Messing up the reef can make you sick

When corals are killed by people, a study has found that the dead corals may be colonized by virulently toxic microorganisms. These are eaten by reef fish. When people eat these reef fishes, they get very sick indeed.

"Some regions like French Polynesia or New Caledonia are particularly strongly exposed to this effect which triggers over 100,000 cases of severe poisoning annually throughout the world."

"The exceptional speed with which symptoms appear in these new cases (burning in the mouth or throat as soon as the fish is ingested), the complete lack of effect of traditional remedies such as false tobacco (or elephant’s foot) and the gravity of symptoms (one-third of people poisoned had to go to hospital, compared with 2% for Ciguatera), signals something other than the classic form of poisoning.

As well as this finding, this study also brought the first demonstration that consumption of giant clams (Tridacna) was linked to poisoning outbreaks."

Here's the full report.

Potential New Threat For Coral Reefs And Health Of Communities In The Tropics
ScienceDaily 4 Sep 08;

Human activities bear a large part of the responsibility for coral reef degradation. Several threats hang over this complex ecosystem with its extraordinary biodiversity, whether in the form of anthropogenic effluents emitted at certain times or global warming which causes coral bleaching.

The dead corals can be colonized by a blanket of algae in turn favouring colonization by dinoflagellates of the Gambierdiscus genus. These microorganisms secrete a toxin which the reef fish ingest when they feed. Then when humans eat the flesh of contaminated fish they fall victim to an infection called Ciguatera.

Some regions like French Polynesia or New Caledonia are particularly strongly exposed to this effect which triggers over 100 000 cases of severe poisoning annually throughout the world. Between 2001 and 2005, the recording of 35 cases of Ciguatera-type poisoning that had hit the same tribe, the Hunete, living on the New Caledonian island of Lifou, prompted a scientific team from the IRD to conduct a more searching enquiry.

Their investigations first indicated that the part of the coral reef where these fishermen caught their fish had been destroyed in order to facilitate launching of their fishing vessels. Submarine observations showed that in places the dead coral was covered by a carpet of cyanobacteria. Epidemiological study then revealed that herbivorous fish species were involved in 70% of the poisoning outbreaks registered in the tribe studied. Now, Ciguatera poisoning generally comes from the flesh of carnivorous fish, placed at the top of the food chain, and which remains the most toxic for humans owing to bioaccumulation.

The exceptional speed with which symptoms appear in these new cases (burning in the mouth or throat as soon as the fish is ingested), the complete lack of effect of traditional remedies such as false tobacco (or elephant’s foot) and the gravity of symptoms (one-third of people poisoned had to go to hospital, compared with 2% for Ciguatera) , signals something other than the classic form of poisoning. As well as this finding, this study also brought the first demonstration that consumption of giant clams (Tridacna) was linked to poisoning outbreaks.

These newly revealed elements support the idea of a contamination mechanism which differs significantly from that caused by dinoflagellate algae even though certain neurological symptoms, such as sensation inversion, are identical. The research team therefore took samples of cyanobacteria, giant clams and different species of coral fish in the Hunëtë fishing zone most at risk.

An array of toxicological analyses performed on mollusc and cyanobacterial extracts brought evidence of complex paralysing substances, some of which had a structure closely similar to ciguatoxins. These results overall point to a hitherto unknown poisoning agent, similar to Ciguatera, yet produced by cyanobacteria. However, unlike dinoflagellates, these microorganisms contaminate mollusc species such as the giant clam and also a broad range of coral reef fish local people use as food.

Another potential consequence emerged from this study. The rise in oceanic temperature by a few degrees, associated with global warming, is already known to have a negative impact on coral reefs: bleaching and eventual death. Such reef ecosystem degradation creates the danger of colonization of this environment-and therefore the fishing grounds-by these cyanobacteria, hence endangering the marine way of life of the area’s human populations.

This already seems to be the case in the French Polynesian island of Raivavae, in, where certain sites are indeed covered with an extensive matting of cyanobacteria. The thousand or so inhabitants of this “paradise” island, faced with increasingly frequent Ciguatera-like poisoning incidents, are switching from a diet where proteins come almost exclusively from lagoon-caught fish and shellfish to one based strongly on other animal proteins. For these fishing communities therefore, global warming could be expressed not only by a degradation of their fishing grounds but also by the emergence of cardiovascular diseases linked to too rapid a transition in diet.

This research was conducted jointly with scientists from the Institut Louis Malardé in Papeete (French Polynesia), the Institut Pasteur of New Caledonia, the CNRS, INSERM and the University of Boston (USA).

What the fish: Can eat or not?

A seafood guide for Singapore soon! WWF announced today that they would be coming up with a guide on the seafood eaten in Singapore to guide consumers in making a more sustainable choice.

This is the Hong Kong fish guide, from the WWF website.

WWF also launched a two-year project to get Singapore restaurants and hotels to serve up less of the grouper and another fish, the Napolean wrasse, also known as the humphead wrasse.

After Hong Kong, Singapore is the second-largest consumer of these fish in the region.

WWF says more than 500 tonnes of fish consumed in Singapore in a year are coral reef fish, and three-quarters of these are various types of grouper. The reason the consumption of the grouper and the wrasse is worrying conservationists is that these fish are at the top of the food chain in the reefs.

'When they are gone, it means other fish normally eaten by them will increase in number. And some of these fish are harmful to the reefs'

'We're not saying one has to stop eating fish but perhaps we can choose to eat those which are in abundant supply. With the seafood guide, we hope to help consumers make these decisions.'

According to AVA, Singaporeans consume about 120,000 tonnes of fish a year, most of them from the waters of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Among the 15 most popular fish consumed here are the Spanish mackerel, commonly known as batang, salmon, pomfret and seabass.

WWF also says destructive fishing practices, such as blast or cyanide fishing, pose a serious risk to the health of reef ecosystems and the long-term future of the live reef fish trade.

The WWF has already produced such guides for Hong Kong and Indonesia.

This is the Indonesian fish guide, from the WWF website.

More about the fish guide
from the WWF HK fish guide

What is the aim of a fish guide?

