The Pretty Typical Adventures of the WildFilms Crew: June 21-27

Well, before the trips started, I made a prediction about what the weather would be like during our trips. I think I got it half right. It rained on us maybe half the time we were out there, and Mother Nature was kind enough to help us clean our tarps and ponchos the rest of the time.

On Merawang, we normally go during daylight hours, and normally there is no rain whatsoever. This time, we got a lashing like you wouldn't believe. Pins and needles, and the sky to the east looked like Armageddon had come on our video tapes.

Alvin heroically trying to capture dramatic 50cm high waves near the beacon.


The rain finally stopped! We can get back to work!


Wai: "So cuuuuuuute! Look at it! Looook aaaat iiiiit!!!!!"


Our very own Sith Lord....

Every time we get the chance, we try our best to slack off... Here I'm contemplating the answer to life, the universe and everything.... 42!

Of course, after every trip, we have the packing up to do....

Breaking down the tent that we use as a hideyhole for equipment during wet weather. People have to stay outside in ponchos.


Something we never considered doing with booties before! Now they're nice and dry!


Don't forget the research that needs to be done to identify the weird and wonderful!

Sometimes, when the girls are in a good mood, we get good meals, like:

Pasta for dinner,
Omelettes for breakfast! And all from...
Raw Food!

See how slack we can be! What a life....

The Semakau Survey had not started yet, and we had taken the most comfortable spot! In air-conditioning no less!
L-R: Han Peng, Ivy, Jo-Tsze, Priss, Marie, Tracey.

Packing up after our session on Labrador Park.
L-R: Tom, Cynthia, Ivy, Priss, Chay Hoon, Han Peng

After Sekudu, all we could think of was sleep....
L-R: Ivy, Han Peng, Chay Hoon, Alvin, Jimmy, Sith Lord

And now for the recruitment phase....
All crew members get some perks... After all, the crew works hard, on their own time, and expect very little in return.
One of the perks, however, is:

Isn't that a nice badge? Don't you want one too? I'm sure you do.

Fabulous Flatworms !!!

For this series of lows, we got to see some fabulous flatworms at our shores.

Flatworms as the name suggests, are flat and the shape are leaf-like. They are unsegmented worms and have a head end with an upper and lower surface. They can be found under rocks or in pools of water.

Flatworms are hermaphrodites. This means that they have both male and female reproductive systems. Their bodies are also soft and thus they could tear easily.

Most flatworms are carnivorous and they feed on small or tiny creatures such as worms, snail eggs or ascidians.

Here are some flatworms that we found on our shores...Aren't they pretty and cute?


This flatworm was found at Labrador. It is almost transparent and was found crawling among the rocks and look like it had just finished a meal (look carefully and you will see a lump of food at the centre).


This Oh-So-Cute guy/gal was found at Chek Jawa among the sponge cities. But this poor thing had a dent in the middle of its body. It must have regenerated some parts that were injured.


This one was encountered at Sekudu. Look at the bright orange colour! It looks like a piece of ascidians if it is still.


The id of this flatworm is Pseudobiceros gratus. It was found at Chek Jawa. Due to its dull colour, it can be easily blend in among the sand and rocks.


And this one is my favourite! Look at the colour! Isn't it beautiful? Look like wearing a summer dress with purple dots.

errhhh... i think i found something..

"errhhh... i think i found something. Anyone interested?" Thats what i said everytime i spotted a thing. And next came a string of questions... "What is that? DESCRIBE!!!" COLOUR!! SIZE!! ETC!!

Scratching my head that filled with nothing but hay.. i racked my tiny little brain(if it exists) to come out with some description.. and all i can come out with is "err.. its white.. around 10mm.." well, thats me, a little fellow with very limited vocab.

I didnt know being an intertidal spotter.. u got to be well versed in describing... thats something i never need to do when i'm diving underwater.. all i have to do.. is to bang lightly on my tanks or shake my torch at nite.. and point at the subject.. the divers WILL automatically swim towards me to look at the subject.

geesh... i thought "well... since u ppl arent coming to me... I shall bring them to you!!" so after my VIRGIN experience on that fateful nite, i armed myself with NEW weapon (i bought 3 soup scoops the next day!! HEEHEEHEE!) and many containers.. hoping to spot more nudis for the next few trips..

well.. perhaps the nudis got some kind of sixth senses.. they seems to hide themselves away from me at labrador and semakau.. :( sob..sob.. i only managed to spot a "huge ass" sea hare- geographic sea hare(Aplysia geographica) at labrador,a 20mm polka-dot nudibranch (jorunna funebris)and a black and green phyllidiella at semakau.

but the great finds at sekudu are enough to keep me excited for the whole week. Its really a NUDI heaven there!!

