Back on Cyrene with youth volunteers who will make
International Year of the Reef 2018 happening! We were also joined by Edward and Sam who are filming Cyrene for the second season of the awesome
Living City. Grateful to regular team members who helped to share about our shores.
Although it lies in the middle of
an industrial triangle and major shipping lanes, Cyrene has some of Singapore's best seagrass meadows. We saw dugong feeding trails, large Knobbly sea stars and other awesome marine life!
We were welcomed at arrival by clusters of many
Knobbly sea stars. Among them, Marcus found the ones which appear to be a hybrid. There were also many
Common sea stars everywhere.
And Marcus also found the
Pentaceraster sea star, whose scientific name means Nippled sea star...haha!
Once again, we saw criss-crossing
dugong feeding trails. We saw them on our trip in
Jan 2018,
Dec 2017 and
Aug 2017 too.
Marcus and the other team members saw many small
Diadema sea urchins. I took a lousy underwater video of them and only when I got home, realised there was a little
Reef octopus behind one of the sea urchins! We only saw a few
White sea urchins.
Other interesting marine life spotted included:
Jorunna nudibranchs apparently mating (Diandrea really wanted to see nudibranchs!). Chew Peng spotted a
Red egg crab. There were lots of
swimming crabs of various kinds everywhere. We saw lots of
Black long sea cucumbers, one
Garlic bread sea cucumber and one
White rumped sea cucumber. The seagrasses seemed well but I only saw a few clumps of long
Tape seagrass, most of those I saw were still cropped short.
The most awesome find of the day was by Karl, who spotted this
Ramose murex, feeding on a
Fan shell clam! This large snail is listed as Endangered in the Singapore Red List. So far, we only know of recent sightings of them at Changi and Cyrene Reef. Other molluscs included
Moon snails and their
sand collar egg mass, Olive snails,
Reef murex snails, living
Fan shell clams.
We had a peek at the reefier areas. And it was nice to see healthy large hard corals.
The boulder shaped kinds were doing well. We saw many healthy
Cauliflower corals, some
Disk corals and one
Anemone coral.
The
leathery soft corals are back!
There were many large healthy colonies of various kinds.
There were also happy
cerianthids, a
Snaky sea anemone, many healthy
flowery soft corals and even one
leathery sea fan.
This is the site of an old boat strike. The boat has piled up dead corals as it ploughed into the reef. But now life has returned and an octopus is spotted among the rubble.
We not only missed a huge downpour, which ended just before we arrived. But also enjoyed a spectacular sunset.
Thanks to Edward and Sam for interviewing the youths who inspire with their enthusiasm and ideas! Such as Faiq who is working on a film about our seagrasses.
Thanks to Edward for sharing drone flying tips with Faiq.
Edward and Sam working hard throughout our trip.
Although it was really hard to convince them to put their equipment away during the landing and departure.
The departure was particularly splashy. Thanks to Liz for loan of towel to protect from the worst of it.
Thanks to everyone for a lovely trip without any loss of life or equipment.
Others on this trip: Marcus Ng, Karl, Faiq.
Chris Wong shared lovely photos of awesome finds!
Karl Png has great photos and finds too
Liz Lim shared awesome photos and finds from areas the rest of the team didn't cover.
Thanks to
Marcus Ng for leading our walk and finding cool stuff, and of course these awesome photos.
More photos by
Diandrea Ho.