Call the 'Seafood Choice Initiative', it aims to tackle the problems with marine fisheries and aquaculture through 'consumer-power'.

Do people care?

According to a 2005 TNS survey, conducted on behalf of WWF, more than 70% of people in Hong Kong didn't know or were unsure of the origins of the seafood they consumed. And more than 50% of them didn't know whether there were any environmental impacts associated with the food they ate. But an impressive 97% of the Hong Kong public said they would either stop or reduce their seafood consumption if they knew a species was threatened.

How were the different species assessed for the HK fish guide?

All species were assessed using rigorous criteria for either wild caught, or farmed species, developed collaboratively by a number of WWF offices, including Hong Kong. For wild-caught seafood, we examined in detail whether the fishery is sustainably managed, and whether the fishing methods are destructive to the environment. For farmed seafood, we looked at the impacts of disease, pollution, the use of medicine, and where the juvenile animals come from.

Updates of the seafood guide

The ultimate aim of the guide is not to completely halt the fishing or farming of any marine fishes or invertebrates, including those currently in the "Avoid" category. WWF recognises the importance of marine species as food. Rather, we hope that gradually all fisheries will become properly managed, and that the problematic side-effects of aquaculture become addressed. With this in mind WWF will periodically update the seafood guide to reflect changes in the way that wild-caught and farmed species are caught and reared. We will also update this webpage with the latest changes, assessments for new species, and more detailed information, to create an invaluable resource for consumers and the industry.

More links

• Hong Kong fish guide website and PDF file download
• Indonesian fish guide website and PDF file download
• Fish guides for other countries
• The latest media reports on over-fishing on the wildsingapore news blog
• The latest media reports on aquaculture on the wildsingapore news blog
  

New Sentosa shore attractions in 2009

Just announced, "a water sports centre, with a fleet of charter boats" and "a S$15 million simulated wave surfing facility, where surfers can ride a 10-foot barrelling wave" at Siloso Beach.

map from the Sentosa website

The "ka-ching" effect? "the new attractions and the opening of the integrated resort is expected to double the number of visitors annually" from 6.1-6.2 million a year to as high as 15 million by the year 2015.

Also reported, Sentosa will launch a new 10-year masterplan for the development of the island at the end of this year. The last masterplan was completed earlier this year.

From the sentosa corporate site:

By 2010 when its S$12-billion ten-year strategic masterplan is completed ahead of schedule, the island will bring Singapore closer to the realization of the country's Tourism 2015 target of attracting 17 million tourists and generating S$30 billion in revenue. Sentosa will also have more than 10,000 residents living in 2,500 luxurious Sentosa Cove homes. By then, a projected workforce of about 16,000 will be committed to provide unique and memorable experiences to our guests.

The Sentosa offering will be enhanced and strengthened with the addition of South East Asia's first Universal Studios theme park built within the S$5.75-billion Resorts World at Sentosa development. Sentosa expects to make more than S$3 billion in revenues with this mega development as well as progressive developments in our services, accommodations, events and attractions.

The Today newspaper asked the new chief executive of Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC), Mike Barclay:

Will the changing visitor demographics — a higher-end crowd — transform the essence of Sentosa, long the laid-back getaway for Singapore's families and students?

What of some concerns that parts of the island might be set aside for access only by the rich and privileged, when Resorts World opens its doors?

Mr Barclay gave his assurance that the only thing that will change is the look of the place, not the feel.

He also said that SDC will engage all stakeholders in discussions before any developments are built, adding that he has arranged to meet residents of Sentosa Cove next week.

Various corners of the island will be differentiated with their own distinct character, he added, to cater to the needs of different people. “There will be focused areas for play, like the beaches; some areas will be relatively untouched and unspoilt; and others will be quieter and more contemplative,” he said.

For instance, the amount of greenery on the island will not be disturbed. Sentosa has also started a programme involving nine primary schools, where students come in to learn about nature and help with conservation efforts.

There were no further details on these issues on the sentosa website as of this morning.

Some Background: Sentosa manages these Southern Islands of Singapore: Sentosa Island, Kusu Island, Seringat-Kias and Lazarus, St. John's Island, Sisters Islands, Pulau Jong and Pulau Hantu.Sentosa has some natural shores left that are still teeming with marine life. So much so that public walks are conducted on these shores by the Naked Hermit Crabs, and the seagrass meadows on this shore is one of the sites monitored by TeamSeagrass.

Related links on the wildfilms blog

• A saltwater lake at the Southern Islands?
• Fate of the Southern Islands
• Photos of Sentosa's natural shores on wildsingapore flickr, including natural shores destroyed by the development of the Integrated Resort.

Water quality at Pasir Ris discussed in Parliament: full text

Poor water quality at Pasir Ris was recently in the news, and there were media reports of the issue being discussed in Parliament where it was reported that a study will be done on the situation.

Although some sporting groups scrambled to find alternative locations, some people didn't really care.

There's still lots of marine life at Pasir Ris!
Like this enormous sea star, also octopuses, sea anemones and more, which Kok Sheng saw and shared during a visit on 19 Aug.

Not to mention the recent excitement about a crocodile at Pasir Ris which was considered an indication that Singapore's rivers are healthier now. Alas, the crocodile eventually got caught.

Anyway, here's the full text of the parliamentary discussion of the issue.

POLLUTION IN THE WATERS OFF PASIR RIS BEACH
(Measures to improve water quality)
From Hansard: Singapore Parliament Reports on the Singapore Parliament website

42. Mr Charles Chong (Pasir Ris Punggol GRC MP) asked the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources if he will provide an update on the investigation into the source of pollution in the waters off Pasir Ris Beach and the measures taken to improve water quality in that area.

Assoc. Prof. Dr Yaacob Ibrahim:

The National Environment Agency (NEA) introduced new guidelines for recreational water quality at the end of July. Based on these guidelines, Pasir Ris beach is assessed to be unsuitable for primary contact activities, such as swimming, water-skiing and wakeboarding. Signs have since been erected along Pasir Ris beach to advise beach goers against swimming in the water.

