Malayan Tapir Behaviour, Habitat Use And Density In Belum, Perak.

Listed as endangered under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the ecological knowledge for the Malayan tapir is still severely lacking; not only for Peninsular Malaysia, but also for the Southeast Asia region. Estimated to be between 1,500 to 1,700 individuals left in the country, the Malayan tapir is now threatened mainly by habitat loss, and fragmentation. In recent years, there has been an increase in tapir road-kills due to the direct impact of road fragmentation. Large-scale natural forest conversion has likely caused tapirs to venture out into human dominated areas. In an effort to conserve Malayan tapirs, this thesis therefore seeks to better understand the population ecology of tapir by investigating its activity pattern, factors that influence its habitat preference, assessing its population status and Relative Abundance Index (RAI) within RBSP, a primary forest and TFR, a selectively logged forest. The Malayan tapir’s activity pattern was found to be predominantly nocturnal; 1900 hrs to 0659 hrs (83.20%). Activity pattern of the Malayan tapir is not significantly different with predominantly diurnal activity of human in the landscape (P>0.05, Mann-Whitney) with kernel density estimate of 0.16 (CI: 0.10-0.22) in TFR and 0.12 (CI: 0.07-0.17) in RBSP. Spatial avoidance towards human habitation was observed from the habitat use analysis, where the Malayan tapir was found to prefer forested areas which are away from the human settlements and at high elevation in the RBSP and TFR landscape

Emerging patterns of genetic diversity in the critically endangered Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris jacksoni)

Southeast Asia experiences some of the highest deforestation in the world. Loss of tropical forest typically leads to widespread habitat fragmentation, with detrimental effects on dispersal ability and gene flow—particularly for large carnivores. We conducted mtDNA and microsatellite analysis to assess—for the first time—contemporary patterns of genetic diversity in the Malayan tiger. We collected 295 suspected carnivore samples in Peninsular Malaysia, from which we identified 26 as originating from tiger using 16 polymorphic microsatellite loci, comprising 22 individual tigers. Despite limitations of the study, our findings suggest tiger subpopulations in the north of the peninsula maintain some genetic connectivity and migration between two putative geographic subpopulations in the Main Range and Greater Taman Negara, with negligible population segregation due to dispersal barriers such as road infrastructure. We identified consistently lower levels of genetic diversity in tigers in the Greater Taman Negara region compared to tigers in the Main Range and small but emerging differences in nuclear and mitochondrial genetic diversity. Our mtDNA haplotype and nuclear DNA analyses suggest the levels of genetic diversity in Malayan tigers may be amongst some of the lowest of the surviving tiger subspecies, though the study is limited both in scale and genomic loci. Our findings are consistent with an expected lag between the rapid decline of tigers in Peninsular Malaysia by over 95% in the last 70 years and observed differences in their levels of genetic diversity