minding your own business and doing your best to avoid fishermen’s nets when suddenly there is a powerful blast in your vicinity. You are stunned (literally) and so are…
You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out: a dead sun bear was found floating in the Kinabatangan River, in Sabah, with both its hind paws missing. The witnesses: two Swedish tourists on a river cruise. The likely culprits: wildlife traffickers who killed the bear for…
Ismail Sabri Yaakob, the federal minister of rural and regional development, is no stranger to controversy, be it his call on ethnic Malays to boycott Chinese-owned businesses or some of his other equally dubious ethnocentric proposals. Last November the minister landed in hot water yet again when he was photographed…
The Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary in Sabah state is home to rich and varied ecosystems of exotic species, featuring a photogenic kaleidoscope of iconic animals: proboscis monkeys, several species of hornbills, the Asian pygmy elephant and Borneo’s emblematic orangutan. The reserve’s forests are at constant risk of further environmental degradation…
Slow lorises are small nocturnal primates that forage in the foliage of tropical trees and sport the physiognomy of cute teddy bears. Proboscis monkeys are reddish-brown tree-dwellers famed for their unmistakably flamboyant sniffers that make them resemble crotchety cartoon characters. Agile gibbons are long-limbed arboreal acrobats celebrated for their swaggering…
The forest of Malaysia’s second-largest state Sabah are, in a word, magnificent. They’re megadiverse – 10 square kilometers of Sabah forest have more flora and fauna than the entirety of North America and Europe combined. They’re some of the world’s most ancient – some being over 130 million years old. …
As the sun sets on the Tenth Malaysia Plan – a blueprint for social and economic development announced by Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2010 – it looks like the Malaysian Government has fallen woefully short of achieving the promises it made to the state of Sabah. Sabahan political figure…
Sabah is Malaysia’s second-largest state and is, in many ways, setting an example in sustainability and environmental protection. Sabah’s laws, protections and regulation of industry have essentially turned back the clock for its extremely biodiverse rainforests – some of which are over 130 million years old. To date, the Sabah…