Lizard myth? No longer...

Everytime when I go Sentosa and see the 'Monitor Lizard Crossing' signs along the road, I wondered, are there really monitor lizards?

Today, it answered me everything.

I was walking very slowly, in fear of stepping on unexpected animals such as frogfish, stonefish, or even stingray until I saw something black and long wriggled in front of me. I thought it's one of the tenacles of a black octopus & I called for Tom.

"Hey! There's an octopus here! A big, black one!"

Tom looked at me with a surprised look

I kept an eye on the moving 'tenacle' until I saw a 'snout'

"No wait, it's a moray eel!!"

Tom was still looking at me with the surprised look

With my eye still fixed on that creature, I saw claws.

"No no no...holy *beep*! It's a...a....a...*stumbled upon words*..MONITOR LIZARD!!"

Tom quickly rushed over my location.

Both of us went 'Wowwww' coz probably it's the first time we see it underwater. The monitor lizard (Varanus salvator)is slightly a metre long & it keeps moving away from us as we approached it. So we sneaked behind & in front of him to catch the as-excellent-as-possible footage of it.

I believed Tom had a pretty hard time trying to capture footage of it coz...He had to sink himself into the water & accidentally swallowed some murky seawater as the strong currents crashed upon the shore. Oh well, next time we must really bring along our eye masks & snorkel tubes to places like this.

We spent like 45mins checking out the fellow underwater until it swam away further into the open sea & so, we tried to look for other things to shoot before the tide comes in.

As we faced the shore, Tom spotted another monitor lizard. This time, double the size! *gasps* Tom quickly ran upshore to take close-up but the smart fellow spotted him & scurried on the sandy shore, climbed up the cliff & into the deep vegetation.

Gone.

We then decided it's time to depart. We returned upshore to retrieve our belongings until I spotted a trail of 'claw'-prints beside our bags.
Geez!
Luckily we didnt bring any cat food (which are used as bait) along, if not, the monitor lizards might have ransacked our bags and ate them up.

One of the monitor lizards also left a pool of 'souvenirs' for us. A pool of uric acid. Thanks.

This is my first close encounter with Varanus salvator,by just 30cm apart,and now I'm totally convinced about the presence of monitor lizards in Sentosa.