The water quality at Pasir Ris has not deteriorated. Rather, we have adopted a higher standard based on the latest guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which introduced a new microbial indicator, enterococcus. The NEA's new guidelines require at least 95% of the water samples collected to have enteroccocus levels of below 200 counts per 100 millilitres. Pasir Ris beach does not meet this guideline, and the causes could be storm-water runoff, riverine activities, and indiscriminate discharges from industries and construction sites. We also cannot rule out non-domestic activities in the open seas.

Singapore already has in place a comprehensive regulatory and enforcement regime to ensure that our waterways are kept clean. For instance, NEA conducts regular surveillance of industries and construction sites to control against illegal discharge of sewage into open drains. The premises along Pasir Ris beach are also connected to sewers, ensuring that sewage is channeled to our used water network and properly treated.

The water at Pasir Ris beach is not able to meet the new guidelines despite existing pollution control measures. NEA is undertaking a detailed consultancy study to better understand the specific sources of pollution affecting our beaches, and determine if there are other measures which are feasible to adopt. The study is expected to be completed early next year.

NEA will regularly collect and analyse water samples at the popular recreational beaches. The grading of beaches will be reviewed annually, with advisories updated as necessary, on their suitability for primary contact activities.

People who live without TV

I am one of those who've joined the dark side. No TV, no cable at home. So I found this article interesting.

It may seem to have nothing to do with the shores. But I do get a lot of questions about how I find the time to do stuff for the shores. I think NOT watching TV is one of those things that has given me back my life, and allowed me to experience Reality as Life instead of TV.

People Who Live Without TV
Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 4 Sep 08;

For many Americans the thought of life without TV is akin to forgoing food, shelter or, God forbid, the Internet. But about 1 to 2 percent of Americans do abstain from the boob tube, and they might seem like strange bedfellows.

A recent study of those who live without found that about two-thirds fall into either the "crunchy granola set" or the "religious right, ultraconservative" camp, said researcher Marina Krcmar, a professor of communication at North Carolina's Wake Forest University. Krcmar interviewed 120 people from 62 different households who do not watch television, as well as 92 people from 35 households with TV, and described her findings in a new book, "Living Without the Screen" (Routledge, 2008).

Aversion to television, it turns out, is a common ground for the very liberal and the very conservative.

"I interviewed one guy who was 31, single, an artist living in Boston, who saw himself as countercultural," Krcmar told LiveScience. "The next day I had an interview with a religious woman with ten children who lived in the Midwest. These people seem like they would disagree about almost everything, but if you ask them about television the things that came out of their mouths were almost identical."

Why do people give it up?

Krcmar herself lives on the dark side, having given up television about 13 years ago.

"It's just something I don't want in the home - it's a perpetual annoyance, like a gnat," she said.

The motivations for most people who abandon TV fall into three categories, Krcmar found.

Some give it up to avoid exposing their families to the excessive sex, violence, and consumerism they feel are promoted onscreen. Others object to the medium itself, claiming television intrudes too much into their lives, interferes with conversation and takes time away from the family. Finally, some people have a beef with the power and values of the television industry and don't want its influence in their homes.

In contrast to the average American adult, who watches three hours of television a day, non-watchers fill their time with a plethora of activities.

"Non-viewers had a greater variety of things that they did with their free time than viewers did," Krcmar said. "It's not just that they were reading instead of watching TV. They were hiking and biking, and going to community meetings and visiting with friends. Overall, they tend to do more of everything."

Are they right?

Science does in fact support many non-watchers' worst fears about TV.

"The research tends to show that increased exposure to television and violence results in greater aggression in children," Krcmar said. "That's a pretty consistent finding."

Though not all children become more violent, and everyone reacts uniquely, it's fair to say that what we watch affects us.

When parents did cut television out of their homes, they reported that their kids didn't bug them as much for junk food and toys advertised on TV. They also said giving up television made their children easier to manage.

"It's sort of counter-intuitive, because people think their kids would drive them nuts without TV," Krcmar said. "But parents found that kids became very good at entertaining themselves and didn't need to be entertained all the time by something that was lively and active. They didn't complain about being bored."

Downsides of life without TV

People who had relinquished television didn't report too many downsides. Most felt satisfied getting their news from newspapers and radio, and while some people said they felt less connected to pop culture, "many adults noted that as a point of pride," Krcmar said.

Even most kids in non-watching households seemed to agree with their parents that they were better off without the reviled medium, though a number of kids around ages 10 to 13 said they resented feeling left out when other kids talk about shows and actors on television. By the time they reached later adolescence around age 14 and 15, though, most had come full circle and said they didn't really like TV and didn't mind doing without.

For those who want to experience some of the benefits of life without the tube, but don't feel ready to go cold turkey, Krcmar said she thinks good things can come just by setting limits.

"I think you can have the benefits just by having kids watch less television," she said. "Be selective about content. You don't go to a restaurant and let them eat anything on the menu. Instead you say choose something that's healthy that you would enjoy."

A similarly restrained approach to TV could go a long way toward protecting kids from the downsides of TV.

Slope protection works at St. John's Island and Kusu Island: MPA notice

Let's hope the cure won't be worse than the disease.

There have been landslides on several of our natural rocky cliffs since last year. This one was at St. John's Island, photo taken in May 07

This series of landslides was at Labrador Nature Reserve, photo taken in Nov 07


SLOPE PROTECTION WORKS ON
(A) ST JOHN’S ISLAND; (B) KUSU ISLAND
from PORT MARINE NOTICE NO. 159 of 2008 dated 4 Sep 08

With effect from 10 Sep 2008 to 9 Mar 2009, 0800 hrs to 1800 hrs daily, including Sundays and Public Holidays.

On St John’s Island and Kusu Island, within the working areas bounded by the following co-ordinates (see attached plan):

Slope protection works will entail the clearing of the debris via land, drilling and cement works and installation of rebar. These works will be carried out from the landward side.

A work barge will be deployed for the supply of materials/equipment to the project site. A safety tug boat will be in attendance throughout the duration of the works.

Safety boats will be deployed in the vicinity of the working area to warn other craft of the operations in the area.

Further general enquiries relating to the project can be directed to Mr Teddy Naland, the senior manager, at Tel: 9750 0388, email: teddynaland@utraco.com.

