Not so low at Changi

Just came back from an evening trip at Changi with Chee Kong, Chun Fong and Mei Lin. Thank God the afternoon heavy rain stopped on time. However, somehow the rain could have increased the amount of water drained to the sea or there was a difference in pressure that led to a not so low tide at the shore today.

The tide table books says "Meterological conditions mainly caused by strong or prolonged winds or unusually high/low barometric pressure may cause differences between the predicted and the actual tides."

Despite the relative higher water level mark, we could still find marine animals! Which I am listing my sightings of the day below. Not going to describe too much though as I've decided to make this post a short and sweet one :-)


Beautiful cowries can be found if you take effort to look at the underside of rocks.


This is another smaller one. But please do flip back the rock to its original orientation or else other animals may dessicate to death.


More residents of the underneath of rocks include many many porcelain crabs.


And also this rock star or crown sea star.

At a more sandy-er substrate we can also find other great creatures.


Like this huge sand stars of another species.This one has a prominent orange line radiating from the central disk to each of its arm.


We also found a couple of these Gymnanthenea laevis or orange tipped sea stars.


This is a slightly bigger one found by Mei Lin.


And its pretty underside. Sea stars don't like to be upside down (so do we), so they quickly would want to turn themselves back.


There were also many brittlestars.


And the underside of the brittlestar that turned over faster than most sea stars.


Surprisingly, they were many of these green mussels. I noticed many mats of the Asian date mussels back on the shore.


I had an encounter with this bristleworm.


A closer look reveals their pretty iridescent colour.


Yet there's another type of worm, which has a tube.


This fan worm is beautiful and it comes in different shades of colours. However, it's pretty shy and will quickly hide back into its tube if you go closer.


It's good to see carpet anemones and also many many sand stars and crabs.


This anemone that hitches rides on snails was found again and I couldn't resist to take another photograph of it.


More anemones include this strawberry anemone.


And also this rather plain looking anemone.

How about sea cucumbers?


There are the ball sea cucumber where traditional Malay tonic called ‘Air Gamat’ is made from their body fluids which are collected and left to stand for several weeks. The tonic is a popular local remedy for faster healing of wounds and as a post-natal treatment.


Other than the usual thorny, warty, purplish sea cucumbers, there is also this one that seems to blend well with the sand.


At the end of the trip, we found this weird looking sea cucumber tha has white spots and yellow dots.

Looks like today's trip was not wasted though the tide wasn't ideally low. Glad to see my friends enjoying exploring at the seashore.