Heres some of the "rare" slugs we found there:
Slug #1
the blade-like leafy slug:
The moment i tried to scoop up this stange looking fellow, its shed its cerata(the blade-like thingy) off. Gosh, those cerata was really sticky!! At first i thought i hurt it.. but after some reading, its some kind of characteristic of a cyerce species which acts as a decoy like a lizard shedding its tail. As of now, the i think it should be a Cyerce elegans, the nearest match i can find. Hope i can to get it IDed soon. :D By the way, they were also found at Chek Jawa by our dear Chay Hoon, the veteran spotter.
Slug #2
the seagrape lookalike slug:
Stiliger smaragdinus
Dont they look yummy?? slurp..
Slug #3
the light brown nudi with round bumps on body:
should be a Hoplodoris bifurcata. If they grow bigger, i think they will make a very good carpet for foot massage. HEE.
Slug #4
the 2 toned brown nudi with spots and round bumps on body:
Hoplodoris flammea

Its seem like there more slugs to offer in our own backyards than what people thinks...
One thing for sure, i'll be back there for more SLUGS!

SLUG of the week

I think I have narrowed down my slug fascination to anaspidea (because they are so cute and squishy looking), sacoglossans (because they are green and bizarrely shaped) and just a few nudibranchs - like the onchs (which are cute and squishy too).

Anyway, along with this theme, here is where I put my vote for Slug of the Week (and so many slugs there were this week!). The slugs seemed to be out and about, doing all manner of things. We spotted many suspicious-looking strands of things near to them, and dotted all round the shore, which were believed to be slug eggs.


Lobiger sp.

Chay Hoon spotted this one on Changi Ferry Terminal, while the team was busy chasing a few giant sea hares around with our cameras. It was just sitting there, the 4 leaf-like extensions on its back swaying in the current, just like any of the other pieces of algae it was sitting amidst. What an amazing find! If you look closer, you might be able to spot the smooth green shell on its back too. :)

Opinions as to which species it is differ. Dibelius calls it L. souverbii in his book, but Bill Rudman has it on his site as L. serradifalci.

As for the other fascinating slugs spotted this week, please keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming post, which our new member and sharp-eyed slug spotter Hanpeng is supposed to write. ;)

Highlights of the Lows: Jun 21-28

Each year, there are usually only 3-4 series of super SUPER low tides in Singapore.

Tides reach minus zero. Vast shores are uncovered for crazy people like us to document. Being mostly covered in water, this zone is very rich in marine life that we seldom get to see.

These rare tides happen in the wee hours of the morning; and last a lot longer than usual. This means trips last 4-6 hours instead of the usual slacker 2-3 hours.

We just lived through the first of these siong tides. Eight back-to-back, back-breaking days. But what wonderful things we saw!!

Since the slug freaks will cover their favourite subject in a separate blog entry, I thought I'd share some of the Other Stuff we saw.



For some reason, there were lots and LOTS of different kinds of brittlestars. These animals are related to sea stars but belong to a different group, the Subclass Ophiuroidea (which means snake-like). Their arms are highly flexible, long spiny (and indeed snake-like) and are used to slither about rapidly. They range from teeny tiny ones (1cm or less with arms) that hide inside sponges, to gianormous ones with arms 10-20cm long. Usually, all you will ever see are their arms sticking out of a cosy hidey hole. Often, the arms are mistaken for worms. It's rare to see them moving about with their central disk out in the open. The pink one in the photo above is upside down. It seems to like to be upside down. We don't really know why.


While Wai goes ga-ga over slugs; my weakness is a bunch of other snail-relatives; the cephalopods (squids, cuttlefishes and octopuses). A cuttlefish has a swimming fin that circles its body like a transparent skirt. The pretty one above was seen at Raffles Marina. It has bright dots along the body edge that flashed as it zoomed around, obviously violating some speed limit. A squid usually has a triangular fin at the tip of its body. While other squids are streamlined pencil-shaped creatures, this rotund little squid was hiding half in the sand pretending to be a bit of rubbish. It has a pair of round flappy little swimming fins which reminds me of Dumbo's ears. What's not to love?