A closer look at the work planned on St. John's Island.
A closer look at the work planned for Kusu Island.This is a photo of that corner of Kusu Island where the work will be done. It was taken in 2004 at a very low tide.

White sandy beaches: where do they come from?

People love white sandy beaches. This poster at Marina South Pier is supposed to depict our Southern Islands.
All that blinding white sand is quite surreal. I guess this is why there is this really small print on the poster...
Probably just in case there is a suit for misrepresentation.

But where does white sand come from? Originally. And why don't Singapore's shores have the powdery white sand that people seem to love?

Here's an article about the white sands of Fiji. Which are threatened because the sand-makers (what a lovely polite term) are being over-harvested.

Sand makers endangered species
Fiji Daily Post 4 Sep 08;

WHITE sandy beaches are assets to any country that thrives on the tourism dollar and Fiji is definitely no exception.

That’s why you see it being splashed across magazines, newspapers, posters and television to market our tourism industry.

It’s this picturesque view that immediately attracts the tourist to pay a hefty sum to enjoy it.

But have you ever wondered how these white sandy beaches are formed? Many would rightfully say that it’s made of crushed rocks, formed by weathering such as rain, freezing, thawing, wind and water so forth or friction by rocks being bashed against each other in a stream or the sea.

So, isn’t all sand supposed to be coloured depending on the natural geology of the area or the different types of rock being eroded - sandstone is yellowish, red sandstone is reddish, granite is grey and volcanic is black.

So what makes white sand? Believe it or not, but they are actually the excretions or waste of parrot fish. They eat the coral and poo white sand.

Fiji Locally Marine Managed Area national coordinator Sunia Waqainabete says parrot fish are the sand-makers because they eat the corals, grind it through their digestive system and then pass it out as waste.

Waqainabete says the amount of white sandy beach in an area shows the population of parrot fish that exist there.

“Those white sandy beaches are produced by parrot fish and that means there is a lot of parrot fish activity in that area,” he said.

Unfortunately, the numbers of parrot fish found in our waters are declining.

One of the species of parrot fish which could become endangered is the bumphead which is the largest of all parrot fish.

They are plant-eaters but they mostly feed on live coral.

Waqainabete says that bumpheads are becoming a vulnerable species because of their high mortality rate due to overfishing and their delayed reproduction stage.

He adds, that this can in turn affect the production of sand in an area.

“The bumphead takes a long time to reproduce because it takes about 7-8 years to reproduce and it shows that it takes a long time to reach reproduction stage,” says Waqainabete.

“Because there is a lot of slaughtering and killing their numbers have reduced.

“It has become vulnerable because they are captured before they reproduce so they need to be protected.”

He adds that the bumphead parrot fish are often in danger because they always travel in schools and always rest at night.

There have been feedbacks from the local communities that bumphead have been seen in large numbers but in marine protected areas or places untouched by humans.

“This had been reported from Macuata but they are also present in untouched areas like central Lau.

“But at the moment they are still classed as vulnerable,” he said.

Despite the large numbers of bumphead being sighted, overall their population has been on a decline due to heavy exploitation, according to Waqainabete.

The Mamanuca Environment Society (MES), a non-government organisation that raises awareness on the importance of the ocean in the Mamanuca group, says the bumphead species is slow-growing and long-living and has a delayed reproduction stage and slow replenishment rate.

MES is concerned about the numbers of bumpheads in the Mamanuca islands because they know how important they are to the production of sand in the area.

The Mamanuca group of islands has many resorts and is a top tourist destination.

Conservationist in the area fear the loss of bumpheads could mean fewer sand and fewer tourists in the long run.

Bumphead parrot fish are commonly found in the day in coral reef habitats, especially fringing or barrier reefs around depths of 3 to 10m.

At night, they usually sleep in groups on shallow sandy bottoms or in caves, making them very vulnerable to stressors.

The juveniles are usually found in seagrass beds in the lagoons.

It is a valuable commodity in the live fish trade but catches have decreased dramatically over the years because of the divers taking advantage of the ‘kalia’s behaviour of sleeping in reefs in the night’.

According to Wikipedia that even though parrot fish are considered to be herbivores, they eat a wide variety of organisms which live on coral reefs.

Some species may include coral polyps in their diet.

And their feeding activity is important for the production and distribution of coral sands in the reef and could also prevent algae from choking coral.

During its feeding the coral rock is ground up by its teeth. After they digest this it is excreted as sand thus at times creating small islands.

At night they force themselves into crevices, some species secreting a thick coat of mucus, like a little surrounding bubble.

The mucus is thought to mask their scent from nocturnal predators such as the moray eel and may serve to protect the fish from infection by parasites.

Because they are always in schools there could be 100 to a thousand in a school said Waqainabete.

Wikipedia also mentions that grazing parrot fish of most tropical species form large schools grouped by size.

Harems of several females presided over by a single male are the norm in other species, the males vigorously defending their status at any challenge. Curiously, if the dominant male of a harem is removed, one of the females will change sex and adopt the terminal male colouration.

Parrot fish are pelagic spawners; that is, they release many tiny buoyant eggs into the water which become part of the plankton. The eggs float freely, settling into the substrate until hatching.

Furthermore, the protection of parrot fish could protect the reefs from being smothered by overgrown algae or seaweed and also produce white sandy beaches.

Waqainabete also said people had to understand that the bumphead parrot fish takes a long time to reproduce and they needed to grow and be protected when they are small.

Alumeci Nakeke is an Ocean Science Reporter with SeaWeb. SeaWeb is a non-profit organisation that works to amplify and clarify the messages of local scientists and ocean experts, and to connect journalists and decision-makers to ocean issues and specialists.

ALUMECI NAKEKE - SeaWeb

Your special shore sightings for the Record

Seen something special on our shores? Tell the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research!
Their Singapore Biodiversity Records Database has lots of interesting entries including these pretty fishes observed during our June trip to Cyrene Reef! So share YOUR special sightings on this Database.

Here's more on how to contribute your sighting record (from the Nature in Singapore website)

Compulsory information include:

• Number of individuals
  
• General locality (Ria's comment: In my experience, providing the lat long data from google earth is the most fool proof way to share location data.)
• Name of observer/s
• Date of observation
• Attach digital image (max size 1 MB), or general description (in the absence of images)

The Record is part of the Nature in Singapore website which also announces their new publication.Nature in Singapore (NiS) is a new, refereed, online journal of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research.

