Changi surprises me again

After a rainy weekend, here comes Monday which is also the bluey day for many. Grace, my brother and I were at Changi an hour before sunrise to catch the last -0.2m tide that exposes the intertidal flat. And many interesting finds await (which is impossible for me to put all the stuffs, thus picked the nicer and more interesting ones).

I bet many of you are sleeping while we were having fun in the shores.

Changi beach is where you can find the bests of the colorful anemones, especially peacock anemones. Picture speaks a thousand words. (Click for a bigger view)

Poor sea pencil gets stomped on I suppose, looking just how a wooden pencil gets snapped and bent. Posted this because I really like how the polyps come out of the main body in water.

[Ria kindly suggested: The sea pencil didn't get stomped I think. There is a stiff inner portion and when the animal retracts into the ground, I think the top part of the body flops over. I see this with other kinds of sea pens as well as the sea pencil.]

And the find of the day... A seahorse! My first time seeing it alive in the wild. Its tail is rolled around the sea pencil, getting a strong anchorage from the crashing waves.

This geographical seahare was huge but it had a shell like thing within its body on the left. Is that a parasite or what? Hope it's doing well.

Saw several sea pens too. Don't they look like a pen with feathers on top?

Something that bewildered me is this stick like thingy on the shore. It looks like a wooden satay type stick on the ground with greyish animal like thing growing around it. Any ideas? Update- Ria thinks its a seapen.

My first encounter with a snapping shrimp. These are the fellow that create the snaps and clicks when you visit a shore.

This octopus was retreating into its hole upon finding out we came near. Can you see the jet of water it released? Interesting!

Sponges everywhere in different colors!

Piece of "egg-capsules art" that the Spiral melongena created.

[Update from Ria: The pink egg cases are probably by Muricids (drills).]

How they lay eggs on bottles can be quite creative. Suppose they ain't that boring right?

Here are the set of the echinoderms! The first and last photos are the brittlestars. The 2nd one on top right is the biscuit seastar while the bottom left is the astropecten sp. type of sand star.

Capturing the moment of joy for Grace.

Another of my first is this hairy seahare. They are really hairy and eject purple fluid upon disturbance.

The other wow find other than the seahorse was this sea slug (Armina babai). Wildfilms also found them in Changi before. Cool!

What a great find to sight the collar kingfisher.

The grey heron looks like a common inhabitant of the northern shore. Great!

This changeable lizard was rather photogenic!

Before leaving the shores, one more photo on homosapiens. Haha.

These parakeets are residents of Changi village, adding melody and favour to the rustic place.Today was really a wonderful time.

Thank God again for surprising good weather despite negative forecasts and lightning seen last night. We have seen quite a lot of creatures. Some of which that are not mentioned above are the snails, ball sea cucumbers, sea fans, colonial tunicates, moult of horseshoe crab, crabs of several sorts, cuttlefish bone, mudskipper, zoathids, worms carpet anemones, onchs, hermit crabs etc.