Ficus finds in Pulau Tioman

I was at Pulau Tioman doing this...

And guessed what I found?


I was very excited to see Ficus species, but due to inexperience, I wasn't able to access the leaves, so I couldn't pluck branches down for IDing. We saw this HUGE fig tree! I like it a lot. :)

And after reading about ramiflory, cauliflory/flagiflory on the Floras, to be able to see it for real for the first time on a live specimen gives an incredible feeling. Look! This ficus species is both cauliflorous and flagelliflorous/geocarpic.



If it's growing on the rock, it's lithophytic as well! :)

I've been truely blessed by these chance encounters with these fig species.

Hope I can make a trip to visit specimens at the Botanic Gardens soon!

How does Statistics come in?

From "A Primer of Ecological Statistics" by Nicholas J. Gotelli and Aaron M. Ellison.

"Using statistics to test hypotheses is only a small facet of the scientific method, but it consumes a disproportionate amount of our time and journal space. We use statistics to describe patterns in our data, and then we use statistical tests to decide whether the predictions of an hypothesis are supported or not. Establishing hypotheses, articulating their predictions, designing and executing valid experiments, and collecting, organizing, and summarizing the data all occur before we use statistical tests."

What is Data Mining?

I thought the Wikipedia's description is quite good:

Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. It is usually used by business intelligence organizations, and financial analysts, but is increasingly being used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimental and observational methods. It has been described as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data" and "the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases."

Some updates

It's been a while since I've updated this blog! In fact, it's been a month. I've been quite busy coping with events and activities and work, and lost the zeal and enthusiasm I first started out with.

But may I not forget the joy of learning even when it gets routine.

So far I have typed out the traits of maximum height, sexual system (diecious/monoecious), minimum and maximum altitude, maximum and minimum dry and fresh fig diameter and position of fig on the plant. I encountered some difficulties with the position of fig, as the treatment in Malesiana and African floras are different.

In Malesiana, it clearly states whether the fig is axillary, found under the leaves, exhibit ramiflory, cauliflory and/or geocarpy. However, in the African flora, they describe the feature without using the term. This leaves me to interprete the feature to be able to assign a term. Further more, I do not know whether being found below the leaves is equivalent to growing on previous growth season's axillary spaces...

I was talking to Prof. the other day when he pointed out how some figs are geocarpic (fig underground on stolons) hence would only be dispersed by mammals or reptiles, like turtles which are much slower than dispersers like birds or bats, hence geocarpic species might be slower to spread than species that fig on axillary buds along the branches.

The next traits I would be tackling are probably growth form and habitat, which I avoided out of sheer fear of the task ahead. Figs are so diverse. They grow in so many places and they have so many growth forms. I would need to find a way to classify it so that I can quantify it in my excel spreadsheet.

My progress might be slower than I wish, as I would be away for a field trip next week to Tioman Island off Peninsula Malaysia East Coast. It would probably be the rare chance I get to do field work, since my project is datamining and deskbound. :) I hope to visit the Herbarium at the Botanic Gardens soon too. Prof. has helped me asked for permission and I am looking forward to see for myself what are all these Ficus plants I've been reading about in these floras.