And who can resist a jellyfish. It's not a mollusc, and is related to sea anemones. There were several of these elegant creatures cruising the waters at the Marina. Tom got lovely footage of it AND without getting stung by the jellyfish OR the fireworms that still bristled thickly at the Marina.


It was also a week of Anemone shrimps (Periclimenes sp.). These delightful creatures frolick harmlessly among the tentacles of Carpet anemones (Stichodactyla sp.). They are usually found as a pair; Mr and Mrs Anemone shrimp. We saw them at Changi, at Tuas and at Semakau. They are certainly not uncommon at all on our shores!


It's soo hard to choose Find of the Week. But certainly this large pipefish is very special. Mary's keen eyes spotted it among the long Tape seagrass (Enhalus acoroides) at Semakau. "Seahorse!" she exclaimed. We had yet to see a seahorse on Semakau.

When we took a closer look, it turned out to be a pipefish that looked like a straightened out seahorse! And it was a papa seahorse as he had lots of little eggs glued to his belly. Like seahorses, in pipefishes, it is the male that carries the eggs. We are still awaiting identification of this marvellous find. Certainly the first time I have seen anything like it on our shores.

But we also did see seahorses. Chay Hoon's keen super-spotter eyes found FIVE of them at Labrador! They had yellow-black striped tails. It's the first time we saw them on Labrador.

Like many other things in life I guess, seahorses are there, we must just know how to see them.


But this beautiful fish is my vote for Find of the Week. Happily swooshing over the sand at Changi.

The last time anything like this was seen was the same time last year during the Chek Jawa transect. Cheng Puay spotted it and took a photo of it. It was thought then that it might be a new record for Singapore, possibly an electric ray of the genus Narcine.

Of course I'm going to get clobbered by the Fish Scientists for not taking a sample for proper id. But I didn't have a net with me! And after my last encounter of the stinging kind, I didn't really want to mess about with a stingray with bare hands. And an electric one at that! When I tried to find it again for the film crew, it had swum off into the murky distance. Alas.

Well, we get to rest up for a week or so. Before the moderately low tides start again. Then another round of exhilirating, exhausting, extraordinary super low tides end of July...

Mossie Combat

with all the mossie bites and swells on my fingers, toes and my scalp, i cant help but wanna say something about these thirsty bloodsuckers..

just something that I heard on Yes!933 a few days ago .. that burning one mosquito coil is equivalent to smoking 4 packets of cigarettes a day... and this website says it is equiv to 100 cigarettes http://www.teriin.org/terragreen/issue47/feature.htm

alternative ways to fend off mossie bites
http://www.mercola.com/2003/jun/7/mosquito_bites.htm#

some of the ideas sound great, e.g. planting marigold plants , or bringing a frog on our trips, hehehehe..

my share of Sekudu 21 June 05

Sekudu trip on last Tuesday was really good, besides the ehhhh... stiliger smaragdinus (?)and polybranchia something that set off all the "What???""What colour", "how big??".. "is it a jorunna? i dun want a jorunna!" , "no!", "it's a discodoris then! I dun want too!" "No la, he knows what he is looking at!" shouting of Guess what IT is game across the shore .. confusing as it may seemed, I guess it contributed to the fun and kept us awake in the wee hours of Tuesday morning...

Other things that we saw include really thin pipefishes, a carpet eel blenny that swam past me and was almost dismissed as another pipefish, two white nudibranches that were not filmed nor photographed on this walk, due to too many stuff, too little time and the rain. A knobbly sea star that Tom almost stepped on, these tiny fishes that looked like some juvenile of some butterflyfish, sea spider, toadfishes, squid, a fish that looked like a spiny leaf fish, but managed to get away from us .. what else what else.. old people should learn to blog as soon as they can instead of leaving it till one week later....

what i have learned/realised I need to learn on my first real WildFilm walk:
1) How to talk with the torch in your mouth and avoid your drool falling on the equipment or the videoman (still trying)
2) Lighting assistant is not easy, especially with the torch in your mouth

Semakau Survey: 26 Jun 05

It was a fabulous day of M&M at Semakau ("Mud and Mosquitoes" -- to shamelessly borrow a phrase coined by Genevie).

Early Sunday morning, WildFilms and 60 other wild and crazy people girded loins, sprayed repellent, hoisted gear and donned full body armour to survey the biodiversity of Pulau Semakau.


The forested area was teeming with vast clouds of mosquitoes. For a change, we didn't notice the sandflies...

The work started as soon as we arrived on site...

The intrepid Prof Teh Tiong Sa and his equally dauntless team (Dr Raju, Hui Boon and Zaki) proceed to map out the humungous shore.


Siti and her seagrass team checked out the vast seagrass meadow that rings Pulau Semakau.

But the folks who had the most arduous job were the 40 or so volunteers that did the mangrove survey. These brave souls trudged through the soft mud and negotiated the maze of roots and hordes of insects to identify the plants of Semakau's mangroves


Sometimes trees had to be climbed to verify identity.


But they seemed to have had the most fun...here's Genevie obviously having a good muddy time!


The weather was wonderful. Sunny blue skies early in the morning, turning nice and cloudy and a sprinkling of rain only when we were ending. Thanks Mum!

WildFilms show that they are the most field savvy of all the teams by 'choping' the most comfortable place to slack off at the end of the trip...



For more photos and info about the Survey, visit the Survey homepage on wildsingapore.

Profound Question of the Week

I wasn't around to hear this myself, but I ws told that the following question was asked some time this week:
"What time does tomorrow start?"

There were two (2) possible answers to that question:
1) At midnight, tomorrow will start.
2) At midnight, tomorrow will become today, so it will never start.

I know not who asked, and who answered. The stupoks victims will have their id10Ts protected anyway.

Reverse Foodchain on Chek Jawa

In a normal foodchain, a large crab will eat a small octopus, and a large octopus will eat a small crab. In other words, the larger fellow will eat the smaller one.

Imagine our surprise this morning when Cynthia spotted an octopus with just its 20cm tentacles moving around outside a hole. Imagine all our faces, when we see a crab, barely 7cm across, trying to feed on one of these tentacles, tugging away tenaciously as if it was the last thing on earth.

The crab dragged the end of that tentacle undera rock and disappeared from our view. However, the octpous was pulled out into the open and it honestly looked very embarrassed, with teh rest of its arms covering its head while it tried very hard to get its arm away from the crab under the rock.



What else did we see? On the walk back from Chek Jawa, this big black snake reared up and spread its hood. Unfortunately, once all the cameras came out, the black spitting cobra had decided that it was time to leave and had disappeared into the undergrowth, and was nowhere to be seen.

Dove meets OFF!

Chanced upon this ad outside the Shaw cinemas along beach road. So smart. Now we can save all those precious dollars buying mosquito repellant that doesn't work. Just buy shower gel. Everyone needs shower gel, right? Yeah right. Still beats me why anyone would want to smell like OFF! all day and night long.

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.

Weather Report

As I write this, at 0245, it is storming. As in complete with lightning, thunder, the works.

Now. What was I doing before I started this post? I was packing gear and getting ready for our next series of trips which begins in about 24 hours.

Why am I making this post? Last year, we were looking for a person to blame the rain on. And we blamed Kok Leong. This year, the theory of Kok Leong as Rain God doesn't seem to work any more.

What DOES seem to work, however, is that it only rains when we are getting ready for trips, or when we are in the field. And if you're sharp, you might notice that it only rains every two weeks or so, and only for about a week.

Guess what? That sort of coincides with when we are on the shores!

Suggestion. If anyone is sick and tired of the muggy hot weather and wants good wet rain, pay for us to go out! I'm sure that we'll bring plenty of rain! At least, the offer will be good only for this year. I'm not going to offer anything about next year till it comes.

Hmmm.... Sorry folks, looks like I jinxed it for this week....

Censorship and The Maturity of Attitudes

Never before have I had to rant. Perhaps, just this once, we will make an exception.

Something happened a couple of nights ago. This blog's tagboard was visited by a particularly vicious charachter. I would not have minded his comments, even if his point of view disagrees with most... No. All of the crew members. I would have let his comments remain on the board for all to see. After all, we are not the most friendly of people when we are tired from lack of sleep and lugging heavy equipment for hours at a time, frustrated when we can't find anything to shoot, or when the thing we are shooting does things we don't want it to, or doesn't do things that we expect it to.

