Cyrene Reef holds plenty of suprises though it is always under-explored. I believe more can be found in this rich biodiverse reef if we get to visit and document it more extensively. We are glad that Team Seagrass adopted to monitor the lush seagrasses in the reef.
Monitoring seagrass gets more fun each time I do it. Especially if you get to partner with Siti, the head of the Seagrassers, you can learn how to differentiate species properly though the juvenile of one species can look 99% like another species. This is a flower of the sickle seagrass (Thalassia hemprichii) that we found along the transect. Ria found a baby knobbly seastar directly in her quadrat. It's really cool to monitor the seagrass at Cyrene.
I chanced upon this prawn or shrimp stranded on the sandbar. It does look that it is cooked because it is red in colour. Haha, but it is still alive and kicking. This one is red maybe because to avoid being seen by predators since red is hard to make out in the dim. These kind of large shrimps are mostly scavengers while smaller ones feed on plankton and algae.
Another shrimp, this time found by Marcus. This snapping shrimp usually tells its presence by their clicking and snapping sounds rather by sight.
This is the first time I get so close with a juvenile long-spine sea urchins (Diadema setosum). This was found among the seagrasses. Can you see its orange rim on its anal cone. This fellow fascinates me by how it continually moves its inner spines, tinted blue in colour. If you see it, do not touch because its long slender spines are very delicate and can break off to cause extreme pain in the victim's flesh.
In hope to find the cushion seastar, I went to explore the reef edge, filled with lots of corals, soft and hard alike. The hard coral shown in this photo is Turbinaria Coral (Turbinaria sp.).
Close up of this Turbinaria Coral showing the individual polyps living together.
This anemone looking creature is not an anemone but a hard coral instead.
Other than the red egg crab, hairy crab sighted, I also spotted this cute swimming crab. They are predators that hunt speedy prey like fishes using their long pincers. You can also see that their eyes are widely apart. It is called a swimming crab because of its paddled-shaped swimming leg (not shown here).
Marcus with his sharp eyes spotted this pipefish (Family Syngathidae). It was hiding among the seagrasses, which they usually do in the day and usually come out at night. They are good camouflage animals, often mistaken as plants of twigs. They can use their elongated mouths to "suck" in small animals floating in the water.
Two seahorses were also spotted! A seahorse is not a horse, but a fish. Haha. They belong to the same family to the pipefish, as featured above. They are actually voracious carnivores sucking up tiny preys. This papa is actually pregnant.
More about this marvellous find at the Wildfilms blog and a video of how it swims at Colourful clouds blog.
All too soon, we had to leave before ending up to get trap with the rising tide that is going to reclaim back the exposed Cyrene Reef.
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