Wentian Shi will leave Bangka island today after a week of very important and laborious work. At first his friend Ji assisted him in searching the true deissneri, that was reported extinct last year already; last week he was accompagnied by Japanese Hiroyuki Kishi, head of the Team Borneo and one oft the best experts on Bangka biotopes.
When I met Wentian some months ago I asked him to go again there and try to search still more intensely; so he did and he did it very successful. Although he found all (literally: ALL) known locations for P. deissneri completely and irreparably destroyed into dead, barren agricultural land, partly planted with oil palm trees already, he investigated the island more intensely than others had done so beforehand. And so he and his friends found small regions with blackwater swamps and … deissneri. Most probably of a different location type than that lost for ever, but clearly this species.
They found some more Paros, too, including so-called bintan and probably a hitherto unknown new form; whether a new species or merely a new variant of the known: nobody knows at present.
They intend to visit the neighbouring and smaller island of Belitung during the next days, from which we know P. spec. Belitung, a roundtail bintan-like type, but it was never imported before. Let us see, what else will be revealed to our eyes.
So far already, it is a great achievement. I was informed in daily mails by Wentian, mostly accompagnied by photos of the fish caught and the landscape. We can now hope to save P. deissneri at least in our tanks. But we must be far more careful to organize this than we were some years ago when our last stock of deissneri dwindled away despite we tried to pay attention on that danger.