A lovely blue-sky day at Cyrene Reef with the IYOR volunteer team!
Among the first things we saw were lots of
Knobbly sea stars. Mei Lin also found the
Pentaceraster sea star!
Elsewhere, the
Common sea stars were abundant and many were in mating position. I saw many smaller one, probably males? There were many
Oval moon snails and
sand collars. We also also a few
White sea urchins, one
Diadema sea urchin and one
Garlic bread sea cucumber. But we didn't come across any sand dollars.
The Common sea star 'walks' using its many tiny tube feet on the underside.
On the sand bar I saw one
Orange mouth olive snail, which I only see commonly on Cyrene.
Although it lies in the middle of an industrial triangle and major shipping lanes, Cyrene has some of Singapore's best seagrass meadows.
So it's not surprising to see
dugong feeding trails! I saw them too on our last trip here in
Aug 2017.
Dugongs eat seagrasses and there are lots on Cyrene. Alas, we noticed much of the seagrasses were heavily covered in epiphytes. And the
Tape seagrass were mostly still cropped short. Although Mei Lin found a pretty female Tape seagrass flower.
Here's more feeding trails inside a lagoon. Among the seagrasses, we saw some small
Forskal's sidegill slugs, a
Leaf slug and an
Olive flatworm. I saw an
octopus too!
Here's a video of the living seagrass meadows and the octopus hunting in daylight - something I've rarely seen.
It was a hot hot day!
I saw a few hard corals, none of them were bleaching. We also saw one
Haddon's carpet anemone and one Snaky anemone, also several Cerianthids. All of them were ok.
Faiq is hard at work documenting the shore! For upcoming features of our seagrasses. While Mei Lin shares more about Cyrene.
Thanks to Tessa, Talia and Claudia for being so sporting and taking a jump shot!
Thank you for the great company as we explored one of my favourite shores!
