The largest peatland in Malaysia is in Sarawak with approximately 1.66 million ha (13%) of total area, distributed widely in Sibu division followed by Sri Aman, Miri, Kota Samarahan, Sarikei and Bintulu. Despite being the most diverse animal species, the study of insects in peat swamp forest, particularly beetles, is still in the incipient stage. Therefore, this study aimed to provide recent information on the beetle species composition in a peat swamp forest of Real Living Lab, UNIMAS (RLL) located in Kota Samarahan. Beetles were sampled for five consecutive days and nights within a seven-day sampling trip in August 2020. Three sampling methods were employed in this study, namely handpicking method (HPM), modified Pennsylvanian light trap (MPLT) and pitfall trapping (PFT). A total of 15 families representing 37 species and morphospecies with 185 individuals were successfully collected. The most speciose family from the beetle assemblages in RLL is Scarabaeidae with eight species collected (21.62%), followed by Curculionidae with six species (16.22%) and Staphylinidae with five species (13.51%). The most abundant family was also represented by Scarabaeidae with 64 individuals (34.59%), followed by Scolytidae with 27 individuals (14.59%) and Carabidae with 23 individuals (12.43%), respectively. This suggests that these families are good candidates as biodiversity indicator of peat swamp forests. This study is still in its preliminary stage; hence it is important to conduct further beetle samplings in future to better understand the potential of beetle as a bioindicator in the peat swamp habitat as an effort to conserve and protect the habitat and the biodiversity that came along with it.

The Penthicodes farinosus are strikingly coloured insects and can be found in India, Myanmar, Peninsular Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, the Philippines, and Borneo. Despite their wide distributional range in Asia with a common occurrence in Borneo, morphometric investigation of P. farinosus is still lacking. The study is aimed to investigate the morphological variations of this species between two different sexes in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Eleven morphometric characters were measured from 183 specimens (69 males and 114 females). The data were analysed using an independent t-test, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA). Sexual dimorphism index (SDI) was found ranging from 0.044 (LV) to 0.1008 (BTg) indicating females were larger than males. In PCA, cumulative variations of 59.9% were recorded from two principal components, showing higher loadings in the length of tegmen (LTg) and total length (TL). DFA revealed a single function that explains a canonical correlation of 0.895 with 100% variation. The Wilks’ Lambda values of 0.199 were highly supported with p<0.0001. The highest loadings for the model are LTg and TL. The two variables were further tested using Leave-One-Out Cross Validation (LOOVC) method which resulted in 97.2% cases being correctly classified as male or female. This suggests LTg and TL can be useful in separating both sexes of P. farinosus.