Zoology Jottings: The Naming of the Hong Kong Newt: The Key Gamers

I photographed this male Hong Kong Newt in 1966 within the outdated Northcote Science Constructing of the College of Hong Kong

Within the literature the Hong Kong Newt is described thus: Paramesotriton hongkongensis (Myers & Leviton 1962). Behind that easy label is the story of these not solely who described the species but additionally of those that collected and despatched the animals from Hong Kong to Stanford College in California. Almost all of the individuals concerned have appeared in my earlier articles however till final week I had not realised that I had already associated among the occasions that led to the Hong Kong Newt being described as a separate species.

Pre 1962: the species it was then considered

Earlier than 1962 the one species of newt or salamander present in Hong Kong was lumped into Cynops chinensis initially described by John Edward Grey FRS (1800-1875) of the British Museum (Pure Historical past) in London. The outline was printed in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1859 and his specimens had been obtained by a Mr Fortune who introduced it in a bottle together with ‘some Fishes and a Leech, collected from a river on the north-east coast of China, inland from Ningpo’. The fishes, by the way, turned out to be home goldfish (the outline of the tail and the big upturned eyes suits the Celestial selection). Grey known as them ‘a really peculiar monstrosity’—phrases I can not higher. Have been they actually present in the identical stream because the newt? Or had been all of them from a stream in a goldfish farm?

That species of newt was redescribed by a number of taxonomists through the years however all of the names given had been finally considered synonyms of that chosen by Grey for the newt from ‘inland from Ningpo’. I shall return to Mr. Fortune in one other article. I shall write it after a cup of tea and therein lies a clue.

Geoffrey Herklots in Thirties Hong Kong was eager to determine the native fauna. He despatched amphibians to Alice Boring in Beijing, or what was then Peiping to most People and Peking to most Brits, over 1200 miles to the north, the place she was gathering and figuring out amphibians of northern China.  She recognized the newts that  Herklots despatched as Triturus sinensis (a reputation that was a synonym of Grey’s C. chinensis and subsequently invalid). In her paper printed in The Hong Kong Naturalist in 1934, Herklots was compelled so as to add a notice since Boring instructed it may need been launched. Herklots had despatched her 27 preserved specimens from ditches in Quarry Bay and he identified that the newt was widespread and widespread all through Hong Kong and adjoining areas of Guandong (Kwangtung, Canton) province and, subsequently, clearly native.

Myers and Leviton started their paper with:

The newt occurring on Hong Kong Island and a small a part of the close by mainland (mainly the hills of the Kowloon space has historically been recognized with the newt inhabiting the Ningpo area of east-central China. The latter was named by Grey (1859) as Cynops chinensis. The 2 kinds had been separated subspecifically by Herre (1939), mainly on osteological characters, however he erred in renaming the northern kind, leaving the Hong Kong inhabitants anonymous.

So far as I could make out (I’ve not seen the unique paper) that Herr Herre (for there are two within the story) named the northern kind T. sinensis boringi, presumably as a result of a scholar of hers had discovered newts recognized as this species in Chekiang (Zhejiang) province which might be anticipated since Mr Fortune had discovered Grey’s kind specimen within the north of that province close to Ningpo (Ningbo).

Karl Wolfgang Herre (1902-1997) attracts little consideration today. The paper Myers and Leviton referred to was a survey of Asian and North American urodeles. For his PhD awarded in 1932 he labored on the subspecies of Triturus cristatus, the Nice Crested Newt of Europe. He later labored on the College of Halle and, part-time, on the Pure Historical past Museum in Brunswick. He continued to work on urodeles for many of his life together with the endocrine management of metamorphosis and fossil salamanders. A biography on Wikipedia in German reveals that he was a member of the Sturmabteilung—the S.A. ‘Brownshirts’—and of the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, NSLB—the Nationwide Socialist Academics League—from 1934 and of the Nazi Social gathering itself from 1937. It was throughout this time that he collaborated with different herpetologists within the research of newts and salamanders, together with Wilhelm Georg Wolterstorff (1864–1943), a serious participant in analysis on newts and salamanders and in selling beginner herpetology by the maintaining of stay animals and in linking amateurs with skilled museum scientists. In 1936 Herre was co-author of a paper with Louis Lantz, the French ‘beginner’ working in Manchester. The Second World Battle would see the co-authors on very totally different sides with Lantz being the consultant of the Free French Forces. Postwar we be taught, ‘After navy service and captivity’, Herre went to Christian-Albrechts-College in Kiel ‘within the late summer season of 1945’. He grew to become a nutritionist and deputy director of the Zoological Institute and Museum and the Museum of Ethnology. In 1947 he was appointed director of a brand new institute for home animals. There he labored on domestication, significantly of canine.

1962. The ‘new’species

The supply of the fabric Myers and Leviton used to erect a brand new species may be very fascinating because it concerned two worldwide networks one, prewar, in fisheries analysis and the opposite, postwar, of these focused on aquarium fish. The kind specimen—the holotype—for the brand new species was collected by Geoffrey Herklots from a stream on the Peak of Hong Kong Island. It was given to Dr Albert William Christian Theodore Herre (1868-1962) (the opposite Herr Herre) who from 1928 till 1946 was Curator of Zoology at Stanford College’s Pure Historical past Museum. Earlier than that he had been Chief of Fisheries with the Bureau of Science within the Philippines. The date given for the addition of three different specimens added to Stanford’s assortment and designated as paratypes was 1941. The person who gave the specimens to this Herre was Herklots’s shut colleague S.Y. Lin (Lin Shu-Yen) (1903-1974); they co-authored a guide, Frequent Meals Fishes of Hong Kong, in 1940. Lin was the person working fisheries analysis in Thirties Hong Kong together with Herklots who was in command of the biology division on the College of Hong Kong. Lin was then or grew to become Superintendent of Fisheries Analysis for the Hong Kong Authorities. He was later recruited by the Meals and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations to work in Washington DC as an knowledgeable in fresh-water fisheries and pond-fish tradition. After that he labored in Taiwan in fisheries analysis.

What we have no idea is why Lin handed specimens of the Hong Kong Newt to Herre, presumably in 1941 simply earlier than the Japanese invasion and occupation. Was Herklots eager to get one other opinion as to their identification? Or was the request handed to Hong Kong from Stanford as its pursuits in systematics and taxonomy and its museum expanded? Was Herre visiting Hong Kong (which he had finished within the Twenties) or had been the specimens despatched by put up? There could also be solutions mendacity in archives.

The historical past of the stay specimens despatched to Stanford within the Nineteen Fifties can also be fascinating. The paper states of one of many designated paratypes:

U 20280, feminine, Kowloon Mountains*, collected in January 1952, by J. D. Romer and despatched alive to the senior creator by Mme. Natasha de [sic] Breuil.