Nature in Singapore will publish articles on the flora and fauna (e.g., biology, botany, zoology, ecology and conservation biology) of the Republic of Singapore.

In particular, articles on new sightings, new records or rediscoveries of nationally extinct species of animals and plants.

The journal will also publish articles from outside Singapore that deal with taxa whose natural distributions include Singapore.

NiS consists of a single volume each year, starting with Volume 1 this year. Articles in this volume include:

• Rediscovery of Dumeril’s monitor
• Aberrant behaviour of a female great hornbill and a female rhinoceros hornbill.
• Attitudes towards biological conservation of one class of National University of Singapore undergraduate students.
• The Nature Society (Singapore) and the struggle to conserve Singapore’s nature areas.

Contributions of articles are welcome.

To prepare the articles, authors are referred to the Instructions to Authors, and manuscripts may be submitted to the Editor, Associate Professor Hugh Tan at hughtan@nus.edu.sg.

Underwater vehicle trials near Hantu and Semakau: MPA notice

Underwater vehicle trials are being conducted near Pulau Hantu and the natural shores on Pulau Semakau. It appears to be a project that involves the National University of Singapore Acoustic Research Laboratory.

AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLE TRIALS AT THE SELAT PAUH ANCHORAGE
from PORT MARINE NOTICE NO. 155 of 2008 dated 2 Sep 2008

With effect from 08 Sep 2008 to 12 Sep 2008 at Selat Pauh Anchorage within an area bounded by the following coordinates (see plan) :

There will be a deployment of an underwater vehicle from a surface craft. The tethered craft will be operating in a 100m radius of the work boat. A safety boat will be in attendance during the entire period of trial at the anchorage.

Further enquiries relating to the project can be directed to Mr Parijat Deshpande, the research engineer, at Tel 9190 8617 or email: pari@arl.nus.edu.sg

Earlier in June, there was a notice of another (possibly related?) activity in the same area, posted on the wildfilms blog

ENVIRONMENTAL SAMPLING AND ACOUSTIC EXPERIMENTS AT THE SELAT PAUH ANCHORAGE
from PORT MARINE NOTICE NO. 123 of 2008 dated 24 June 2008

From 26 Jun 2008 to 04 Jul 2008 in the area indicated in the plan.

There will be measurements of ocean water and sea-bottom properties by unmanned vehicles and surface craft. The unmanned craft will be operating in a 500m radius of the work boats. Acoustic communication tests will also be carried out in the working area. A safety boat will be in attendance during the entire period of experiment at the anchorage. Further enquiries relating to the project can be directed to Ms Regina Chan, the project coordinator, at Tel 9835 1615 or email: regina@smart.mit.edu

Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End

Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.

Robin Lloyd, LiveScience.com 2 Sep 08;

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.

The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists - allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.

But no one agrees yet on whether this extreme sharing among scientists and even the public is ultimately good for science or undermining it.

"It scares people," says biochemist Cameron Neylon, an open science advocate who works at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and posts all his experiments in an online "open notebook."

"People are very frightened about being that open," Neylon told LiveScience. "This is not really the way current academic culture is built and we are trying to change it. So that makes some people uncomfortable."

Open science

The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.

"In some areas, credit is mainly appreciation by peers (think mathematics and theoretical physics)," she said. "In other areas, money is a factor. That might be through patents or simply because some ideas can be used to make money directly. Consider if you would have a great model to predict the quirks of the world's economy - would you go and publish it?"

Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as "no insider information." Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.

Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where physicists post their "pre-print" research papers before they are published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles; virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites.

The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.

Networked cyborgs

Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.

It could take years to generate results, and scientists tended to guard their data and findings prior to publication in a journal, possibly giving out only minimal details on what exactly they were researching.

Results became legitimate and credit was given to scientists once their results were published as a paper in a "peer-reviewed" journal - one for which the work is evaluated by experts in the field as acceptable or unacceptable for print. Often papers were sent back for rewrites or clarification, and publication can occur months after submission. This system still is in place for many scientists.

However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs.

Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.

With supercomputers and sequencers processing data at warp speed, along with online Web tools for analyzing data and posting early results, the pace of research, from lab bench to established finding, has accelerated (and the public tends to learn about findings faster).

"In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics," said MIT physicist David Kaiser, "the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, 'Did you have more coffee that day?' We aren't usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis."

Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.

Is it a good thing?

There is "no question" that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.

His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to "replicate" scientists' work - try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.

Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.

And Neylon, the biochemist from England, said: "One of the things that is really clear about making this available is that the person whose access you are really enabling is your own." Wherever he is worldwide, if he can sit at a personal computer with Internet access, he can pull up his notebook.

And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).

"There is a lot of potential for the public to understand how science actually progresses - it is messy and painstaking, and most experiments either fail or provide ambiguous results," Bradley said. "On the blog, I try to report our progress in a way that other scientists, but also to a large extent the public, should be able to understand."

Also, open notebooks could yield important contributions from non-scientists or experts in other fields, Neylon said.

"It's not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas," he said. "There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches."

So far, there are only a handful of scientists who post their complete notebooks online, but dozens of others post some, but not all, of their notebook pages. Perhaps this is due to the dreaded scoop.

Drawbacks of open science

One of the biggest fears of nearly all researchers is that someone else hears what you're doing and beats you to publication. That means you wasted a lot of time (and most researchers work extremely long hours, so loss of productivity is especially painful and can also harm one's chances for getting a job or promotion or funding for the next research project). Once you publicly reveal your thoughts, data or experimental results, some say, you lose control over ownership of that information. This topic is covered by an area of law called intellectual property, as well as patent law, and there can be significant money to be fought over when it comes to patents.

Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don't advance careers.

However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project.

Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to "lock" posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said.

