On the 06 of Jun 2008, I went to Tuas Teamseagrass monitoring. Had not been on this shore for more than half a year. Seems like there are some changes to this shore. I remembered during the previous monitoring (about Dec 2007), the seagrass (spoon seagrass) were smaller and less dense. This time round they were bigger and seems to occupy a slightly bigger area. However most of these "big and fat" fellows were at the other side of the monitoring side.
There were 11 members for the day and most of them had experience with the monitoring thus I "abandoned" them to do the job while I went towards the beacon to look for interesting stuff to show them after their monitoring. The species of seagrass that one would find in Tuas is the spoon seagrass (Halophilia ovalis). Thus it was pretty easy and most of the members took a very short moment to finish their job and very soon they were joining me at Merawang Beacon.
The first thing that caught the interest of one of the participants was this pinky thing among the sponges. It seems to be a sea cucumber but I am not sure. There were about 3-5 of them each about 10cm long.
There were lots of seafans and hydroids at this shores. The seafans looked like underwater flowers due to their colors and structures. While the participants were amazed by the display of this underwater garden, they were told to avoid contact with the hydroids and not to brush their naked legs by the hydroids as some of them where wearing shorts. This was because hydroids is similar to jellyfish, they belong to the Phylum Cnidaria. They would give you a nasty sting for days if you touch them. Thus we should try to avoid touching them and coming in contact with them by wearing long pants.
Time was short, very soon all of us had to go back to work. As we were proceeding back, afew of us saw a stingray, a number of filefish and this cute little boxfish.
Tuas's shoreline is really interesting and full of wonderful sea creatures. Hope we can protect the shores around us and educate the public that side effect of poaching and how we can preserve what we have now for our future generation.
