Seeking Serpents at Sungei Buloh

Twas time for the monthly snake hunt at Buloh with Chee Kong!

Wai and I eagerly looked forward to more snaky encounters of the numerous kind.

Plunging into the mud (only Master Chee Kong walks on mud. Us mere mortals get it up to our necks), we searched....

There were plenty of Telescopium snails (Telescopium telescopium). A closer look revealed they were busily doing funky things! Poking siphons where they aren't ordinarily poked. In pairs, threesomes, foursomes and more. It was quite a snail party on the mudflats. There were some alone, doing stuff to stones. Laying eggs?


I was just remarking to Wai that we haven't bumped into flatworms in mangroves. Then there at our feet, another party! Upside down, you can see their branched digestive systems, all pretty in pink and purple. Were they Limnostylochus sp.?


And LOTS of worms too. Handsome bristely bristleworms. Really flat red ribbon worms. This one had openings at one end. Releasing eggs? A wound? So many questions.


But the one question on our minds was: "Where are all the snakes?!"

We went to Snake City no. 1 where we used to haul them out by the bagfuls. None to be seen. We went to Snake City no. 2, also not much action. Wai doggedly stalked one hiding in a hole, finally talking it out of hiding. Only Chee Kong seemed to be having much luck. Possibly it's that ability to levitate over mud that we wonder about, as we trudge along behind him.

We did get to see one snake in action.

Wai shot great footage of him snatching a fish. We could see the fish moving down the snake after it got swallowed! After dispatching the first fish, the snake immediately snatched another one!


As we limped back last night, our bags and our thirst for snakes unfilled, we chanced upon a nightjar.

This bird nests on the ground and is usually perfectly camouflaged against the fallen leaves. As the nightjar flew off, where it was sitting was a single perfect little egg!


Perhaps next month, Wai and I will have better luck with the snakes...

Hauntingly Beautiful Hantu: what is it's fate?

Stunning reefs and shores surround Pulau Hantu!

It is often believed that there is nothing much on Palau Hantu because of the large industrial complexes nearby.

But you only need to take a closer look to be amazed!

Our Sunday trip to Hantu was spectacular, as always (despite the Close Encounter of the Stonefish kind).

The shores are alive with colourful anemones, big and small...

And corals of all kinds of shapes and colours...

Inside Pulau Hantu's swimming lagoon there are seagrasses and hard corals. Providing shelter and food for all kinds of creatures.


The swimming lagoon even has giant clams!


Unfortunately, the water is generally rather murky. But just because you can't see it doesn't mean there's nothing there.

Take a closer look, you'll find fascinating creatures such as razorfishes. These were literally hanging about in the swimming lagoon. We also saw them on our last trip three weeks ago. Young razorfishes settle among the long spines of the black Diadema sea urchin. We were joking that perhaps these guys fell asleep and their sea urchin snuck away. The fishes sure looked blur and confused. But I guess you would too, if you spent all your time with your head down.


As work is expected to start soon on the Pulau Ular reclamation project very nearby,
we hope the rich shores of Pulau Hantu will not be permanently harmed.

More about the Pulau Ular reclamation project on Debby's Hantu blog.
Shell to reclaim land around Pulau Ular 3 Jun 2005
Crack this.12 Jun 2005
Parliament Report (full text): "Land reclamation at Pulau Ular" 20 Jul 2005
Harm to marine life to be minimised - Minister of State (Trade and Industry) Heng Chee How Parliament Shorts. Straits Times, 21 Jul 2005.
No Shell involvement 28 Jul 2005
Call to view the marine EIA for proposed reclamation works at Pulau Ular 3 Aug 2005

More about just how amazing our wild reefs:
in Jani's tribute to Singapore coral reefs on her Blue Tempeh blog
and Danwei's appendix to the tribute to on the Reefwalk blog.

When You Are Down On Your Luck... Keep a Lookout for Stonefish!

It was a hot and lazy afternoon. I was having a nap on the bus on my way to West Coast Pier, when I suddenly woke up as I realised that the bus hadn't really been moving much for quite a while.

Alamak! Traffic jam. On a Sunday afternoon some more???