Neylon says the total scientific openness is freeing on a personal level:

"In the biological sciences you spend a lot of time worrying, 'Is someone going to beat me to this? Am I going to get scooped? How are we going to get this grant?' - all things that lead you to being scared to talk to people about what you're doing. I have found a lot of that dropping away. So one of the main personal benefits of simply making everything available is that you know it's available, so you stop worrying about it (who can see it). Not having that worry, 'Am I giving the game away?' is actually a tremendous relief."

Fear of losing peer review

Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.

"Like in the case of scientific fraud, if you talk to people in biomedicine, they are really concerned about peer review because it is one of the few ways they have to stop fraud. In fact most fraud cases come from biomedicine," said Harvard University historian of science Mario Biagioli.

Peer review started in the 17th century as a variation of the censorship practices attached to books and newssheets publishing, Biagioli has written. Nowadays, many fields of science and communicators of it (including journalists) rely on peer review as a generic stamp of approval.

"The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field," Biagioli said.

Trends in the strength of peer review tend to zig and zag throughout history, and even today, says MIT's Kaiser, who also is an historian of science. The premier physics journal Physical Review only started requiring peer review for every submission in the late 1950s, he said.

And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.

"Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days," Kaiser said. "Journals have largely lost their information function."

Now they are used for promotions and prestige in physics - for helping to build careers but not necessarily for getting ideas into circulation. "Now we can give away most of our physics results for free," Kaiser said. "No one is going to care if I post some obscure model of cosmology on this Web site."

But that is just physics. In biomedicine today, he said, the terrain is totally different, primarily because of complex intellectual property considerations and potential conflicts of interest among researchers funded by drug companies, as well as concerns over patient safety and privacy.

For the good of truth, humanity, economies?

Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.

"Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich," he said.

This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.

"Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way," Neylon said. "The question is 'Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?' That is the vision."

There's a movement for more open access in science. See their blog.

Labrador Food Centre no more

After 37 years, our favourite refueling stop after a shore trip is to be closed "to make way for 'future redevelopment'". We had our last meal there after our trip to Sisters Island on Sunday. We will sure miss our fix of nasi lemak, nasi campur, prata and other yummy stuff.

Farewell, Labrador Villa Food Centre
It closes after 37 years to make way for future redevelopment
Ang Yiying, Straits Times 2 Sep 08;

MADAM Cheng Ah Tee has spent the past 37 years serving coffee from a drinks stall at the Labrador Villa Food Centre.

But that came to an end on Sunday when the run-down hawker centre near the corner of Alexandra and Pasir Panjang roads served its last meal.

The institution, popular for what patrons call its cheap food and old-world charm, has been closed to make way for 'future redevelopment', said a National Environment Agency spokesman.

Other sources say it is making way for the Labrador Park MRT Station, which is due to open in 2010 or later.

Speaking in Mandarin, Madam Cheng, 65, the longest-staying tenant, said: 'I definitely won't be able to sleep for at least a month or two.'

While watching movers cart away the refrigerator from her stall, she added: 'It is really very good here. For over 30 years, there has never been any quarrels.'

The 37-year-old food centre had just 10 stalls, but it was popular with local workers. On the haunt's last day, regulars turned up in droves for a last taste of their favourite dishes and to snap photos of the place and the stall owners.

Some said earlier they were drawn to it because of its rustic look.

'Where else would you see wooden planks being used to shutter up stalls at closing time, wire mesh used as ceilings and bamboo sheets as protection from the rain?' said one patron who only wanted to be known as Mr Meldi.

When The Straits Times visited Labrador Villa Food Centre at noon yesterday, five of the 10 stalls were boarded up and the tenants of the remaining stalls were busy packing their things. Pots, plates, bowls and cutlery covered the tabletops.

Old-timers at the food centre said they were reluctant to leave.

Madam Hajjah Sa'diah Abdul Rahman, 56, was dabbing her eyes with tissue before sitting down to sort through letters in front of her 16-year-old stall, which sold Malay dishes and snacks.

'Sayang, sayang,' she said about the loss of the food centre, repeating the Malay word for 'love'.

Another tenant, Mr K. Manokaran, 45, who runs the other drinks stall there, has fond memories of the place dating back more than 30 years.

'My school was very nearby, so I came by to help my mother,' he said.

Some tenants are unsure if they would continue with their business. Others are still hunting for a new location. It would, however, be difficult to find an equally good location at the same rent, tenants said.

Shame Labrador Villa Food Centre had to go
Letter from Clair Elaine Jerusha Devan (Ms), Straits Times Forum 4 Sep 08;

I WAS sad to learn that one of my favourite breakfast haunts has closed, as mentioned in Tuesday's article, 'Farewell, Labrador Villa Food Centre'.

This place is just one quaint and rare joint my family, friends and I love to go when we are famished after a pre-dawn walk through Labrador Park. Labrador Park has come a long way since the days when my former college St Andrew's Junior College was located in Alexandra Road.

We had hoped the Government could find a way to renovate it without having to demolish it completely as it has such an old-time ambience where you can sit and have really authentic 1970s tasty food at great prices. Even my son finds the place a one of a kind.

It is the motivational force to wake up super early, drive from Yishun in the north to Labrador in the southwest for a two-hour early morning walk, knowing we can fuel up after with such humble delectables such as prata with fish or mutton curry, mee rebus, dosai and curry puffs, among others dishes.

What a shame to lose a place like that. It is something you can never recreate or replace.

Seaweeds wage chemical warfare on corals

In the fierce competition for real estate, some seaweeds unleash chemicals to deter baby corals from settling down.

Thus animals that graze on seaweeds such as sea turtles, fishes, slugs and snails play an important role in the balance of life on the reefs. Over-fishing, over-collection of seaweed eaters can affect this balance.

Seaweeds wage war on corals
Science Alert 2 Sep 08;
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

Scientists have found a new challenge for the world’s struggling coral reefs: seaweeds releasing chemical weapons that prevent the corals from recovering after a disaster.

A ground-breaking discovery by Australian researchers has proved that some sea weeds, or algae, produce toxic chemical signals that deter coral larvae from settling on reefs devastated by bleaching, storms or other impacts. The good news is that the clever little coral larvae may also use the algal chemicals to find a good home.

