This afternoon I had a great time giving
a talk at NUS to a very enthusiastic and engaged audience.
Just before the talk, I stopped by the
Life Sciences Honours Poster Day and saw some awesome work being done for our biodiversity!
Rick has a great poster about
his work at Mandai mangroves! As usual, he takes this opportunity to also share with others about our amazing mangroves. And Dr John Yong's awesome
'blue' guidesheets are indispensable for this! Dr Yong in fact
went to Mandai with Rick to share his vast mangrove knowledge.
Rick and Wei Kit have tagged more than 1,400 trees at Mandai mangroves!! This involves special, super accurate equipment and has resulted in lots of important data that tells us more about this special mangrove. Find out
more about Rick's study on his awesome
Mangrove Action Squad blog featuring the very macho
Mangrove Mafia
I bumped into Siti who showed me Jamie's awesome work on seagrasses. It's great to see that all the hard work in the field has paid off in useful results!
Meryl Theng did a great
study of our Smooth otters! Finding out where they are and what they eat and all kinds of other details.
She had mapped out all the otter sightings from 2010 to 2011 and it's so exciting to know these marvellous wild creatures are seen in so many parts of Singapore! If you see any otters, do share your sighting so that it can contribute to useful studies like Meryl's. You can easily contribute to the
OtterWatch facebook page, and/or this
easy form.
Here's Siti with Merilyn who did awesome work on finding out what lives in seaweeds that get washed up on the shores. It's a galaxy of all kinds of critters!
Bee Yan did awesome work on our mangrove crabs, but she was deep in conversation with Peter Todd so I didn't want to bother them. She already published a paper on a
new record of a hairy mangrove crab!
N. Sivasothi was also in discussion. I also met Mei Lin, Joelle and many others in the life science community who were obviously thrilled with the good work that has been achieved.
Alas, all too soon, I had to rush off to set up for the talk organised by Terence of
BEYOND BORDERS, an initiative by the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). Terence has really done a great job with the posters which also advertised the
FREE evening Pasir Ris boardwalk tours with the Naked Hermit Crabs!
Also thanks to Jac, an avid volunteer nature guide at Chek Jawa, who introduced me to Terence and OSA (she is in black sitting behind Ivan, a Naked Hermit Crab). It was nice to see so many new faces too!
Wow, the event even had an emcee! I'm so impressed. I had a great time sharing about our shores and the audience were patient with my lame jokes and asked lots of important and interesting questions. Thank you!
Thank you especially to Terence for organising everything, and arranging for a kind $150 honorarium which will be given to the Naked Hermit Crabs. This amount will help the Crabs provide
free guided walks to families at Chek Jawa for about 100 parents and kids. Hurray!
I'll be giving this talk again next week
29 Mar (Thu) at Green Drinks! Always a delight to share our marvellous shores with others.
