As the snail was of an unusual colour, it was collected and deposited in the Zoological Reference Collection of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum at the National University of Singapore, under the catalogue number ZRC.MOL.5722. Even though this individual has a yellowish-white body, it is not a true albino. An albino animal would be totally devoid of pigmentation. Even the shell will also lack the brown and black markings. As normal colouration is retained on the shell, the individual herein featured is regarded as xanthic. For comparison purposes, a normally pigmented Achatina fulica from Singapore is shown on Fig. 2. Albinistic or xanthic individuals appear to be rare in nature. Through selective breeding, snowy white-fleshed giant African land snails have been farmed in Taiwan (R.O.C.), where they are known as ‘white jade snail’ (白玉蝸牛), since the early 2000s on a commercial scale for human consumption (Hsieh et al., 2006; Chiu et al., 2012; Tan et al., 2012). Farming of this variety of snail has apparently been subsequently introduced to China (P.R.C.), and frozen and canned white jade snail meat appears to be easily available in Taiwan and China (for an overview, please refer to: http://baike.baidu.com/view/510259.htm). The snail meat is also commonly sold in night markets in the southern part of Taiwan, but most consumers seem unaware that they were consuming giant African land snails (Shih H.-T., personal communication). Curiously, despite the economic value and the fact that white jade snail farming and consumption is widespread in Taiwan and China, there is very little published information in English. Based on information in online pet forums and websites, the albinistic white jade variety of the giant African land snail is widely available in the pet trade; possibly originating from the same farms. In Singapore, these white jade snails have made a brief appearance in the local pet trade in the mid-2000s, but have not been seen since (Tan Siong Kiat, personal observation). However, the individual found at Bukit Gombak (Fig. 1) is more likely to be a melanin deficient natural mutant rather than a released pet, as snails in the pet trade are usually albinistic rather than xanthic

Pseudochromis ransonneti was described from Singapore in 1870 by Steindachner (1870), but it remains poorly known to date. This fish has recently been encountered off Pulau Hantu (Heng & Lim, 2013) and apparent courtship behaviour has even been observed there (Heng, 2014). The yellowbelly dottyback is known to inhabit coastal reefs, often in silty areas, down to 12 m depth, where it occurs singly, in pairs or in small groups. It is distributed in the East Indian region including the south-eastern coast of Sumatra, the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, Brunei and Palawan (Allen & Erdmann, 2012). The discovery of small and cryptic fishes such as the yellow-belly dottyback is essential to the understanding of the ecology of fish populations and community structures in local waters. Documenting such fishes is always challenging when using traditional census techniques such as belt transact. This is because these fishes have a tendency to display negative responses to divers. A combination of non-destructive methods, baited census and traditional census for documenting cryptic fish species has been suggested by Stewart and Beukers (2000). Perhaps their method could be adopted by researchers in Singapore to obtain a more accurate picture of fish communities on local reefs

Diogenid hermit crabs (Decapoda: Anomura: Diogenidae) from localities in the western Pacific (Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and Taiwan) were examined for abdominal bopyrid parasites. Over 2000 hermit crabs were collected from various localities in the Philippines between December 1996 and June 2000. Fifty-seven of these crabs harboured abdominal bopyrid parasites, no species of which have ever been previously reported from the Philippines.