East Coast Park shores are becoming richer in marine life! As seagrasses settled on sandy artificial shores.
A small team made a spur-of-the-moment decision to check it out yesterday, despite the not-so-low-tide. And we found sea stars, special snails and other surprises.
The sandy shores are teeming with tiny to small
Cake sand dollars. There were several families on the shore and the kids found all kinds of interesting marine life.
These included baby
Knobbly sea star and a
Cake sea star that was eating a dead fish! They also found a
Peachia anemone that was out of the sand and looked strange to them. I did not see any buried sea cucumbers. Kok Sheng found even more interesting sea stars and marine life.
Another special find were several small
Thick-edged sand dollars.
There were also lots of living
Button snails on the shore! A lot more than on our last trip here in the morning in
Jul 2015.
Button snails are preyed upon by all kinds of burrowing animals. You can often see signs of this on the sand, with trails of panicky button snails moving away from a large tunneling burrower.
Here's a video of some of the burrowing predators that we saw on this shore. These include the
Fig snail,
Ball moon snail,
Lined moon snail,
Naked moon snail,
Weasel olive snail and
Grey bonnet snail.
I also saw snails buried in the sand that are ordinarily seen above the sand. Like the
Spiral melongena and the
Gong gong snail. The Lined moon snail in the photo is a burrower.
The tide was too high to check on the seagrasses which we first saw growing here in
Jun 2015. But I did get a glimpse of some growing nearer the high shore. There were lush growths of broad
Needle seagrass and
Spoon seagrass with large leaf blades. I also saw one
Haddon's carpet anemone. This video clip shows how the tiny seagrasses hold up in the surging waves.
Oh dear, some of the rocks on the artificial shore were turned over. This will cause the animals that have grown on the rock to die as they are exposed to light and dry out during low tide. Remember to turn back all rocks gently after you have a look at what is under them. There was one person far out at sea possibly fishing. I didn't come across any nets or traps on the shore.
Let's hope the shore continues to prosper and grow richer until our next survey.
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