The 11th International Meeting of the Asian Network of Research Resource Centers will be held in the Philippines on 16-19 October 2019 inside the beautiful campus of the University of the Philippines Los Banos!

For important information on the conference, please go to the home site at https://sites.google.com/up.edu.ph/2019-anrrc

When we think of rodents and mice, we usually think of them as gnawing critters which will bite into anything they can fancy on. We hate them and consider them as pests, specially when they are inside our homes. But these two new species of mice, the first discovered in Mt. Labo, Camarines Sur and the second, in Mt. Mingan, Aurora are not the typical rodents we know.

“Funny as it is, we liken their eating style to a hungry kid eating and playing with spaghetti, says Prof. Phillip A. Alviola, curator for small mammals at the UPLB Museum of Natural History and part of an international team which has been doing mammalian surveys across the Philippines since the 1980s.

“Have you seen the classic Bella Notte scene in ‘Lady and the Tramp’ when they ate spaghetti? Think of something like that, but instead of the rodents sucking up the spaghetti, they are slurping on earthworms,” Alviola says as he laughed during a short interview.

If you are a curious outdoors person, you may at least once have come across frothy slime smeared on vegetation. Your first thought may have been, “Gross! How could anyone spit around so carelessly?”

But the chances of you touching another persons' sputum even on a hike are quite small. Spittlebugs might be the more likely culprit.

Bugs that spit and hop

That ‘spit’ you were shaking off your hand could be the secretion of a sap-feeding cercopid called a froghopper. 

"Cercopids are a big family of tiny hemipterans, an insect group which has wings that are part tough and hard, part membranous," explains Dr. Sheryl A. Yap, curator at the UPLB Museum of Natural History.

We are pleased to invite you to the 11th Asian Network of Research Resource Centers (ANRRC) International Meeting (ANRRC 2019). This year, the Philippines, through the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) and the UPLB Museum of Natural History, is a proud host to the event which will be held at Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), University of the Philippines Los Baños on October 16-18, 2019.

ANRRC aims to promote cooperation and networking among Bioresource Centers (BRCs) in the Asia-Pacific Region. BRCs are repositories of plant, animal, and microbial species as well as their tissues, cell lines, and genetic information. The uses of BRCs cut across a wide range of fields as scientific resources are made available to research agencies, educational institutions, and the government.

The ANRRC 2019 Theme is “Bioresource Centers: Infrastructure for Biodiversity Conservation, Biotechnology, and Biomedicine”

I was not surprised at all when I heard that a new species of cricket was named after a very good friend. The publication had good timing, released online just three days before what should have been his 28th birthday. Today, May 8 marks five months since he has passed on.

The description of James’ scaly cricket, Ornebius alvarezi sp. nov., one of two new species of common scaly crickets recently described from Siargao Island in Mindanao is both a testament and honor given to James Alvarez, a promising young wildlife biologist brimming with so much potential but whose life was probably destined to be just that — short, accomplished and well-lived.

Upon reading the description on Zootaxa (https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4590.1.7), I was immediately drawn to the photo of the holotype which Ming Kai (Tan), Jeck (Baroga-Barbecho) and Ma’m Sheng (Yap) collected in Siargao, just two months before James’ ill-fated climb of Mt. Apo in December 2018. I looked at it closely from several points of view, and concurred, yes, the new cricket does embody James.

The UPLB Museum of Natural History is saddened by the sudden passing last week of Dr. Graham Charles George Argent, Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and a member of the International Board of Advisors of the Museum's journal, Laksambuhay.

Fondly considered as Edinburgh's "Indiana Jones" of Botany, Dr. Argent has been to the remotest and most inhospitable areas in the world in search for the rarest plants. Even in his retirement from the RGBE, Dr. Argent has worked on Ericaceae and Musaceae of Southeast Asia. He gave the keynote speech at the Flora Malesiana Symposium (Edinburgh) in 2016. In September 2017, he was one of the plenary speakers of the museum's CLADES: First Philippine Natural History Museums and Collections Summit.