This shore was impacted by the
300-tonne oil spill in the East Johor Strait seven months ago.
I was relieved to see lush seagrasses with sea stars and other marine life. As well as several dugong feeding trails!
The oil spill started at Pasir Gudang in Johor, whose lights were visible at dawn, as shore birds foraged on the seagrasses of Pasir Ris. It was nice to see dugong feeding trails in the lush seagrass meadows here.
Dugong feeding trails are formed when dugongs chomp up seagrasses, leaving a shallow trail of about equal width.
Spoon seagrasses are among their favourites and these furrows were seen in meadows of Spoon seagrasses.
The Spoon seagrass had large leaf blades and were nice and fresh and green. I did not see any that were bleaching.
I also saw a few patches of
Hairy spoon seagrass as we did on our last survey here in
Oct 2015.
It was nice to see one small
Eight armed sea star. But I'm surprised to see only one
Biscuit sea star.
Most of the sea stars I saw were tiny to small
Cake sea stars. I didn't come across any
Sand stars.
I saw a few
Black sea urchins on the rocks.
I saw a few
Ball sea cucumbers and one small
Garlic bread sea cucumber.
We also came across one large
Slender seagrass octopus. There were also a few snapping shrimps and many
swimming crabs and
Stone crabs. On the high shore there were signs of
Sand bubbler crabs and
Ghost crabs.
The ground here is very soft and silty. So it's not surprising to see many sea pens. I saw many
Flowery sea pens, many
Sea pencils and several
Slender sea pens.
There were a few
Cerianthids, and one had a lot of little black
Phoronid worms.
Although I saw several
Haddon's anemones, I did not many other kinds of anemones.
Zebra coral encrusted many of the rocks on the shore. Most were nice and brown, although a few patches were rather pale. But I didn't see any sponges on the rocks, similar to our last survey here in
Oct 2015.
As usual, there were clumps of seaweed on the shore, mostly
Gracilaria and
Ulva. I was surprised to see many clumps of
Round sea grape seaweeds. I don't usually see large amounts of this seaweed on our Northern shore. This is my first sighting at Pasir Ris. A sign of a changing shore?
I saw some scum on the waterline and a look around suggests that this came down the drain that flows out onto the shore. I saw similar scum on another stretch of Pasir Ris that I surveyed in
May 2017.
There is still a lot of trash on the mid water mark even within the Park boundaries. I did not have the energy to do the area outside the Park.
In some part of the shore, clay is beginning to show up. A sign of erosion? I met two fishermen fishing on a sand bar. I asked and one of them said the fishing was no good.
Our last survey here was in
Oct 2015 but it was done during an evening tide. The last morning low tide survey was 3 years ago in
May 2014 when I saw much more marine life. In
May 2017, we surveyed another part of Pasir Ris further away from Pasir Gudang, where we saw many more anemones.
Photos by others on this trip
