Oct 18, 2008

Sentosa (17 Oct 08)

It's that time of the year for evening tides and under a gloomy sky, the Team assembles to monitor Sentosa.We are being filmed! Siti and Wei Ling had been hard at work even before we arrived. Here they are giving the briefing before we begin. And then we were off.Andy shares monitoring methods with first-timers Ian and Ms Hirano of NEC. While the others are spread out on this rubbly reef to check out the seagrasses.Although this stretch of natural shore at Sentosa faces our busy world-class container ports, it still has lush growths of Tape seagrass (Enhalus acoroides) and Spoon seagrass (Halophila ovalis).
Both kinds of seagrasses are doing very well! There are large, healthy patches of them all over the shore.
Today, there was a huge bloom of Hairy seaweeds (Bryopsis sp.) which washed up in large quantities on the shore.The seaweeds also bunged up the transect square so they had to be removed every time before taking the next reading. More about Bryopsis and seaweed blooms on the wild shores of singapore blog.Even as the sun sets over the industrial installations at Jurong Island, the Team continues their work.
The Sentosa shore is too narrow for the usual kind of set up with the transect tapes. So we do a random sampling here.

When we were done, we took a quick look around the shore and saw the usual hard and soft corals, as well as some red egg crabs and an octopus! There was also a Giant carpet anemone with an anemone shrimp!

The weather held and it didn't rain like yesterday. So we had a nice cool evening trip.

Thank you to all who came to help: Andy, Marcus, Ivan, Jiunn Hui, Charmaine and our special guests Ian and Ms Hirano.

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