If a person were to attack us, I will appreciate the negative feedback as a point where we can improve the film or the crew, and perhaps do something to make things better. However, to say,"So-and-so is a f***ing b****" and leave it at that, I find as totally unacceptable. Just as unacceptable, is to say that the shores are a *bleeping* waste of time, and deserve to be buried. I'd like to know why. Did you go unprepared and get bitten by insects and burnt by the sun? Did you stay out in the rain and get sick? Did you play in water that was too deep and flood your handphone? That really is not our fault, is it? You couldn't find the things we found so that you could put them in your fish tank? We're not going to tell you where or when is a good time to go get them.

Unfortunately, the current state of the tagboard is due to the offensive nature of a poster a couple of nights back. The comments have been deleted, because I have decided from the start that this site is meant to be safe for 14 Year Old Sisters. The comments were caught by a sharp-eyed crew member, and were deleted I think within an hour of the poster leaving this blog.

Again, I do not like to censor my thoughts, nor do I wish to censor the thoughts of others. As Voltaire is said to have said,"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." However, if need be, the stick will be wielded, and the club thrown, I will censor you.

I have had disagreements before with the rest of the crew, even with some of the more important members. I have even had some discussions with visitors to our shores and exhibition booths where we do not agree on points of view. We can agree to disagree on some points, and keep other points in view for later discussion/argument. We can have a mature conversation, even on the tagboard, or any forum. Just leave the vulgarities out of it. Trolls will be taken clubbing.

Slugs, slugs, slugs

I was in slug heaven this week. At Sentosa we spotted the most amazing sea slugs ever. They were the most enormous seaslugs I'd ever seen. Check out this fella, which was about the size of my hand!!!


Aplysia sp.

What's better than 1 gigantic sea slug? 2 gigantic sea slugs making more sea slugs! Here's another picture of it with a (possible) mate. This is what they usually look like on the ground.



How adorable. Pity Ria wasn't around to get shots of the other pair we found that was actually mating! We didn't pick them up to show her because it would be rude to interrupt. I think Jeff did, though. And Tom's supposed to get the stills off the footage we got. :D

And here's another cute little slug that we saw this week. Onchs are my absolute favourite. This one looks a bit different from the ones we usually see, which look different from anything on Bill Rudman's site. Can't remember which one this was though, so I have no idea how big it really was. It looks kind of like the first onch I ever saw, on my year one biodiversity fieldtrip, the one that started this whole sordid (and like Ria mentioned earlier, doomed to fail) love affair.




[Added later:]
Finally, the video stills are in (thanks Tom)! And how grainily authentic they are too...


Sea slugs mating (left) and close up (right)

Wild Things this week

Seh Suan (left) requests a photo of the menacing clouds that gather at the end of our Changi trip. Sneaky cam (which is actually an MP3 player) makes a valiant effort ...

We were joined at Changi by some Blue Water Volunteers: back, from left Dan Wei, Ming Sheng and Bernadette. Wai, as usual, holding something small and squishy that she has fallen in love with. It's always a short-lived love-affair. After an affectionate interaction, all love interests are carefully replaced where they were found.


The Wild Things on Kusu, among the wondrous corals in the lagoon...


It's Tracey's first trip with us, but he has already started to shoot the photographer who is merely trying to document the team. What's with this shooting each other thing that gets all team members :-) Everyone else is distracted by the pink anemone shrimp that Kok Leong has found in a gianormous sea anemone (from left to right: Robin, Tom, Wai, Tracey, Kok Leong)



Alvin (off frame) yells "Slug Sex!!", probably the only thing that could get the team moving THAT quickly at the end of a long long week.

It appears the slugs are really at it this season. Plus the seahares and leaf slug last week, we now got steamy shots of three different kinds of slugs...cool.



Since Healthy Breakfast was such a big hit, it reprised this week...


Tracey puts EVERYTHING on the sandwhich: cheese, salami, sardines...eeeww.

The sandflies and other annoying unidentified bugs were really swarming at Kusu. Alvin points out how he left the bug that stung him on his forehead as a warning to the other bugs. Back home, Alvin and I realise we are no longer reacting as badly to sandflies as we used to. Could it be we are building up an immunity? Oh please let it be so...

Highlights of the Lows: Jun 7-11

This week we did Changi with a vengence. From end to end. And it is still surprising what you can see on the shores!


