Me is a Hemingway cat!

Halo, me is Tootsie, one of Ria's three cats. Not wanting to lose out to other tech savvy cats (see here , here and here), me have decided to make my first post on the crew's blog. See how intelligent me is.....me waited for the crews to be out, with lovely Kimmy and silly Hades nowhere insight, me blog. **Hahaha....*cough*....me mean....Meowmeowmeow....they will never know me can blog** ;O)

So what shall me put on my first blog entry? *Think*.....okay, me shall blog about my uniqueness, my PAWS!

You see, me is a cat who has more than the usual number of toes on my paws compared to lovely Kimmy and silly Hades. And me just found out that me is called Hemingway cat from the current issue (April'07) of The National Geographic magazine. See me here on the left and the page from the magazine on the right. See my PAWS! It's the same as the cat on the page!



We are called Hemingway cat because of Ernest Hemingway's love for my kind of cats. There's also a term for my kind of abnormality, it is called polydactyl. Here's more information about Polydactyl cat.

Now...now...when will me get a chance to appear on a magazine? Meow(sigh).....guess for the time being, me can only get myself on the magazine like this;

Wild love on Sentosa's shores

Ron and friends were out on Sentosa today. We were joined with the Republic Poly sea cucumber team led by Amy, and also Teresa and Tia.


While the sea cucumber folks and Siti checked out echinoderms and seagrasses via the short cut, the rest of us took the 'adventurous and character building' longer route.


The tall cliffs and weird rock formations along this route were awesome. Chay Hoon christened the rocks 'Petra Pink'. Ley Kun waxed lyrical about them endlessly. Andy pointed out the rock pools that were full of amazing animals!

As we turned around the corner to the reef proper, we were astounded by the countless floating white specs on the water among the seagrasses of Sentosa. The white specks look like styrofoam and were sprinkled on the water all around us. Some gathered together in large flotillas.

The Tape seagrasses (Enhalus acoroides) were blooming like crazy!


The little white specs are the male pollen that float on the surface. The 'frilly portion' of the male pollen repels water while the opposite end is attracted to water. Chay Hoon demonstrated this with little pollen 'standing' up on her wet hand!


The female flowers, we observed, had water repellent petals (see the curvy water around the petals). The petals closed together when the flower is submerged. But when the flower peeked out of the waves, the petals floated upon the water surface to expose the innermost portion. Probably, only the innermost portion between the petals is NOT water repellant.

This must be how male meets female! Ah! Mystery of Seagrass Love finally explained.


The little male pollen are produced from bracts that appear at the base of the seagrass (left). While the female flower is held up on long stalks, to reach the water surface. When pollinated, the female flower turns into a large furry fruit (right).

Just when we thought we had seen it all, Siti calls us over to see a fruit that had just opened up to release its little seeds! Wow, I've never seen this before!!


Sentosa is of course more than just seagrasses. The reef flats have lots hard and soft corals.


Today for some reason, the coral rubble was colourful with all kinds of encrusting lifeforms.


The Republic Poly team will no doubt blog about the sea cucumbers they saw. While we await a more delicious and R(A) rendition of seagrass love by Budak on his blog.

It may not appear like much from a distance, surrounded by busy shipping and artificial beaches, but this little hidden shore on Sentosa is very much alive with natural marinelife.

We hope it will remain that way for all Singaporeans to enjoy.

Big hungry smelly snakes

Slithery, slippery and stinky was the theme of the last two evenings. I was out with Sijie and his fearless Snakehunting team at Pasir Ris. And WOW, did they find some really humungous snakes! And they were smelly too! I mean the snakes (which also made the some of the snakecatchers very stinky too, more on that later)


Here's the team from Tuesday (sorry, tall people got cropped out as it's hard to frame photos in the dark). They were in the midst of groping the big snake to see if it had eaten.


Shoop tries her hand at doing the 'snake massage' to check for dinner in the snake. Sijie's study requires only snakes that have been eaten. Sijie also shows team members how to tell the gender of the snake and other anatomical details. Of course I know snakes have things like a heart, lungs and stomach, but it's hard to imagine all that packed into the long, skinny, squirmy body.


And the team from Wednesday evening also caught a few BIG fat snakes! And Nor Aishah was back out in the field, fully recovered from the stingray incident with TeamSeagrass.


Some unusual behaviour observed include this snake attempting to eat an obviously dead and rotting fish head. Apparently, these snakes are not known to scavange.


More low-class behaviour was also observed. As one particular snake patiently went about trying to deal with its catch, another snake snuck up and tried to swallow the same fish from the other end!!


And here's one contented snake as it went about the serious business of swallowing its dinner. Although the fish looks too large for it, the snake managed to swallow the entire thing!! Whereupon, Sijie swooped down and promptly added the diner and dinner into his collection for study.


Snakehunters obviously don't read signs very well. But since we were out there at low tide, the warning doesn't quite apply. The rocks, however, were very slippery, and there were MANY rocks.


Shoop gently caught this really Big Mama who was calm and docile.

Later on, Shoop caught another Large Snake that did the propeller job and smeared Shoop thoroughly with stinky goo. Fortunately none of us were near her at the time of the incident. Shoop really smelt bad after that!

At the end of the trip, Shoop got cleaned up. Nevertheless, I sniffed Shoop very hard before I let her into the car. And still made Shoop sit on a poncho just in case. The stink of snake goop stays on forever if it gets onto upholstery. Alvin sat in the car in the next day and when asked, proclaimed that the car didn't smell any worse than it usually did. Hmmm...

