Hi! It's Li Si :) A year ago, I went on a search for a research project, and was kindly offered a chance to study about termite communities in Indonesian peatlands. Not long after, a pandemic occurred and I had to think of another research topic that can be done locally. As I searched for local topics, it struck me that there is so little we know about the soil and leaf litter invertebrate community here in Singapore. Although there were some studies done on specific groups such as ants and termites, there wasn't any studies done on the arthropod diversity in Singapore's forests. And so... I embarked on a journey to document the different arthropods that can be found in Singapore's forests.
What are arthropods?
The number of living species on this planet that has been described thus far is about 2 million. Of the 2 million, more than half - 1.2 million - belong to the phylum 'Arthropoda'. Arthropoda, or Arthropods, is the largest phylum of living organisms. It consists of 4 main subphylums:
Hexapods e.g. insects, springtails, bristletails
Chelicerates e.g. spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, mites
Myriapods e.g. millipedes, centipedes
Crustaceans e.g. lobsters, crabs, shrimps, woodlice
My first research experience
To put it simply, my research project involves assessing the diversity of arthropods in different forest types in Singapore's Central Catchment. After months of planning and waiting, I was excited to begin the first of my fieldwork sessions back in December.
The first few sessions of fieldwork taught me that no amount of planning can prepare you for the real thing. As Murphy's Law described, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong". From challenging terrain to heavy thunderstorms, macaques trying to steal our samples to losing our samples from strong wind, it was difficult to be well-prepared because you are always hit with unexpected scenarios. Perhaps I will elaborate about the challenges I faced in a future post. Anyway, the moral of the story here is... every challenge you face in life is an opportunity for a lesson to be learned.
A few Months Later
Fast forward several months later... I'm glad to report that things have been going well. We've managed to streamline the sampling process and made it much more efficient than the start. Now, it only takes ~2.5 hrs per fieldwork session as compared to the initial 3-4 hrs. We've also had lots of interesting experiences during the recent fieldwork sessions. It was especially intriguing to see how the forest types in the Central Catchment can drastically change from one type to another in the span of several meters. It really made me curious about what the forest was like in the past. There was also no end to the cool and weird encounters we've had! From having a face-to-face meeting with a snake to finding a treefall covered in cricket larvae (?), I'm sure that there'll be more fun adventures to come!
An oriental whip-snake that we encountered in the field! It was right next to my face and I didn't realize it until I almost snipped it with my secateurs.
A rotting log that was filled with crickets and cricket larvae(?). There was so many of them and they reminded me of mealworms!
A video featuring Marx, our TEE Lab's research trainee who has been joining me on the fieldwork sessions!
Moving forward...
As of writing, I am officially halfway through with my fieldwork (yay!). I would like to use this opportunity to thank those who have been joining me for the fieldwork sessions thus far. If anyone is interested in joining us for the fieldwork sessions, feel free to drop me an email at: tayl0036@e.ntu.edu.sg and we can work something out!
In the next post... I'll be sharing about the really cool arthropods that we've found on our fieldwork and how we extract them from the leaf litter/soil samples! Here's a sneak peak of what's to come: