The beautiful natural shore at Sentosa Tanjung Rimau has living corals, lush seagrass meadows and natural cliffs cloaked in a coastal forest.
This shore is a refuge for some rare coastal plants, and is among the few shores left in Singapore with lush Tape seagrasses with long leaves. Today, they were fruiting!
Here's a glimpse of the shore. Including corals hard and soft, anemones and anemoneshrimp, colourful sponges, nudibranch and seagrasses.
There are not a lot of corals on the shore, but still, there are a few large colonies.
I noticed that some of the large boulder shaped corals were pale or had pale patches.
But most of the corals seemed alright. I saw a variety of corals. Most were
Merulinid corals. There were also many
Boulder pore corals, some were large. I saw some plate corals too, and one
Trumpet coral and
Cauliflower coral. The rest of the team saw
mushroom corals.
There were a good variety of
leathery soft corals, most were medium sized. Although there were a few very small
Omelette leathery soft corals, which suggests some kind of stress.
The natural coastal forest that cloaks this natural cliff has some of the last of Singapore's now rare coastal plants. Among them is
Nyireh laut which is Critically Endangered in Singapore and we probably have only about 7 trees on our shores. The mother tree and her older daughter tree are still alright.
It was nice to see the very young Nyireh laut that has settled under the cliff some distance from the mother tree is still doing well. I first saw it on my last trip here in
July 2017. The young Nyireh laut growing under the pillbox is doing well. On the last survey in
Jan 2018, it seemed to have been chopped off, but has since resprouted. The patch of
Raffles pitcher plants are also still there.
The rest of the team shared special sightings like a pair of
Tiger cowries!
Also this interesting nudibranch which I have never seen before!
It was great to see some clumps of
Tape seagrass with super long leaf blades, as they should. During the last survey in
Jan 2018, the male flowers were blooming. Today, I saw a lot of fruits!
Unfortunately, I did come across some cropped Tape seagrass too.
The patch of
Sickle seagrass near the seawall is still there and doing well.
Liz shared her sighting of
Needle seagrass, which is surprisingly not that common here.
There remains a bloom of
Bee hoon green seaweed and
Hairy green seaweed that seems to have been going on here for years now. As is normal this time of year, there was also a bloom of
Sargassum seaweed.
This shore lies near the Pasir Panjang container terminals. The long line of floating drums are back. They were absent during our survey in
Jul 2017 and
Jan 2018 so they must have been reinstalled since then. These are a
'security barrier' first installed in 2012.
We didn't survey the shore past the point. Let's hope this beautiful shore remains safe until we get a chance to return again.
Photos by others on this trip
Loh Kok Sheng
Jianlin Liu
Liz Lim
Vincent Choo
Chay Hoon
Joleen Chan
Others on this trip: Choo Yi Feng.
