Educational trip to the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre

I had the opportunity to join a group of 29 MLT students of Batch 1-5 accompanied by 2 of their lecturers to the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre in Semengoh on Monday. I was about 15 minutes late *woops* but I was able to catch the slideshows that Ms. Asha was presenting to the students.

Ms. Asha was on hand to give a brief presentation about the centre, its contribution and such.

No educational field trip is complete without their lecturers giving them questions based on the presentation/field trip as part of their weekly tutorial assignments before the tour around the facility =)

Mr. Then distributing assignment topic to each of the group

The studentssss ............. ! =)

After the presentation, all of us headed to the (traditional) documentation block a.k.a herbarium section where most of the plants are stored and labeled to document their species, collector's name, venue of collection and such in the database.

The students listening to the officer's explanation in full concentration on how plants are collected, mounted on the special sheet and labeled.

A section of the lab where some of the plants were also kept in plastic bottle/jar/

Apparently, not only plants were documentated but animals and insects too. Here are just some of the specimens that I managed to take a picture of.

Don't be fooled =)

My camera didn't do these insects justice because they looked small. But really, they were H U G E !!! I can't imagine the horror if anyone who has fear for these creatures sees one of these in real life *gasp!*

From snakes to moonrat .... They're all kept in this one particular room ...

Next, we went to another section of the centre, which is the Preparation Lab.

Leaves, barks, roots, branches of plants are dried first before the distillation.

Showing the equipments and how the plants are process to the students ...

Jotting down notes for their assignment =))

Touring around the Laila Taib Ethnobotanical Garden. A lot of plants used for medicinal purposes by the indigenouss tribe in Sarawak for both human and animals can be found here.

And finally for a group picture of the students and their lecturers.

Madam Cynthia standing far left, while Mr. Then standing far right.

The rest, MLT Batch 1-5 students!