Under the flight path of roaring planes from Changi, there are lush seagrass meadows.
Studded with Knobbly sea stars and other amazing marine life! With dugong feeding trails too!
There were several medium sized
Knobbly sea stars, many medium sized
Biscuit sea stars, a few
sand stars and even one large
Eight-armed sea star. We didn't see any
Common sea stars.
Here's a video clip of the sea stars I saw.
There were also many other colourful sea cucumbers: many
Thorny sea cucumbers and
Pink warty sea cucumbers,
Orange sea cucumbers and
Purple sea cucumbers. There were many
Ball sea cucumbers washed ashore and one
Smooth sea cucumber. I saw many small
White sea urchins and
Black sea urchins. Also small swimming crabs and other crabs. There were a few
Haddon's carpet anemones and one
Swimming anemone. I noticed many small
Window pane shells and many young
Fan shell clams. I saw one live
Spiral babylon snail and a few
Hammer oysters.
Some fellow visitors also found this
Sundial snail. It was alive but encrusted, so probably not in the best of health. We last saw many of them here during our survey in
May 2017.
There were also some
Hairy sea hares.
A Carpet of Death menacingly slithers through the seagrass meadows hunting hapless prey. There was an explosion of these
Olive flatworms this morning. Similar to what I observed on our last survey here in
Dec 2017.
There were dense growths of
Needle seagrass and
Spoon seagrass. I only saw a sprinkling of
Fern seagrasses and could not find the patch of
Smooth ribbon seagrass that I saw in
Dec 2017.
I saw a few furrows that might be dugong feeding trails. We didn't see any
dugong feeding trails during our
Dec 2017 survey but did see some on our survey here in
May 2017.
Sadly, still many large plastic bags on the low shore.
This shore is cleaned daily. So this trash line is from last night's super high tide.
I'm glad this shore seems to be okay. It is very accessible and tends to be impacted by visitors and people who harvest the shore.
More awesome finds and photos by the team!
Abel Yeo
Wong Yip Hong
Others on this trip: Carol Phillips, Kelvin Yong, Wong Yip Hong
