Cyrene quieter than usual

Although Cyrene lies in the middle of an industrial triangle, it still has some of Singapore's most amazing shores.

A full team surveys at predawn and although the sandy areas seem quieter than usual, they find four Giant clams, baby cushion stars, Knobbly sea stars, dugong feeding trails!

The highlight of any trip to Cyrene are the large Knobbly sea stars. I saw about 20 near the beacon, similar to what the team saw in May 2025 and in Nov 2024. The team also some other clusters of these sea stars in other parts of the reef flat.

There's never been a lot of hard corals on Cyrene since we first started surveying it. Most of them are boulder shaped and there are some large colonies. I had a brief look at the corals on the eastern end today. In Jun 2024, we estimate about 50% of the hard corals here were impacted by mass coral bleaching mostly the smaller hard coral colonies were outright bright white bleaching. While larger ones seemed alright. Similar to our last survey in Nov 2024 and May 2025, today I didn't see any bleaching.

Near the beacon and around the eastern tip of Cyrene, there remains a lot of large Leathery soft corals. Similar to our last survey in Nov 2024 and May 2025, today I didn't see any leathery soft corals bleaching. I also saw flowery soft corals, zoanthids, Leathery sea fans and Giant carpet anemones - they were also fine.

Today I saw some dugong feeding trails at our landing point north-westward facing Pasir Panjang Container Terminal nearer Jurong. These trails are formed when dugongs chomp up seagrasses including their roots, leaving a shallow meandering furrow of about equal width and depth. I didn't see many distinct trails elsewhere. It seems every survey since 2021, we see dugong feeding trails on Cyrene. Yay! Today, I got distracted chatting with the TeamSeaGrass folk doing monitoring on the shore, and I didn't take a closer look at the seagrass situation.

The huge and long sand bar seems very quiet even at pre-dawn. In the past, we used to see special snails, sand dollars here. I only saw a few commonly moon snails, olive snails, Cake sand dollars and even crab burrows were few. I saw a few star shaped impressions but no Common sea stars. I will update with the finds by the rest of the team later.

Since Kelvin's awesome drone views during our last survey in May 2025, I noticed the middle of the reef flat is now almost completely bare of sand. Along the edges, there is now a very long and narrow and tall sand bar along the western and extending to the southern edge of the shore facing Pulau Bukom. In the past, there was only one obvious sand bar at the western end. This shows in a comparison of Google Earth views of Cyrene through the years.

Although it lies in the middle of an industrial triangle and major shipping lanes, Cyrene has some of Singapore's most amazing shores. We had surveyed in Jun 2024 for impact of the Pasir Panjang oil spill a few weeks prior and did not see any signs of oil. Today, Cyrene to have pulled through both this oil spill and mass coral bleaching that happened last year. Let's hope it stays safe until we return!