“Seaweeds produce a wide range of chemicals, some of which encourage coral larvae to settle and some of which repel them,” says Dr Laurence McCook of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. The research was partly funded by an international Pew Fellowship award for Marine Conservation, and the team includes Chico Birrell and Lindsay Harrington, of James Cook University, and Bette Willis (James Cook University) and Guillermo Diaz-Pulido (University of Queensland) of the CoECRS.

Chemicals released by the algae into the water can have a significant impact on the success of coral recovery after damage. “We looked at three kinds of sea weeds and found that a green seaweed called Turtle Weed had a powerful deterrent effect on coral larvae, which refused to settle and appeared stressed. Larvae had difficulty settling with a second seaweed and a third produced chemicals that actually encouraged coral settlement” said Prof. Willis.

These chemical mechanisms may have important implications for the long-term survival of coral reefs globally and their ability to regenerate after damage from coral bleaching, which is expected to become more frequent and devastating under climate warming, Prof. Willis says.

Dr McCook says that, following damage to a reef, algae nearly always beat the corals in the race to resettle the devastated area. A lot then depends on which algae dominate the new system – and whether there are enough fish, turtles and other herbivores around to ‘mow’ the weeds and give the corals a chance to re-establish. The scientists published a detailed survey of research into the effects of different seaweeds on the recovery of corals. The team concludes that the role of weeds in influencing coral recovery has important implications for the fate of reefs – and for how they are managed.

“On the Great Barrier Reef we have been relatively lucky, but elsewhere we have seen a number of instances where seaweeds simply took over the reef, completely preventing the corals from coming back. The greatest threat seems to be when we get thick mats of algae combined with sediment runoff, which smother the reef and stop corals gaining a foothold – a serious problem for our coastal reefs.”

“These conclusions underline the difficulties that face a reef in recovering from a major setback – and especially the role of humans. If we remove all the fish that mow the weeds, or if we release large amounts of sediment and nutrients from the land to build these toxic algal mats, it makes it almost impossible for the corals to come back,” he says.

However, he cautions, the picture is not simple. Some weeds repel corals but others, like calcareous red algae, play a vital role in reef building and help the corals to re-establish.

Algae also influence the amount of offspring corals have, the space and sunlight available for them to settle and in some cases even shove the newly-settled corals off their rocky perches.

The team cautions that it is still unclear how much which seaweeds affect whether or not a coral reef can recover from a major setback. But the importance of effects such as the chemical warfare has probably been underestimated.

“These issues are likely to play a major role in the resilience of coral reefs worldwide, and in their ability to withstand or bounce back from the stresses of climate change,” Dr McCook says. “We need to understand these effects if we are to look after our reefs and give them the best chance of survival in the long run.”

Whale shark at Sentosa: some recent comments

From cartoons to letters to the press, here are some recent thoughts about the issue.

This drawing by Chay Hoon on her colourful clouds blog

On the blogs

• Hello, it's my day! the whale speaks for itself, on the colourful clouds blog
• Whale shark in Singapore a cartoon, on the my sketchbook blog
• Welfare Groups In Singapore Fight For Whale Shark by Matt J. Weiss on divephotoguide.com
• How can we prevent this unfair sentencing of the whale shark to a life term? on the empty cage blog
• Environmental hypocrisy "Who are people providing top-class care? Are they world renowned whale shark experts? Or are they Tampines fish farmers, hastily recruited by this casino to tend their over sized aquarium?" on the Thoughts on a First World blog
• Save the whale "At very least this whale won't be eaten up by the Japanese" on the Visit Singapore Zoo blog
  

In the print media

Shark concerns: One step forward, two steps back?
Letter from Mariann Maes, Today Online 30 Aug 08

"RWS’ act of denial also tarnishes the image of Singapore as a city-state that cares for the environment. There is no point in Singapore being advocated as a green global hub if it chooses to ignore the plight of flora and fauna in its care."

Whale of a bad idea
Letter from Satveer Kaur (Ms), Straits Times 3 Sep 08;

Even if we place the whale shark in a tank the size of Singapore it would not be big enough. What more on a tiny part of Sentosa?

Other links

More links on the wild shores of singapore blog entry on the issue.

Splitters and Lumpers: why planet Earth needs taxonomists

"Whazzat?" is a question we often exclaim when exploring our shores.

Here's more about how lifeforms on our planet get named, the difficulties and why this effort is important.

Splitters and Lumpers: why planet Earth needs taxonomists
Marlowe Hood, Yahoo News 31 Aug 08;

Among biological scientists, they are the true nomenklatura, a small and far-flung tribe dedicated to the coherent naming of all living things, past and present.

Gathered in Paris last week, the world's leading taxonomists feted the brilliant and vainglorious Swedish naturalist who, 250 years ago, single-handedly created the system of classification they still use.

But beneath the festive air the proceedings were troubled, on at least two counts.

Carl Linnaeus -- who called the sample-collecting students he dispatched across the globe in the 18th century his "apostles" -- was a creationist born a century before Charles Darwin.

Today many biologists are clamouring for a new approach to cataloging the planet's flora and fauna that goes beyond morphology and takes evolution into account.

A dozen competing theories have cropped up in the last decade, and at least one of them, called PhyloCode, has gained serious traction.

In other scientific disciplines, new ideas elbowing out old ones is a normal and essential process. But in taxonomy, renewal poses a special problem: how can you replace plant and animal names used for two-and-a-half centuries without causing chaos?

"If we did not have a system of classification that was hierarchical and had names that could be easily retrieved we would be helpless," American biologist Edward O. Wilson explained in an interview.

Taxonomists themselves can poke fun at their sometimes arcane bickering as to whether a new discovery is a species in its own right or a subset of one already on the books.

"We have 'lumpers' and 'splitters'," said Richard Pyle, a zoologist and fish specialist at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, and an officer in the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).

"Splitters want to draw the lines around a specimen tightly, while lumpers will say, 'no, that's just a slight variation'. And there is nothing in this system which tells you who is right -- it is purely subjective," he said.

But beyond growing internecine quarrels, an even deeper and shared malaise coursed through the proceedings.

It stemmed from a gnawing sense of urgency, and realisation that what Wilson calls "the great Linnean enterprise" -- the mapping of the Earth's entire biosphere -- has barely begun.