10 min crawled by...

Well, this jam couldn't last forever... I still had a bit of time...

20 min... and I felt like I'd spent 20 years on the bus.

As the snail bus finally reached the next bus stop, I decided it's either now or never, and jumped down the bus before I had to spend the rest of my life on it.

I had to walk all the way from Beach Road to Funan Centre before I could find a taxi stand without too many people. I guessed many of the bus passengers did what I did - alighted from the bus to take cab instead.

I finally reached West Coast Pier and found Chay Hoon there already, and I started complaining to her about the taffic jam. After a while, Ria and Alvin also reached, and we found out that Alvin had left his monopod on the bus!

Ok. Seems like 2 of the members here were experiencing bad luck. I jokingly told Chay Hoon and Ria that with the bad luck we were having, we better kept our eyes open for stonefish. Darwin also arrived in a while and we set off for Hantu.

It was a good day, clear and bright. Chay Hoon saw a batfish, but it got away. Perhaps because of the heat, we didn't really managed find much things, only a little chromodoris which Chay Hoon found. But little did we know that nature has its own little ways of saving the best for the last...

When the tide was coming in, we decided to call it a day, and I had totally forgotten about the stonefish joke I made earlier. We started heading back to the beach, and suddenly, I heard Alvin shouting something that sounded like gibberish to me. Wind a bit strong, so I can't really hear what he shouted despite the fact that he was only like 10m in front of me.

I walked towards him, and he said it again. This time round, I caught the word "stonefish".

And yes indeed, lying down there right in front of Alvin on the mudflat was a stonefish! How close! Good thing he managed to spot it, and didn't step onto it!

It's really kind of hard to spot the stonefish (Synanceia horrida) when it was just sitting there on the mudflat. I'll run a little test here.

Which of the below picture shows a stonefish?







If you have guessed the first or the third one, please check this out to find out how to differentiate between a stone and a stonefish. If you've guessed the one in the middle, then you've got the right one!

And here's a close up of the business end of the stonefish...



The stonefish was so lazy that it didn't even bother to flip over when it was placed in the pool of water underside up!



Anyway, it seems like we've used up all our bad luck, and no one got hurt during this close encounter :)

However, not everyone who encountered the stonefish got off lucky. Read what happened to Robin a few years back here.

Ria also had a bad encounter with another fish, the stingray, last year. Read about it here.

I guess all these again remind us to be extra carefull when we are out there exploring!

WildVlog to come

***This is an example of a vlog and a virgin foray into vlogdom. I’m planning to set up a affiliated video blog with dedicated servers (Thanks Ria for the dough!). Hopefully the shitty resolution will be solved, and ill have it up and running by May. Then we can tinker around with the vids and see how the networld reacts. This way we can do trial and error as well as teaser build-up to the WildFilms documentary to come, when it finally gets done. Sorry but as ive said i can't upload the pics, the damn blog hates me. I'll pass the photos to Ria so she can upload it. Do comment if my facts are wrong!!***


I had an eventful outing to sisters today. And possibly because i havent been in trips for so long my stupoks resistance is shit. 1st thing i find out is:
*err. where are my booties?*
*probly entertaining the basecamp cats while we speak*
Sigh. So we get there, and im all aquiver, praying to the stone fish gods and stingray deities for protection.

1st shot was of a hermie trying to take over a bigger shell, what with it probing and poking, but the resident isnt giving up withoug a fight! or at least a long wait. The hermie in the white shell was just snuckered in and resisting the seige.




Well it wasnt too bad afterwards. After a few random shots, i perched myself on a rock for over half an hour to get this:



The ocky was oblivious of my presence and began actively hunting a school of fishies.



And then it swam right towards my perch. Note its colour change as it passes different media – crypsis. These guys have chromatophores wired directly to their big brain so all this is done consciously. Note also how they move – quick swim to a rock and mimic the rock, then push off again to another rock. This way it’s harder for predators to notice or track it.



And the ocky finally catches something! Upon sighting prey, ockies usually jets up to its prey and envelops it in its web. This confuses the prey and prevents its escape. The ocky’s hard chitinous beak then bites into the prey and injects a mild venom to paralyse it. It then gets consumed, and the ocky moves on!

