I’ve heard many rumours about fishermen having sighted large objects in the deep blue sea off the coast of North Borneo. These are often told in a hushed tone as if the very mention of this would invoke the wrath of the gods. In fact I know of a person who claimed he personally knew where to actually find one.

But of course, he warns me, it’s going to be dangerous because the sea around that sunken vessel is known to be haunted.

Could it be that the sunken ship is the Dutch submarine, which sank off the coast of North Borneo some 70 years ago? According to this report, a group of divers who were exploring the deep sea north of Borneo found the wreck of a Dutch submarine which sank in the World War II era. The ship has been declared missing for 70 years.

The exact location was not told “to honor the deceased and their families.”

According to the report which quoted the Dutch Defence Ministry in The Hague, the submarine, known as Hr. Ms.. KXV (or K16), which had been missing with 36 crewm embers in 1941, was found by Australian and Singaporean divers.

These divers must have been acting upon tips-off from local fishermen, the same group of fishermen whom I heard the rumours from.

Sorry about the title, I couldn’t resist it. But if the Italian motor racing star Loris Capirossi ever slows down in his career, he might very well acquire the tag “slow loris.”

Back to the issue of slow loris, when was the last time you saw the animal, or known as kongkang in Malay or tondoyutung in Momogun? Like I’ve not see this cute little animal for decades and almost forgotten that it existed if not for a recent news saying scientists was tagging a Bornean slow loris for the first time.

The move was part of efforts by the Sabah wildlife department to study the primate’s behaviour. What did they say? Primate? I never thought for once that slow lorises are categorised as primate.

Benoit Goossens, director of the Danau Girang Field Centre that is spearheading the study, said in a statement that through the study they hoped to raise the awareness in Sabah on the importance of protecting nocturnal primates as much as protecting orangutans, proboscis monkeys, sun bears and elephants.

A sense of perplexity lingers in the air as I write this, having just sampled the kind of music, or sound, or ambiance, coming from the album Iceland vs. Borneo by John Hirschmann, an electronic musician unknown to you and me, and perhaps, to the rest of mainstream music listeners.

For a sample of what strange arrangements encapsulated by the thought-provoking allusion of how Iceland and Borneo might mix, listen to the album by clicking on the track list on the embedded player below.

The music seems rustic, chaotic even, and if you are to dance to its extremes, you might end up with legs twisted.

These are music tracks plucked from the road less travelled, a pulsating narrative of free radical electronics bouncing in the dense jungle of Borneo or burrowing in the dead cold mountains of Iceland, like I know there are dead cold mountains there. Haha, I don’t even understand what I’m saying… duh!

I kinda like the mysterious sound of track Number Seven, Negalife 1, though.

In many towns in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo Island, old shophouse buildings can still be seen standing and functioning like the way they were in yesteryear, albeit in their dilapidated state. This row of wooden shop houses in Menggatal town, about 16km from the state capital of Kota Kinabalu, is among the few remaining buildings reminiscence of how things were in the 50s and 60s.

Old shophouse in Menggatal Town, Sabah, Borneo

A toad species scientists feared had extinct, reappeared in the jungle of Sarawak, the Malaysian state on Borneo Island recently. Listed as the Top 10 most wanted lost toad, the Sambas Stream Toad was last seen in Europe 1924, according to Conservation International (CI).

The toad, Ansonia latidisca, was previously known from only three individuals, and was last seen in 1924, CI said.

Rainbow toad... Photo released by Conservation International which recently discovered the elusive amphibian. Photo credit: Prof Indraneil Das

“Prior to the rediscovery, only illustrations of the mysterious and long-legged toad existed, after collection by European explorers in the 1920s,” CI said in a press release, announcing the discovery.

A picture of the Sambas Stream Toad, released by Conservation International which recently discovered the elusive amphibian. Photo credit: Prof Indraneil Das

Excerpt from CI press release:

Dr. Indraneil Das of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) was one of those inspired researchers. After announcing his new discovery of a tiny pea-sized frog in Borneo last summer, the Old World’s smallest, Das and his team targeted the missing Sambas Stream Toad species for rediscovery last August.

Initial searches by Dr. Das and team took place during evenings after dark along the 1,329 m. high rugged ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range of Western Sarawak, a natural boundary between Malaysia’s Sarawak State and Indonesia’s Kalimantan Barat Province. The team’s first expeditions proved fruitless in their first several months, but the team did not give up. The area had barely been explored in the past century, with no concerted efforts to determine whether the species was still alive. So Das changed his team’s strategy to include higher elevations and they resumed the search.

And then one night, Mr. Pui Yong Min, one of Dr Das’s graduate students found a small toad 2m up a tree. When he realized it was the long-lost toad, Dr. Das expressed relief and near disbelief at the discovery before his eyes.

“Thrilling discoveries like this beautiful toad, and the critical importance of amphibians to healthy ecosystems, are what fuel us to keep searching for lost species,” said Dr. Das. “They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering, which is why targeted protection and conservation is so important. Amphibians are indicators of environmental health, with direct implications for human health. Their benefits to people should not be underestimated.”

YouTube user BorneoProductions uploaded a video quite sometime ago but good photography, as they say, is ageless.

It shows time-lapse photography of Sabah rich natural heritage and the iconic Mount Kinabalu, the central piece of Kinabalu Park, Malaysia’s first World Heritage Site. Enjoy the video — an apt tribute to Enigma’s Return to Innocence which counts yours truly as a fan.

A jewel beetle collected from a local residing in Crocker Range, Sabah, is among four new species of jewel beetles found in Southeast Asia, according to a recent report.

NEW JEWEL BEETLE SPECIES ... P. chalcogenioides, found in Crocker Range, Sabah

The jewel beetle was found by a local collector in the vicinity of Mt Trus Madi, according to the report, published in ZooKeys.

The other three species of jewel beetles — so called because of their glossy iridescent colours — were found in Thailand and Indonesia’s Sumatra and Lombok.

If you are game for scientific description of the species, here is the report, in PDF. The pictures of the four species are also shown in the report. Here is a question worth pondering: how many more species of Borneo flora and fauna which are yet to be discovered?

Far flung places, like those in rural Borneo, provide ample photographic opportunities, particularly the people and their cultures and traditions. This picture of a tobacco shred seller was taken in Sikuati, a small town in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo island.

A newly-discovered species of mushroom, known as Spongiforma squarepantsii, has been found in the forests of Borneo, a report said.

Shaped like a sea sponge, S. squarepantsii was found in 2010 in the Lambir Hills in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo.

Spongebob Squarepants (left), Spongiforma squarepantsii (right). Credit: Tom Bruns, U.C. Berkeley (for the S. squarepantsii picture)

It is bright orange—although it can turn purple when sprinkled with a strong chemical base—and smells “vaguely fruity or strongly musty,” according to San Francisco State University researcher Dennis Desjardin and colleagues’ description published in the journal Mycologia.

“Under a scanning electron microscope, the spore-producing area of the fungus looks like a seafloor carpeted in tube sponges, which further convinced the researchers to name their find after the famous Bob,” according to a statement.

The Penans want to be left alone in the jungle. The government says doing so would mean sidelining them from mainstream development. Timber companies want to log the forest in the name of commercial profit. The government wants the tribe’s ancestral land to build hydroelectricity dams to power the state’s development need.

But the Penans want to stay in these jungle, where they can live in “luxury.” Resettling them would impoverish them.

What is then the sensible way forward for the this last nomadic tribe of Borneo? Should the Sarawak government allocate them forest to live for those who want to remain in the jungle and bring to the mainstream those who want get out of the jungle?