The first morning tide for 2017! We survey a different Changi shore to check for impacts of the
300-tonne oil spill in the East Johor Strait that landed here three months ago.
Nick saw 5 otters! But I missed them even though he called out to alert us. There was oil sheen on the shore, but seagrasses were not bleaching.
Here's Nick's video clip of the otters that we missed!
There are lush seagrasses on this shore. There was the usual sprinkling of marine life, but the shore appeared quiet compared to our last visit in
Nov 2016. We saw only one
Knobbly sea star, some small
Biscuit sea stars, some tiny
Plain sand stars. And for the first time, some
Common sea stars at the mid-water mark.
There were also lots of different sea cucumbers. The most abundant were
Thorny sea cucumbers and
Pink warty sea cucumbers. There were also some small
Orange sea cucumbers. I saw two small
Garlic bread sea cucumbers, a small
Purple sea cucumber, and a small
See-through sea cucumber.
I saw a few
Hammer oysters, some tiny to small
Window pane shells.
I only saw one
Miliaris cowrie and one
Waved mitre snail. I didn't see any other large living snails.
Marcus brought back to the water two large
Coastal horseshoe crabs that were stranded on the high shore. There were some
Orange striped hermit crabs and
small flower crabs. We saw a few
Peachia anemones and one small
Haddon's carpet anemone. I only saw one small
Flowery sea pen and one
White sea urchin. I saw one large
Potato sponge washed up on the shore. I didn't see any fishes.
The tide wasn't very low so I couldn't see most of the shore. But what meadows emerged were lush, mainly
Spoon seagrass (with large leaf blades) and
Needle seagrass. I saw one small cluster of uprooted
Fern seagrass. How nice to see a small patch of
Smooth ribbon seagrass near the mid-water mark which we first spotted in
Aug 2016. Fortunately, I did not see any seagrass bleaching, unlike the bleaching I saw
two weeks ago near Changi Point.
We had a quick look at the artificial seawalls nearby. I noticed a layer of nesting mussels on a small part of the rocks. I hope these are not the invasive mussels that we saw at
Kranji two weeks ago.
I heard that oil landed on this part of Changi during the East Johor oil spill three months ago. This morning, we could still see oil sheen on the shore. But I did not see actual brown puddles of oil.
Here's a video clip of the oil sheen along the shoreline.
Sadly, large trash lands every day on this shore that is cleaned every day. Most of the trash I saw appeared to come from Singapore fish farms, which are not provided with daily trash collection. There was also a few large clumps of
Palm Oil Waste which afflicts much of our north-eastern shores.
We saw two men on a boat laying a long fishing net off the shore. Hope the otters don't get trapped in it.
Thanks to new friends from the
Nature Photographic Society of Singapore who joined our trip this morning! Thanks to Destine, Robert and Simon for your company and for finding awesome animals.
Posts by others on this trip
Other oil spill surveys
On 1 Apr (Sat),
Liz Lim was with TeamSeaGrass for their regular monitoring at Chek Jawa and shared that she did not see any signs of oil spill impact on the seagrasses there.
Posts about the Jan 2017 Johor Strait oil spill
Survey on 10 Feb, one month after the oil spill
Other surveys and news posts
