In March 2025, we also started our work for MountBuzz on the island of Borneo, in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Northern Borneo. We – that is a team of three students from the University of Vienna (Imran Sadovic, Andrea Errante, Isadora Skudelny) together with Agnes, our collaborators from the Universiti Malaysia Sabah (botanist Florina Anthony and insect evolutionary ecologist Sze Yek Huei) and Belle Damasus, who is a Master student with Florina and working on filmy fern ecology on Mount Kinabalu. On our initial exploration trip in the first week, we were accompanied by several expert botanists from the Universiti Malaysia and from Sabah Parks, whose knowledge helped us not only to identify different Melastomataceae genera which we all saw for the first time in Borneo, but also to learn a lot about other rainforest plants and which ones can be used for medicinal purposes, or prodcue yummy fruits. Eating and cooking became a thing in the team in the course of the trip, with our Malaysian colleagues introducing vegetables and cooking techniques to the European team members that they hadn’t known about, such as the use of differnet Cucurbitaceae shoots in stir fries and soups… and vice versa, the European team members prepared a few classical central European meals, such as Gulasch (a paprika-heavy beef stew) with Spätzle (a type of pasta) or boiled potatoes with butter and salt.

Our exploratory trip featured different areas of Mount Kinabalu, including lowland foothills around Poring hotsprings (where the world’s biggest flowers, Rafflesia, grow!), mid-elevation montane rainforests with beautiful streams, and a hike into the higher elevations of Mount Kinabalu where one transitions from montane forest to cloud forests and will, eventually, reach treeline. Interestingly, Melastomataceae on Mount Kinabalu do not reach the Alpine zone above treeline, which they do on all other gradients. We do not know the reason for this difference, but it is an interesting question to ponder on in the future. Initially, we found many species just with fruits or sterile, but as always, as we kept looking and exploring more in the forest, more and more individuals with flowers and buds started showing up. The most common genera we found were Medinilla, Melastoma and Sonerila, with the latter being small herbs growing on the shaded forest floor in dense moss layers. We also found some more rare genera such as Catanthera, Astronia, Phyllagathis and Dissochaeta. At this phase of the project, any flowers we find are exciting, since almost all of these genera don’t have any information on their reproductive biology, and if they do, often only for one species from a single locality, while many genera (such as Medinilla, Melastoma and Sonerila) are actually large and geographically widespread. Again, we put up cameras for video monitoring of pollinators, backed up by direct observations and bee catching to identify bees and collect pollen samples from them. We further started manual pollination experiments to understand whether the species can reproduce in the absence of pollinators, monitor flower longevity and flower traits. The team will employ this protocol and data collection across multiple different sites in different areas of Mount Kinabalu in order to understand how reproductive strategies change across elevation.