Study on snails in Perak

Lafarge Malaysia, who are quarrying Gunung Kanthan (see labels), provided a grant to scientists from Rimba and Universiti Malaysia Sabah to study land snails on 12 limestone hills in Perak. See Rimba for more on this.

The results were published in ZooKeys 682 on 4 July 2017, Diversity and biogeography of land snails (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the limestone hills of Perak, Peninsular Malaysia, by Junn Kitt Foon, Gopalasamy Reuben Clements, Thor-Seng Liew. The results are very interesting, on 12 hills -
"We found 122 species of land snails, of which 34 species were unique to one of the surveyed hills. We identified 30 species that are potentially new to science. The number of land snail species recorded at each hill ranged between 39 and 63 species.".

This is quite exciting, lots of potentially new species.

The study also reveals that "Charopa lafargei which previously presumed as endemic to Gunung Kanthan (Vermeulen and Marzuki 2014), is shown in our study to also occur on the limestone hills at the north of Kinta Valley".

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Over the years I have collected a few snails from limestone areas. This one is common all over Peninsula Malaysia -

Amphidromus atricallosus perakensis (Fulton, 1901)

See more on my blog Some snail shells from Pahang and Perak limestone.

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LafargeHolcim accelerates biodiversity efforts in Southeast Asia

My blog in June 2014 reported that Cement giants Lafarge and Holcim would merge. The merger happened in July 2015.

Lafarge is the company quarrying Gunung Kanthan - see labels about this.

On 11 July 2017, LafargeHolcim published an article, " LafargeHolcim accelerates biodiversity efforts in Southeast Asia".  See link for the full article. Although Gunung Kanthan isn't specifically mentioned, it does relate to Malaysia. Excerpt from first paragraph:
"LafargeHolcim is accelerating its efforts on biodiversity conservation and has signed an agreement with Fauna & Flora International (FFI), a leading NGO focused on biodiversity. Under the agreement, FFI will perform an independent external review of the Group’s existing biodiversity management plans (BMP’s) at sites in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines; contribute to the development of a Groupwide strategy on karst management since karst areas are an important habitat for unique and specialized fauna; identify opportunities for enhancing biodiversity in quarry rehabilitation; and organize a stakeholder dialogue bringing together an external expert group, local government, local NGOs and LafargeHolcim staff to consult on BMP recommendations."