17/4/2005 • Creatures of Nuang
A number of us trekkers don’t like hiking up Gunung Nuang. I don’t particularly favour the trek myself. But one reason that always draw me back to this mountain is that I always get to see interesting creatures or insects. Yesterday’s trek was no different.

I got to see a toad with a dried leaf camouflage on it’s back very early on our trek up the mountain. I didn’t bring out my camera to take a pic of it. I should have. Just as I should have taken a picture of the stick insect that retracts it’s legs to it’s body. It was almost indistinguishable from all the little dried twigs that were scattered about.

But here are two insects that I got on camera. I don’t know their names, but they sure do look interesting.


Photo by Adrian Wong (left) and Tan Meng Chwen (right)

This is by far the most interesting insect I saw this time around. Adrian spotted this insect latched onto a dried log on the path while coning down the mountain. We started taking photos of it. And I thought that it’s be nice if I had a picture of it in my palm. I reached out to grab the insect. As soon as my fingers touched it’s hard back, the insect coiled itself up into a ball and rolled away. When coiled up, It looked like a pretty marble.

Here’s what seems like an armoured millipede. We saw this at the summit. It was walking quite swiftly until it stopped (as if it wanted us to take pictures of it). Since it was so still in it’s tracks, we placed a 20 sen coin just for size-comparison.


Millipede and size comparison

And then I got hungry…


¬ Khoo Nee On

22/4/2005 • Identifying the bug

Still intrigued by the bug that can roll itself into a ball, I surfed the internet looking for information. Since bug-study is not my field, I didn’t really know where to search. I still haven’t identified the particular species of this bug, but I did find out what type of bug it is. This bug is is a type of Pill Millipede also known as pillipede.

It’s classified as a millipede, although one article claims that they are more closely related to lobsters and crabs (go figure). Anyway, except for an orange pill millipede from Madagascar, most articles and images found on the net focus on the more common black-coloured pill millipede. I’m still not entirely satisfied with what I’ve found, but at least I now know what kinda bug it is. Totally cool.