Though the water is quite murky in some parts of Changi, the shores are very much alive. Green mussels (Perna viridis) grow thickly on any hard surface in the seawater. This particularly large clump was growing on just one rope. There was also a stretch of shore that was piled high with living 'see-ham' or cockle shells (Anadara granosa). It was impossible to walk without crunching on them...ouch. 'Gong-gong' (Strombus canarium) are also common on Changi. Most snails have a little 'door' called the operculum to seal the hole in the shell. The Gong-gong has a pointed knife-like operculum that is attached to a strong foot. The Gong-gong uses this to push against and thus hops along quickly, instead of slowly creeping along the bottom like other snails. The Gong-gong has large eyes on long stalks, probably to help it see where it is going as it moves much more quickly than other snails. This particular Gong-gong looked different from the usual Gong-gong, but possibly it's a young snail. Or perhaps something different altogether. I haven't found out yet.



We keep seeing this tiny little squid on all our shores. It can rapidly change from yellow to black. Octopuses are also common on Changi. This particular one was very well camouflaged among the muddy rocks where it was hiding. I only spotted it because of the jet of water it was shooting out. A marvellous surprise was a large dark orange, almost red, sea horse. Wai spotted it and Alan Tan took the photo. I was far away at the time :-(



We saw some of my favourite group of animals, the Echinoderms. These purple, pink and white creatures are often mistaken for worms. But they are actually sea cucumbers! Belonging to the Family Synaptidae, these soft, easily damaged animals are often found draped around brown colonial tunicates that look like melted chocolate on rocks. There were lots of black short-spined sea urchins (Temnopleurus toreumaticus)and one beautiful Pencil sea urchin (Prionocidaris bispinosa). The banded pink spines are spiny! There was also one solitary sand dollar (Arachoides placenta). We also saw other kinds of sea cucumbers as lots of sand stars (Astropecten sp).



Amazingly, you can find seafans on Changi! Though not as plentifully as on some of our undisturbed shores. These branching animals are related to corals. They are colonial animals with yellow, orange or red skeletons. When submerged, the tiny white polyps emerge to feed. Colourful branching hyroids, also a relative of corals, grew in little bunches on pilings and stones. These animals may be yellow, orange or pink.



There were lots and LOTS of these little fishes on Changi shores, sometimes in groups of 3-4. I've not seen this happen before. About 8cm long, at first I thought they were scorpionfishes, but a closer look suggests they are not. I still don't know what they are.



The most exciting find for me was Mr and Mrs Anemoneshrimp (Periclimes brevicarpalis) living happily on a carpet anemone. With five black-ringed orange spots on the tail and purple-purple tinged legs and pincers, they are mostly transparent with some large white spots here and there. We see them more often on the Southern Shores, so it was a pleasant surprise to meet them on Changi.

We had a great time too, on the trips to some of the Southern shores. Lots of nudibranchs, slugs, flatworms. Of course, corals galore! More photos another time...

Casualty Lists for June 7-11 Series of Trips

No major casualties to report.

Minor casualty was due to overzealousness. A cameraperson had her hand stung pretty well by an anemone where a shrimp was hiding. On a normal guided walk, these anemones would be considered safe to touch. In this case, however, it is suspected that the anemone either thought the hand was dead material, food, or something irritating and to be stung and gotten rid of. The cameraperson, who specialises in extreme macro underwater shots produced very good shots, which we think were worth the pain, though next time, she will be instructed to wear gloves, or just stay the heck out of the anemones, which is what the other underwater cameraperson does.


Potential major casualty in the future due to this series of tips: Soundtrack to the stage musical: Les Miserables. Why? Ask Wai. (So sorry for that!) We were sitting around complaining of being tired, and one of us started saying,"One day more!" The song got stuck in our heads for the rest of the day. We also abused "A Little Fall of Rain", and are considering abusing "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables".

Many apologies to Messrs Boubil and Schonberg.

Wild Singapore and BWV at CTS

It was great to see so many volunteers at the bwv/wildsingapore booth at Celebrate the Seas this weekend. We spoke to many visitors about our local reefs, signed up a whole bunch of people interested in joining the BWV reefwalks, and sold many toys in BWV's fundraising effort. Even our "Play Our Game" game was a hit. All in all a very satisfying event. Maybe even as satisfying as it was tiring. :)

Casualty Lists for May 24-29 Series of Trips

Hmmmm........

As far as I can tell, there were no casualties this series other than the usual involuntary donations of blood. Also, although things like filters were dropped accidentally, nothing got damaged permanently.

Hence.... No casualties this series. Good job.