Amid predictions that the impact of human activities -- especially climate change -- could wipe out thirty percent or more of all species on Earth by century's end, the scientists charged with finding and defining those species are feeling the heat.

"If you want to preserve a vanishing species, or combat a medically dangerous one, or use it in some beneficial way as a crop, you need to know what you are dealing with," said Andrew Polaszek, a scientist at the Natural History Museum in London and outgoing Executive Secretary of the ICZN.

"That name is the key to all the knowledge that has been accumulated about that organism."

While most people might assume that the job of cataloging Earth's living organisms is nearly complete, the opposite is true.

Some 90 percent of bird species are known, more than 80 percent of flowering plants. But scientific understanding of bacteria and other micro-organisms is "shockingly incomplete," said Wilson, a towering figure in the field of biology, and one of the first to probe the concept of biodiversity.

"Two hundred and fifty years after Linnaeus, we have still only classified as few as 10 percent of the organisms living on Earth," he said.

There are an estimated 1.5 million types of fungi, but only 60,000 are known. Nematodes, including parasitic pinworms and hookworms, comprise the most abundant phylum in the animal kingdom -- probably four or five million strong -- but only 80,000 have been classified.

"In dealing with the living world, we are mostly flying blind," said Wilson. "Trying to diagnose the health of an ecosystem -- a lake or a forest -- to save or stabilise it is like a doctor treating a patient while only knowing ten percent of the organs."

In an effort to catapult the current classification system into the 21st century, a number of taxonomists have launched Zoobank, a Web-based registry of organism names. Some 1.8 million species are listed so far.

"The registry will be the central place where everyone can go look to see what is going on in the rest of the world," said Pyle, who described it as the "most profound change in taxonomy since Linnaeus."

But even this seemingly common-sense step has created controversy, pitting advocates of Internet-based, open-access publishing against traditional and powerful publishers.

Under the current system, a new species does not officially exist until the scientific report of its discovery appears in print.

Other posts about tricky naming issues

The perils of morphology and taxonomy on the wildfilms blog

Big sunrise on Little Sisters

4am and we're off for the last pre-dawn low tide trip for the year, to Little Sisters Island.The smaller of the two Sisters, this compact island has a densely overgrown but narrow reef. We've not visited Little Sisters Island since Dec 07, so we're excited to see how she might be doing.

And she seems to be doing well. On some parts of the shore, every inch of rubble is coated with living things: hard corals, sponges, encrusting seaweed and lots of other stuff I have no idea what they are.Even big corals are squished up next to one another.The water quickly cleared up as the tide fell, leaving a lagoon of calm clear water full of fishes. It was a natural aquarium!

I saw many of these damselfishes that looked very similar.This one is probably the Bengal sergeant (Abudefduf bengalensis).How about this one?And this one? It was much larger. Hmmm...

Pre-dawn trips are fun because many of the hard corals extend their tentacles at night.They look very different with their tentacles sticking out.And very beautiful too!Unfortunately, many hard corals are identified by details of their skeleton. So it's difficult to identify corals from photos of with expanded polyps.

Besides hard corals, there were also lots of leathery soft corals.These are also colonial animals, with many tiny polyps living together in a shared leathery tissue. They are identified by the different kinds of polyps and polyp arrangements.So although the colony may look similar at first glance, a closer look will show they are different.These three leathery soft corals with 'fingers' are probably all different kinds.The soft coral that looks like an omelette has taller polyps.And on one of the soft corals, I notice something that looks like a tiny sea anemone. Wow!

There were bigger anemones too, like the Giant carpet anemones (Stichodactyla gigantea). Marcus found one with a clown anemonefish. But I had no luck.

We all saw this special anemone though.It's what I call the Snaky sea anemone (Macrodactyla doreensis). It has long snaky tentacles and the body column has bumps. I remember someone once remarked that the tangle of fat tentacles reminded him of a bowl of udon! These sea anemones are not very commonly encountered, so it was nice to see one.

Today, the Sargassum seaweed (Sargassum sp.) was in full bloom. The long 'leafy' strands covered everything and made it difficult to look around. So I decided to look AT the seaweed instead. Of course lots of animals were hiding among the fronds, including this rather well camouflaged octopus! There were also lots of fishes, crabs and other animals among the seaweed, which were difficult to photograph in the 'forest' of weeds.
But these little snails (probably Family Columbellidae) were easy to shoot. There were lots of them. But some of the shells on the seaweed were occupied by little hermit crabs instead of snails!Besides the usual 'leafy' kind of Sargassum, there is also another kind of seaweed that belongs in the same family. This brown seaweed has triangular, pyramidal blades that often grows in a kind of short column. I don't see it very often as it's mainly found on hard surfaces facing strong waves. It's called Turbinaria sp. which unfortunately, is also the name of a hard coral.

We check out the Giant clam (Tridacna squamosa) on the island and were glad to see that it's still there! Has it grown? I'm not sure. But this is what it looked like in Dec 07 when we last saw it.
On the high shore, there were lots of Land hermit crabs (Coenobita cavipes). I saw at least five of them. They seem to be undisturbed by the hordes of fiercely biting red ants that were foraging there too.This is good to know. I remember reading about how on Christmas Island ants were killing the land crabs.

The best part of a predawn trip is of course ... dawn!And what a stunning sunrise it was today! A glorious blue sky painted pink by the first rays of sun with the city skyline in the distance, and reefs all around. What a great way to end this year's series of predawn low tide trips.
I also quickly scurried over to the other side of the island, to take the sun rising over the horizon behind St. John's Island, and Big Sister island opposite.The water visibility was excellent today! Here's a view facing Big Sisters.And towards the city.

The water was so clear that just before we left, Ivan noticed a gianormous red feather star. Of course "kamikaze" YC slid right down the seawall to take a photo of it. It was enormous. He's uploaded more photos of this trip and other trips to our shores on his facebook.
The sky was so marvellous we just couldn't stop taking photos and videos even along the way home.
Here's the huge sky over our main business district, with Sentosa to the left, and the blue blue waters around.

This photo reminds me of just how small we are and how we are affected by nature all around us. In the city, we forget. Because we can't see the sky or touch the sea.