My overall sense is that there are fewer hard corals than before the Big Dying that we observed in Jun 2018. There is still not much live coral in the area facing the spillway. It was disheartening to see that the two clumps of Tape seagrass that I saw had cropped leaves (but not cropped very short). There were, however, still many leathery soft corals, some were quite large. There were also a lot of red feather stars. And I saw a few small Barrel sponges - these suffered badly during the Big Dying. At the old jetty, there was hardly any marine life. And we couldn't find the Fluted giant clam, the tide wasn't really very low today.
Here's what the volunteers who surveyed the shore saw.
Jianlin Liu
Richard Kuah
James Koh
Vincent Choo
On our last survey in Jun 2018, there was mass dying on this shore. With a heavy smell of death (like a badly run fish market) as we saw large corals and sponges that were bleaching, or had dying, rotting tissue.
On our next survey in Apr 2019, we didn't see any bleaching or dying corals. While the leathery soft coral garden seems to be doing well near the beacon, and the area nearer the old jetty seemed mostly alright, we didn't see as much live coral in the area facing the spillway. We saw familiar favourites like the red feather stars in abundance, also the Fluted giant clam. There were also many anemonefishes in almost every large anemone.
Due to COVID, we didn't survey in 2020. And we almost missed our window this year. We can only survey on Mondays, when the course is closed for maintenance. And there are not many Mondays with a tide low enough for a survey.
Thank you once again to SDC and Serapong Golf Course for supporting our annual surveys and for looking after these precious shores!
On 13 July, some other shores were surveyed during the low tide.
Marcus Ng checked up Sembawang beach.
Richard Kuah also checked out Sembawang Beach.
