A species checklist is the documentation of what species are present in a geographical space in a certain timeframe, and it allows us to better understand the diversity present and thus come up with meaningful biodiversity conservation strategies. Furthermore, knowledge of what species are present is an important step for future research studies, and thus my project aims to fill this knowledge gap by documenting the presence of dung beetle species in Singapore’s forests and parks.
Hi I'm Zann Teo, a Year 3 student from the Asian School of Environment specialising in Ecology and my URECA (Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus) project is split into three parts – specimen collection, DNA barcoding, and morphological traits.
Over the first semester of the academic year, I have been collecting dung beetle specimens with my lab mate Yong Xu, with some additional help from other members of the lab. We sampled using different bait types (dung, fruit, and chicken carrion) in baited pitfall traps and un-baited flight intercept traps across four forests and eight parks in Singapore. You can check out Yong Xu’s blogpost here to find out more about our adventures in the field, and the results of our collection.
Back in the lab, we have sorted the dung beetles by morphospecies. Being completely new to this, we have split them based on size, colour, pronotum and elytra patterns, presence of hair. However, as we got more practice while looking at the hundreds of specimens collected, we started to recognize some of these species. My personal favourite is Onthophagus babirusa, as I find its unique underside coloration and pattern so distinct and beautiful!
In the coming semester, I will be working on the second part of my project– carrying out DNA barcoding of all our collected specimens. Through carrying out DNA barcoding, we seek to find out if there are any species that look morphologically similar but are actually different species at a genetic level. We have recently carried out a trial run of the DNA extraction protocol (shoutout to the Repro Evo Lab @ NUS for kindly going through the protocol with us!) and will be carrying out the protocol for all of our samples in the next few weeks before sending the DNA samples for sequencing.
After we complete DNA extraction protocols and have sent the samples for sequencing, the third part of my project will commence – spending many days in the lab taking high quality images and measuring different morphological traits of representative individuals of each species and using this information to create a local species identification key. As of now, we are primarily using a Sabah dung beetle species identification key as well as relying on the experience of our for our preliminary ID-ing. This key would help with identification both in the field and lab, but more importantly, will act as a local reference. At the end of my project, we hope to publish a species checklist of Singapore dung beetles that contains morphological descriptions and is supported by DNA barcodes. My project is at the interface between taxonomy and ecology, and I am so excited to continue working on it over the next few months.
Written by: Zann Teo