The world’s biodiversity is not distributed uniformly throughout the globe. Some areas such as the tropical rainforests, seas and coral reefs teem with the varieties of life whereas others such as some deserts and polar regions are almost devoid of them (Gaston, 2000). Malaysia, with her tropical jungles and seas, is rich with biodiversity. She is fortunate to have had eminent pioneers such as Ridley (1967), Corner (1972), Soepadmo (1972) and Whitmore (1983) to study her flora and Medway (1968) and Lim (1991) to study her fauna taxonomy. Other pioneers in Malaysian biology included Berry, Dhaliwal and Mohsin. These pioneers are then ably followed by workers such as Latiff, Kiew, Go, Khoo, Davidson, Saberi, Omar, Jambari, Idris, Zekri, Teo, Marziah, Tan, Mukherjee, Shapor, Yusoff, Azmi and many others studying the various subdisciplines of biology. In addition to the more obvious large plants and animals, microorganisms and aquatic organisms had not been neglected either. Workers such as Nawawi, Verghese, Ho and Faridah are known
for their work on fungi while Fatimah, Phang, Japar and Anton had studied algae, seaweeds, diatoms and seagrasses. However, some of these workers have now either retired or are soon going to attain retirement age and the worrying part is that there are not many younger
workers keen to pursue research in taxonomy and biosystematics, a prerequisite to further studies in ecology, genetics, biotechnology which in turn are prerequisites for rational conservation, management and sustainable utilization of our rich biological resources. With each passing day species are becoming extinct sometimes without us even knowing that they had ever existed. Even in a developed country such as the USA, one third of her plant and animal species are at risk of extinction (McCann, 2000). Hence, taxonomic and biosystematic studies of our plants, animals and microbes whether terrestrial or aquatic, freshwater and marine, should be priority areas. So should studies on their reproductive biology, life cycles, physiology, feeding habits, migration patterns, predators and their sensitivities to environmental changes.
Spatial subsidies increase local productivity and boost consumer abundance beyond the limits imposed by local resources. In marine ecosystems, deeper water and open ocean subsidies promote animal aggregations and enhance biomass that is critical for human harvesting. However, the scale of this phenomenon in tropical marine systems remains unknown. Here, we integrate a detailed assessment of biomass production in 3 key locations, spanning a major biodiversity and abundance gradient, with an ocean-scale dataset of fish counts to predict the extent and magnitude of plankton subsidies to fishes on coral reefs. We show that planktivorous fish-mediated spatial subsidies are widespread across the Indian and Pacific oceans and drive local spikes in biomass production that can lead to extreme productivity, up to 30 kg ha-1 day-1. Plankton subsidies form the basis of productivity "sweet spots" where planktivores provide more than 50% of the total fish production, more than all other trophic groups combined. These sweet spots operate at regional, site, and smaller local scales. By harvesting oceanic productivity, planktivores bypass spatial constraints imposed by local primary productivity, creating "oases" of tropical fish biomass that are accessible to humans.
Management of wild fisheries resources requires accurate knowledge on which species are being routinely exploited, but it can be hard to identify fishes to species level, especially in speciose fish groups where colour patterns vary with age. Snappers of the genus Lutjanus represent one such group, where fishes can be hard to identify and as a result fisheries statistics fail to capture species-level taxonomic information. This study employs traditional morphological and DNA barcoding approaches to identify adult and juvenile Lutjanus species harvested in Malaysian waters. Our results reveal a suite of species that differs markedly from those that have previously been considered important in the Malaysian wild-capture fishery and show that official fisheries statistics do not relate to exploitation at the species level. Furthermore, DNA barcoding uncovered two divergent groups of bigeye snapper ('Lutjanus lutjanus') distributed on either side of the Malay Peninsula, displaying a biogeographical pattern similar to distributions observed for many co-occurring reef-distributed fish groups. One of these bigeye snapper groups almost certainly represents an unrecognized species in need of taxonomic description. The study demonstrates the utility of DNA barcoding in uncovering overlooked diversity and for assessing species catch composition in a complicated but economically important taxonomic group.