A quick look at the rich shores of Pulau Semakau before rain forced us to leave.
This shore is the natural part of Pulau Semakau that was spared when the Landfill was created. The Landfill seawall is on the left, with a lower seawall built for the replanted mangroves. The reef in front of the seawalls was there long before the Landfill was constructed. So it is NOT true to say that the Landfill created the reefs.
Kok Sheng and Pei Yan did the reef edge and found all kinds of marvelous marine life such as large
Fluted giant clams, large
Burrowing giant clam and special sea anemones. This shore lies just opposite the petrochemical plants on Pulau Bukom (on the horizon).
Meanwhile, I headed inland to check out the higher shore. Much of the ground I travelled was crumbly rubble and abundantly covered with
Feathery soft corals and
Zoanthids. I was surprised that there wasn't a massive bloom of
Sargassum seaweed in the area that I surveyed.
Here's a look a the replanted mangroves and the lower seawall around them. In front of them, a large area of
Branching montipora coral.
But I took a closer look and most of the branching corals were dead. Recently dead? Because they are still standing. What killed them? Coral bleaching?
Or
the oil spill earlier in the year?
Pei Yan's blog post outlines the areas covered. Oil had washed up on Eastern Semakau and the impact was assessed to be worst on the mangroves lining the shore (red line).
Some other species of mangroves have started to settle naturally among the replanted
Bakau pasir mangroves. I didn't get a chance to take a closer look because of the change in weather.
I saw the usual variety of hard corals and I didn't see any that were bleaching.
There were many large
leathery soft corals and I didn't see any that were bleaching.
I was so glad to see that all the
Asparagus soft corals were not bleaching and were nice and puple when their polyps are retracted, and brown when their polyps are expanded.
From the N
OAA Bleaching Alert Areas, it appears that our region is still under Bleaching Alert (green). Hopefully, the threat of bleaching is diminishing.
I saw one
Giant carpet anemone, one
Haddon's carpet anemones, one
Wiggly reef star anemone and in the distance, I could see the patches of purple
Magnificent anemones.
There are nice sandy patches near the seawall. Here, there were lots of
Common sea stars, many in 'mating' position with the usually smaller male on top. There were also many
moon snails. And I saw one
Mangrove horseshoe crab with a smooth tail, and one
Garlic bread sea cucumber.
Alas, I only saw sparse patches of mostly cropped
Tape seagrasses. There were also some patches of small
Spoon seagrasses heavily covered in growths. Fortunately, none of us came across any driftnets.
Towards sunset, I noticed really nasty storm clouds over
Cyrene Reef, where
TeamSeagrass is monitoring with Alex! Oh dear. We saw a post by the team of really heavy rain on them.
I noticed stormy weather in the east too, and heard that our friends guiding at
Chek Jawa were rained out. It's great to know that there are so many people now exploring and working on our shores during low spring tide. I hope everyone is safe!
Thanks to Alex's brother Kim Seng we managed to escape the shore just in time to avoid the rain. The way home was choppy and we had to be careful when crossing the Jong Fairway which is used by really huge container ships that probably have difficulty spotting such a tiny boat as ours in the rain. So thank you to Kim Seng and crew for getting us safely home.
On this trip, we were joined by members of
GARS (Gamefish And Aquatic Rehabiliation Society). This Society of recreational fishermen are involved in habitat restoration and practice catch and release. They don't use live bait and instead have a fascinating variety of artificial lures to mimic the fish's favourite prey. Today, they had encounters with a Queenfish and a shark and also spotted a Hawksbill sea turtle. It's great to have this team looking at the open waters which we usually don't really look at. In this way, our surveys are more complete!
We don't visit this shore as often as we should. I last visited this shore in
Oct 2011.
Posts by others on this trip
