Coral overdose at Terumbu Bemban

Terumbu Bemban is among our smaller submerged reefs but it has some really nice corals!

Today, I didn't do much aside from looking at corals here. Fortunately, not much signs of coral bleaching.


We arrive at first light of a glorious dawn.

Important to land on this reef in daylight, because we need to be able to see clearly to avoid the small submerged reefs around Terumbu Bemban.

Although these submerged reefs lie close to petrochemical plants at Pulau Bukom, there are some astonishingly rich areas here. Today I tried to take video clips of them instead of photos.

There are some special corals here, such as Acropora coral, Anchor coral and more! And they grow quite close to one another in some parts of the shore.

Here's a video clip of more of the various kinds of corals I saw.

Here's a video clip of some of the mushroom corals I saw. There were very large ones and most were were not bleaching.

While we were at Terumbu Bemban, a boat zoomed past (we notice these things because this causes waves which affects our efforts to document the shore edge). Later on, the boat came back and started working near where we were. It appears the people on the boat were laying large fish traps (bubu) around the submerged reefs. There appears to be one person with an airtank diving to put the traps in place.

I only had a quick look at other parts of the reef. There are small patches of Spoon seagrass, some of them covered with epiphytes.

And small clumps of Tape seagrass, cropped, but not very short.

The corals at Terumbu Bemban actually look like they were doing about the same if not a little better than on our last trip to here in Jun 2014. At Marina Keppel Bay, the corals growing on the pontoons are still doing fine. I really hope our corals will make it through this year without any mass bleaching.

Today I found that taking while taking videos is fun, it means less time to move around on the shore. Also takes more time to process and a really long time to upload. Also didn't help that Flickr as usual is acting funky so I can't share the clip easily. So videos may not be something I can do as much as I would like to.

Tomorrow, our last morning trip before the low spring tides end for the month.

Posts by others on the this trip

• Juria Toramae on facebook.
• Jonathan Tan on facebook.
• Marcus Ng on facebook.
• Loh Kok Sheng on his blog and on facebook.
• Neo Mei Lin on her blog.
• Russel Low on facebook.
• Toh Chay Hoon on facebook.