Sentosa Seagrass Transect recce

This morning, Siti, Shoop, Peter and I had a look-see at Sentosa in preparation for the Sentosa Seagrass Transect next month.

Sentosa has the clearest water of our reefs! It's crystal even with waves crashing.

And it's reefs are crowded with hard and soft corals in all colours of the rainbow.

They come in various shapes from flat plates, to folded flower-like shapes...

And various textures and patterns...

This 'fingered' pink soft coral I've dubbed 'surgical-glove leathery coral' which Shoop thought was quite gross. While the bright blue smooth and slippery animal is probably a sponge.

There were LOTS of these slipper hard corals! We saw at least 10 large ones.

These hard corals lie unattached to the bottom, unlike the other kinds hard corals more commonly seen on a reef. The one above is sometimes called the Tongue slipper coral (Herpolitha sp.). They may sometimes form T-, Y- or even X-shapes; mainly due to regeneration after damage.

This one is sometimes called the Mole slipper coral (Polyphyllia talpina) because its short tentacles give it a furry appearance.

We startled several 'balls' of these small Lined eeltail catfishes (Plotosus lineatus). These catfishes generally swim about in a ball when they are young. The low tide must have disrupted a large ball of them, as there were scattered groups of these fishes, all about the same size. Hopefully, they will regroup when the tide comes back in.

And a school of many very nervous Cresent perch (Terapon jarbua). I've not seen such a large number together before!

Sentosa is the one place where you can be almost certain of encountering this monster worm. The Giant reef worm can grow to 1.5 metres long. It has a nice name though... Eunice is its scientific name.

Sentosa has lots of long Tape seagrasses (Enhalus acoroides), and some of them were fruiting! We also saw a female and male flower, but they were not in 'full bloom' so to speak.

While I slacked off, Siti was hard at work measuring up the transect site.

And Peter explains the Long black sea cucumber (Holothuria leucospilota) to Shoop; a tricky thing to do without being rude.

On the way back, another visitor on the shore pointed out this pair of Coastal horseshoe crabs (Tachypleus gigas) excitedly and assured us they were rare. Fortunately, this is not quite true. Yes, they are probably not as common as they used to be, but we still encounter them regularly on all our shores.

Our shores are still very much alive with amazing surprises if we only take the time to explore and learn more about them.