SABAH INTERESTING FACTS

Today i thought it might be interesting to add some facts about Sabah to this page i found some of these while browsing through interesting facts.

1,Sabah's nickname is "Land beneath the Wind" due to its location, which is just below the typhoon and monsoon belt of South East Asia. This means that most of the time Sabah is spared from the damaged by typhoon. 2, Sabah gets its name from a banana tree called 'Pisang Sabaa', which grows in abundance along its west coast area. 3, The tallest tropical tree in the world is located in Sabah at Tawau Hills park. (Sal's hometown) The tree from the species Shorea faguetiana was measured at 88.1 meters in height by an American scientist, Roman Dial in September 2005. This discovery has been recorded in the National Geographic magazine, July 2006 edition. 4, Sabah has 15 out of the 31 species of Nepenthes found on the island of Borneo. Nepenthes is more popularly known as tropical pitcher plants or monkey cups, (or Periuk Kera in Malay) is a kind of carnivorous plants in the monotypic family Nepenthaceae. 5,Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre is the first official orangutan sanctuary and rehabilitation centre in the world which is setup in 1964. 6,Sabah is home to the Borneo Pygmy Elephant, the world's smallest elephant. The Pygmy elephant of Borneo is a sub-species of the Asian elephant, which have a more rounded appearance and are smaller in size than their mainland cousins.

7, The Borneo tropical rainforest is about 130 million years old, making it one of the oldest tropical rainforest in the world. 8, SABAH is home to the Rafflesia, the lagest flower in the world.

Parachuting cats into Borneo! A Cautionary Tale.

In the early 1950's, the Dayak people of Borneo suffered a malarial outbreak. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had a solution: to spray large amounts of DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died; the malaria declined; so far so good. But there were unexpected side effects. Amongst the first was that the roofs of the people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It seemed that the DDT had also killed a parasitic wasp which had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse, the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckoes, which were eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of typhus and plague. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the WHO was obliged to parachute 14 000 live cats into Borneo. Operation Cat Drop, now almost forgotten at the WHO, is a graphic illustration of the interconnectedness of life, and of the fact that the root of problems often stems from their purported solutions.