[CRAB PIC]

Snack for ockies.

Then, on to flatworms!

Here’s a really tiny tootsie one – 1cm! Only Chayhoon with her wondereyes could have spotted it!

[FLATWORM PIC]

A marine flatworm, after being irritated by me, tries to swim away, then goes back to crawling. Note how thin it is – you can practically see the gravel through it! Not too sure what species it is, could anyone help?



Off the shallows to the other lagoon; here were some corals, soft and hard:

[CORAL PICS]

(This sucks but my coralology isn’t that good. Ill be able to give a better commentatory once I go through some basic coral books =P)

[FEATHERDUSTER PIC]

And I found this beautiful featherduster worm swaying in the current. These guys are polychaete worms, which means ‘many-bristled’. There are many kinds opf polychaetes, from errant predators to sessile feeders like this one. What you see are appendages they use to filter the water and drag tiny stuff to eat. Once disturbed, they quickly withdraw their ‘featherdusters’ from harm.

Then on to the beach, where I passed by ghost-crab central:

[CRABTRACKS PIC]

Note all the crabprints around, made by ghost crabs. These guys live further inland, and are quite big. Not too sure about their habits, but it should be scavenger-predator.

[MONKEYPRINT PIC]

I also saw evidence for an abduction. See the scuffle and monkeyprints? There are macaques on the island, and these guys are known to eat crabs. This hapless crab was almost home when a monkey must have plucked it up for a quick snack.

And that was all the time we had. After a quick breakfast we hopped back on the ferry for the big island.

And coming back home, stupoks hits again while in the car:

Ria in driver’s seat: *brings hand behind to reach for seatbelt and asks for assistance*
Yc in backseat: *shakes Ria’s hand*

Idiocy to the core. I need more sleep.

- Yc out

of puppet masters and vampires

Justto fill up empty space and waste precious time...

I was surfing the vast reaches of internet space when i came across these two juicy bits of grossity, bug-style. The first one's featured in Carl Zimmer's The Loom, by the way.

So one walks along the garden on a fine summer day, sniffing flowers and watching the butterflies flutter. Suddenly a wasp, beautiful and glimmering in the sun, zooms to you and hovers just in front of your face, as if scrutinizing you, then buzzes off to some other busy errand. Its called Ampulex compressa, and it has a deadly agenda.

A large number of wasps are predatory, and most hunt for caterpillars or spiders to feed their young.

Most just paralyse their prey and drag it down a burrow and lay eggs on them. This one takes it a step further. Because the roach is too big for it to drag, it evolved a wholly new way to get its prey into its nest of doom.

It first jabs its stinger down a cockroach in the midsection.

This makes the roach's front legs buckle, allowing the wasp to leisurely snake its stinger now INTO the roach's brain and inject another neurotoxin, taking down its escape response, and susceptible to control.
Next, the wasp climbs atop the roach, and guides the doomed roach by its antennaes into a ready dug burrow.She lays an egg on the zombiefied roach. It does not resist, fight or flee.
The egg hatches.
The Larvae enters roach.
The larvae munches roach innards.
The larvae pupates inside roach.
And the zombiefied roach remains vividly alive and aware all this while.
And finally, from the midsection, in classic ALIENS style, the chestburster emerges and begins another lifecycle of eating, mating and making zombies out of roaches.So the next time you step on a roach, consider it an act of mercy. Better instantaneous squish than long slow vivid death.


On the other hand, a further relative of the wasp, the ant, has another creepy species up its sleeves. Dubbed the "Dracula Ant", adults will catch and chew on their young larvae until they bleed, and feed on the hemolymph (insect blood) that leaks out. They feed soley on this blood (cant take on solid foods), and usually take enough to sustain themselves without killing their young.
Well, usually.
The young larvae feed like normal ants on solid food brought back by the adults (ie paralysed prey, much like how wasps do it), and have been observed to run and hide when they sense an adult entering their chamber. No, i wouldnt want to be in that family.

well, that's it for today's creature feature!

-YC out