Slugs! And Fishes! And Crabs! Oh My!
What a wonderful trip we had today! Wai was tempted to join us, but she decided that her work commitments came first, and we let her go. She is so going to bang her head when she sees the video we got today!
The trip to Sekudu was wonderful! We had new records of a whole lot of creatures. One crab that we saw for the first time today, and almost every other crab that we saw today was female and carrying eggs! Even a porcelain crab that somehow ended up in my bootie all the way to Kranji was female and carrying eggs... (Oooops.... I swear I had no idea she was there till Chay Hoon was cleaning the gear, and spotted her....)
We also saw a number of new nudibranchs or sea slugs, all of them spotted by a new spotter that joined us today, Han Peng. We feel that his vocabulary, however, needs building up. When a new creature was spotted, he called us all over. However, jaded as the regular crew are, we ask for a description first before rushing over. All that we got from him was hand signals and waving lights, so the whole thing effectively became a game of twenty questions! During breakfast, we realized that he could spot things due to his experience as a diver. We also realized that his inability to describe the creature is due to the exact same detail, that you can't talk with a regulator in your mouth. Funnily, we seem to understand each other perfectly with torches in ours...
About the slugs that Super-Slug-Girl missed. One was found on seagrapes, and looked just like a bunch of them with rhinophores/feelers on one end. Another was leafy, and was probably a sarcoglossan like the Elysia we put in a pot on St. John's. Two of them were found, and one sort of fell apart when touched by the cameracrew. Ria tried valiantly to get a shot of the more pristine one. Yet another nudibranch was barely a centimeter long, and was found next to a coil of eggs.... Which it was eating!
Photos will be provided by Ria at a later date... I think. Some of the stuff was caught on video only, and se was nowhere nearby to get the thing on her 16 megapixel camera!
Also, in addendum to my previous post, it appears that what I said was true. We are now one day out, with one day of rain.
The trip to Sekudu was wonderful! We had new records of a whole lot of creatures. One crab that we saw for the first time today, and almost every other crab that we saw today was female and carrying eggs! Even a porcelain crab that somehow ended up in my bootie all the way to Kranji was female and carrying eggs... (Oooops.... I swear I had no idea she was there till Chay Hoon was cleaning the gear, and spotted her....)
We also saw a number of new nudibranchs or sea slugs, all of them spotted by a new spotter that joined us today, Han Peng. We feel that his vocabulary, however, needs building up. When a new creature was spotted, he called us all over. However, jaded as the regular crew are, we ask for a description first before rushing over. All that we got from him was hand signals and waving lights, so the whole thing effectively became a game of twenty questions! During breakfast, we realized that he could spot things due to his experience as a diver. We also realized that his inability to describe the creature is due to the exact same detail, that you can't talk with a regulator in your mouth. Funnily, we seem to understand each other perfectly with torches in ours...
About the slugs that Super-Slug-Girl missed. One was found on seagrapes, and looked just like a bunch of them with rhinophores/feelers on one end. Another was leafy, and was probably a sarcoglossan like the Elysia we put in a pot on St. John's. Two of them were found, and one sort of fell apart when touched by the cameracrew. Ria tried valiantly to get a shot of the more pristine one. Yet another nudibranch was barely a centimeter long, and was found next to a coil of eggs.... Which it was eating!
Photos will be provided by Ria at a later date... I think. Some of the stuff was caught on video only, and se was nowhere nearby to get the thing on her 16 megapixel camera!
Also, in addendum to my previous post, it appears that what I said was true. We are now one day out, with one day of rain.
1 Comments:
Aw man, consider my head banged. :( Hopefully this is a nice prelude to what we're going to get this week..
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