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Our Chinese friend Wentian Shi who presently is exploring the few remnants of former Paro-biotopes and primeval forest on Bangka island told me yesterday that some days ago he succeeded to find the true P. deissneri again at a location formerly not visited by ichthyoplogists.
[b]This is exciting news since last year his expedition was wthout success. He found literally all known locations for this oldest species of the genus completely dried or destroyed by oil palm plantations. He and his fellow travellers supposed deissneri being the first Paro we know to be extinct.
The new discovery was made although presently we have the rainy season with very high water levels. I saw the pictures of the fishes that Wentian shot on location. Let us hope that he will be able to bring some living pairs to Europe for breeding them.
The re-discovery is a first class achievement. Congratulation, Wentian! Hope to see you soon back in Germany! And greetings to Hiroyuki Kishi who will meet you on Bangka next week![/b]
Peter Finke
Yes, this is indeed great news, – I too am very glad to hear so. I look very much forward to hearing more about this, and hope to do so in Hamburg in September.
Meantime I wish Wentian Shi best luck with his continual search for fishes down there, and for the safe returning back for himself and fishes 🙂 ..Congratulations to Wentian! This is an important step for our project! It proves that it is actually possible to get ahead. I am hoping that the fish will make their way safely to some good breeder and that soon we will be having a good new stock of these “first ever found” species. It would have been a lot of history that would have been lost If they had been extinct
With permission from Wentian Shi we have been allowed to upload a few of his photos taken in Bangka.
I ask all to respect that these photos are with copyright of Wentian Shi, and they are not to be copied by any means for use any other places. These are wonderful photos of a rare and threatened species, for which we have been wondering for some time now whether this species perhaps was completely lost. We are delighted that Wentian Shi has reported the finding of p. deissneri on Bangka, and we are looking forward to hearing more about it later.
But just for now, a few photos of Wentians here.Hello, now we can see how easy to recognize is this species … Even, just after catch color spots on the tail fin are clearly visible.
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.
Wentian Shi has truly preformed a great service to our organization and to the world of environmental conservation. Martin is right on in his post noting that with the most recent photos even someone like me, who does not consider himself an expert by any means, can turn to a reseller and say “No sir, that fish is not P. deissneri it lacks the spots”.
I have asked about Hiroyuki Kishi, head of the Team Borneo, several times in the past and little is known about him and his efforts particularly in recent years. I truly believe there is great treasure and knowledge that he has collected that is locked within the Japanese language and unavailable to the rest of the world. There is an amazing project to be uncovered for someone or a small group to collect his information and that of Team Borneo and to translate this information into German or English. Do we have someone out there that would be willing and able to invest time and energy in this project???
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