Dickson also shared his adventures that night on his blue heaven blog.

The Snake team is out again this evening. But I've chickened out. But Dickson has again shared more about those doggies on his blue heaven blog

Glorious Hantu!

It was a gorgeous blue-sky afternoon and beachfleas and wildfilms were back on the shores! What a welcome change from the rather drippy and damp outing at St. John's the day before.


At first glance, the Hantu shore doesn't look very promising. With the industrial installations at Pulau Bukom in the background.


And work on the reclamation of Terumbu Bayan is ongoing.


The massive sea wall is steadily being built out of giant rocks and huge piles of sand.


But just around the corner, outside the seawall, the reef flats are teeming with life! Leathery corals weird and wonderful flop all over the coral rubble.


Sijie's sharp eyes spot a little drama, as a ribbon worm snags a shrimp much larger than itself! This seemingly harmless worm has a prehensile stinging proboscis that can paralyse its prey and grip it tight. The prey is then consumed whole...eeks. Within seconds, the shrimp stopped struggling and its eyes turned opaque. We didn't stay to watch the end of the gruesome scene.


We also startled a swimming crab chomping down on its freshly caught lunch. A rather large and pretty halfbeak! The fish was still alive!


The ground is thick with living animals. Everywhere, there are flowery carpets of tiny little colonial anemones of various colours and sizes.


A variety of corallimorphs also coat the rubble. They come in a dazzling variety of patterns and colours!


Soft and hard corals grow side by side.


Tiny little mushroom corals no bigger than a 20-cent coin cluster next to larger ones. Mushroom corals are hard corals that become free-living as adults. That is, they are not attached to the bottom and can actually move around, but slowly.


Here are two other kinds of mushroom corals. They are also commonly seen on Hantu's reefs.


A variety of colourful corals crowded the reef flats. All very much alive!


There was a request for a giant clam. And soon, we spotted one.


No trip is complete without the obligatory slug sightings. Among those seen were a phyllid (left) and the enchanting Glossodoris atromarginata (right) with its constantly rotating feathery gills.

Meanwhile, other team members spotted octopuses, a huge ball of baby eel-tail catfishes, more Giant reef worms, and anemone shrimps in the many large anemones on the reefs.

Chay Hoon (of course) found a frogfish which promptly became the star of the video shoot. In a supporting role were various little fishes that played the part of the frogfish's dinner. The little frogfish could really eat a lot! Other performers included a pair of octopuses quarreling over a hairy crab. Ron and Helen found a snake in the grass on the way back! See Ron's tidechaser blog for all the gory details!

What a fabulous day out at Hantu! Let's hope the reclamation off the island goes smoothly and things settle down so that this delightful reef can recover quickly.

Soft corals at St. John's

As another intrepid bunch of beachfleas headed out yesterday, the weather turned wet.

Regardless, we valiantly pushed on. Upon arrival at the jetty, Chay Hoon did a lucky draw of ponchos from the 'Gucci Bag' (our little bag used to prop up the video cam during field shoots, which is usually stuffed with old ponchos). She found enough ponchos for those who OBVIOUSLY did not read grumpy instructions about proper field preparations.

One unlucky person had to use the very beat up poncho that had long been downgraded to groundsheet because it was full of holes. It didn't smell too good either from being in a plastic bag for probably 2 seasons. Well, that's what you get for not bringing your own wet gear :-)

We had quite an international team with people from South Africa, France and the U.S. It's a pity Ron wasn't with us to guide them. He was instead having a great time guiding at Pulau Semakau, as we found out from his tidechaser blog.

A very soggy team headed out to check out St. John's shore, usually densely packed with corals. On this trip, we felt there was quite a bit more sand on the lagoon bottom than usual. And we noticed there was a landslide on the coastal area facing the lagoon.

I decided to focus on the softies as the water was a little too high to photograph the hard corals on the reef crest.


These tiny little corallimorphs encrust the coral rubble with their brightly coloured discs.


St. John's reef flat is festooned with all kinds of soft corals. Sometimes carpeting large areas of the bottom. These leathery soft corals come in bizarre shapes. Some like ruffly flat omelettes. Others remind of pink surgical gloves. Yet others like bunches of brown furry grapes.


They are living animals comprising tiny polyps that basically look like anemones, with a long body and a ring of minute tentacles. These polyps live together in a colony with a shared leathery tissue.


For some reason (possibly the continuous and annoying drizzle), there were LOTS of Giant reef worms (Eunice aphroditois) out and about. I saw four of them, each shooting disconcertingly out of their hidey holes to forage nearby. These very long and scary-looking worms are vegetarians. But they can give a nasty bite if they are disturbed.


With creepy tentacles and a gazillion little legs down the endless length of its body, it has a face that only a mother could love. But it does have a lovely irridescent body. It is identified by the white rings near its head.

Of course slugs were discovered, long black sea cucumbers considered, all kinds of hard corals pondered upon. Mr Budak found a squirmy worm eel! More about his encounters on this trip on his budak blog

Alas, the tide soon turned and we had to leave before it became really dark. So we didn't catch the night shift of octopus etcetra.

Morning tides are much more exciting, when the nightshift is out partying and the shores are at their best. Can't wait for them to start next month!