P. tweed­iei Gallery with pho­tos by Went­ian Shi and Leo Dai

The Part 1 of the report from the recent expe­di­tion by Yuhan Ji and Leo Dai (S.J.D. [N. J. B.]) to West Malaysia and

Sarawak. With Mohd Lok­man, we checked the habi­tats of tweed­iei in Johor.

The fish can still be found, but in very lim­ited areas in south­ern Johor. To search for Parosphromenus in West Malaysia is often a

sad expe­ri­ence.

The trip for tweed­iei is no excep­tion. The orig­i­nal habi­tats were either destroyed or severely dam­aged by oil palm plan­ta­tion. We

have to go inside the plan­ta­tions to look for remain­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. None of the three loca­tions are really orig­i­nal, they are just

bet­ter pre­served waters sur­vived and recov­ered from the oil palm plan­ta­tion. Not sur­pris­ingly, the pop­u­la­tion den­sity turned out

to be quite low. Wild tweed­iei is a beau­ti­ful mid­dle sized species with extra­or­di­nary inten­sive red color on unpaired fins. It looks

very sim­i­lar to its close rel­a­tives in West Malaysia, alfredi, rub­ri­mon­tis and sev­eral other not yet sci­en­tif­i­cally described local

forms.

And they might also share a sim­i­lar fate. Con­sider the tragedy hap­pened to the habi­tat of alfredi, which is just around

100KM away, we are not sure how long can tweed­iei fur­ther sur­vive in the wild.