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Most of the freshwater species in
Borneo belong
to the genus
Macrobrachium
in the family Palaemonidae,
sometimes called long-legged or marsh
shrimp, and are characterized by long,
developed claws
in the dominant male, adult
shrimp. These shrimp are true shrimp, and some species (such as Macrobrachium rosenbergii)
are harvested for commercial consumption. Some species also become
quite large, with freakishly huge claws, but these are not those
species. If there were any like those in Latak stream or in the
Maliau’s streams, they were too big for my traps. (That’s what I like
to think happened at Maliau.)
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| Detail of a map of Lambir Hills National Park From the Sarawak Forestry website |
The shrimp were caught
with simple bottle traps consisting of a
large water
bottle with its top cut off and reattached so the mouth of the bottle
was inverted to make a funnel pointing toward the inside of the bottle.
(Traditionally people used bamboo traps similar in design but much
bigger.) Cord attatched to these traps were used to secure the traps to
the
river/stream bank. Greg
and Min-Sheng
assisted me in
making these, coming up with bait concoctions, and setting them up. The
bait consisted of bread or crackers mixed with rotting
fish/shrimp/squid and/or cheese and/or peanuts. These were set
overnight in various areas
of Lambir Hills National Park (none so far were found in traps at
Maliau Basin, where small fish
rather than shrimp seem to dominate as scavengers within the Basin,
especially at Ginsing
Camp). Although the traps easily caught many shrimp extremely quickly (frighteningly easily, in fact) the most immediate scavengers seemed to be juvenille shrimp, which were hard to identify. |
| If traps were left
out longer, the juvenille shrimp, which are territorial, would kill
each other and become bait for larger, more mature shrimp. These mature
shrimp would also end up killing each other, and if the traps were left
out for even longer, the decaying shrimp would attract various fish
species for Greg‘s
taxon.
Because of the
limitations of using a trap to catch the mature shrimp,
I have limited notes on their behavior and territory. According to Iwata et al. (2003), Macrobrachium species seem to prefer different microhabitats within the same river, and there are at least three Macrobrachium species residing in freshwater streams in Sarawak, Borneo(1). However, because I could not find the characteristics of these species (M. neglectum, M. trompii, and M. pilimanus), I couldn’t figure out which was which. “Wood Shrimp”, or shrimp of the genus Atyopsis (distinguished by a different body shape and carapace form) also apparently reside in the same area, but I did not find them. |
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