My A-Grade Paper

[Rafael Eggli]

Good evening everyone!

I am happy and pleased to finally tell you that I recently handed in my final version of the A-Grade Paper on the Parosphromenus Project.
I want to thank everyone who was in one way or another involved in the writing of this paper. Especially, I thank Peter, Dorothee, Helene and Bennie. You all have already recieved or will soon recieve (post seems to have the usual Christmas-problems..) either a digital or the printed version of my paper.

For those of you who do not yet know about it I want to give a short summary of my work and what I aimed to do. Later on, I will come up with my conclusion and recommendations for the future. If there is anyone who would like to get the whole paper as a link to my dropbox, please send me a message so I can give you the link. Actually, the paper is in German language but Google translator might help at least to a certain extent…

Now here is what I’ve done:
In Switzerland, students of Grammar schools have to write a “scientific paper” on a self-chosen subject one year before we have our final exams that will allow us to study at university. This paper is graded and counts in our final certificate as a full grade just like maths or french…
So I decided to write about the PP and analyse its structure and the prospect to the future. I wanted to find out if the PP will be able to survive and if there are sings of successful developpments.

I therefore had many conversations wit Peter and other important people of the PP and so forth.
The probably most important part of my paper consists of a evaluation of the Census. On purpose of having compareable numbers, I always counted how many pairs of a certain species/variety were reported on one census. We already had the discussion if this makes sense and so forth… I will no further comment on that. However, my data-gathering was not the end of it. I already posted the whole excell-table. Here is the updated version of the simple data table with the fall 2015 data:

I am going to go on with the analyses in my next posts…

[Rafael Eggli]

It seems like it did not work the first time…

[Rafael Eggli]

I hope this is better…

OK finally I know how it works… I will go on with the really interesting graphs tomorrow…

[Rafael Eggli]

So lets go on then with the results:

Of course, the easiest way to describe progress and success of the PP is to look at the develpooment of the total amounts of pairs and the number of participants of the census.

Her you can see how many people reported their animals each year. It is good that we hace rather constant numbers here but we should wish for increasing numbers. This would lead to a certainly more constant developpment. At the moment, those who leave eq

Here you can see the developpment. The blue Graph shows the total amount of reported pairs. It shows a really interesting behaviour and a good upwards-trend. Obviously, during some 5 years, we more than doubled the whole of our stock. Of course, all this data will show a certain statistical fluctuation. This is due to breeders who do not always report their stock because they do not have enough time or they simply forget it. But overall, the trend is really clear which is great!
Now to the not so good news:
The red Graph is almost constant with little fluctuation. This sounds good in the first moment because you might think that we succeed in constantly breed the same species. Sadly, this is not true. As the next graph shows, we have huge species-fluctuations. This fluctuation-rate has led to the state we are in that about a third of the about 60 species or varieties that have ever been reported are no longer found in our stocklists. This is a developpment we need to stop.

I hope this shows how well we can use our Census-data and why it is important to keep it actual
Please ask if you have any questions or remarks on that!
I will tomorrow go on with this…

[Peter Finke]

Rafael, very good indeed. This brings us forward a big leap.

But it is difficult to draw the right conclusions from this, conclusions that are possible to be realized with hobbyists. But if they are not, we should draw other conclusions: Which species or forms should we think of in the first row when a museum or zoo is willing to cooperate with us? With other words: Perhaps you could give us a list of the most endangered species/forms (endangered from your evaluation point of view). That is, a list arranged in the succession of priority as our stock situation is concerned.

Go on, Rafael, it’s good!

[Rafael Eggli]

Hello everyone,

@ Peter: Yes, I will com to that list in a moment…

But firstly, I would like to show you some more developpments:

We have seen that some species have been breeded very often in high quantiities and are therefore really abundant. Others are not well distributed and therefore likely to disappear again. In the Graph beow, I present the developpments of the 16 most abundant species compared to the 42 further species.

I think it shows nicely how much the population sizes can vary throughout the years. Filamentosus and also harvey “Selangor” used to be reported in rather big quantities. Others have happily improved.

I want to go on and focus a bit on the unequality we find in the pair-distribution:

I took this graph exactly as I had put it into my paper so theres some writing in german on it… It shows the exact-percentage distribution of the Pairs that were reported in April 2015 on the different species. It is easy to see that this distribution is extremely unequal. The most common species; P. quindecim is hugely overrepresented: about one in four of all the reported pairs were of this species!
But it goes on: the four most abundant species: quindecim, linkei, bintan, and phoenicurus from Aq. Dietzenbach added up to more than half of all the reported pairs! The 32 other species and varieties shared the other half.

Now I want to move towards what Peter suggested:
We want to know exactly how many and which species are endangered the most:

This is the developpment. I grouped the Species into 4 cathegories. On the top, I put those that are the least endangered. 21 or more pairs of these specias have been reported. Then we have the relatively safe species that are rather abundant in the census with 9-20 pairs.
The third row shows the species and varieties we have to focus on the most. Of these many species, we have currently 4 up to 8 pairs wich is not so much. They face the real danger of dieing out within a few years. Therefore, these species must be observed and bred as intensively as possible. Currently, we have 10 such species:

[b]alfredi “Sedili”
anjuganensis ct.
cf. Filamentosus spec. “Ampah”
spec.aff. Linkei “Pankalanbun”
cf. Nagyi “Cherating”
pahuensis ct.
parvulus “Tankiling”
sumatranus ct.
tweediei “Pekan Nenas”
tweediei ct.

[/b]

Then we come to the 9 species that might very well face extinction soon. Thea are only represented by 1-3 pairs:

[b]allani “Sibu”
spec. aff. Bintan “Dua”
spec. Aff. Bintan “Sungai Bertam” ct.
gunawani (Danau Rasau)
harveyi ct.
opallios ct.
paludicola “Paka”
spec. Aff. Rubrimontis ct. Mimbon 2008
tweediei “Sri Bunian”
sp. “Parenggean”[/b]

In the past, the vast majority of all species that have disappeared used to belon to the 3rd group usually at least a year before they disappeared and most of them then showed up again in the 1-3 pairs in the census right before they disappeared.

I want to ask everybody of you wo has one of the 19 above-mentioned pairs in his or her stock to focus even more on these species and make sure they will become better available soon.
Of course, In some cases, this might already be too late but hopefully, some can be saved!

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