First visit to Berlayar shore

On a hot Sunday afternoon, I decided to have a first look at Berlayar shore beside Labrador Park.


This shore lies at the mouth of a river where many mangrove species lie upstream. Quite a fair bit has been exposed in this moderate low tide. At the other side of the bank is Keppel Club and a white colonial house.


Opposite is actually Sentosa! In fact, this shore lies right across Tanjong Rimau, Sentosa's natural living shores.


Similar to Sentosa, there are nice coastal landform at the Bukit Chermin side of the shore.

What can we find among the rocks and sandy/muddy shore here?


Adding to the colours of the shore will be many of these encrusting ascidians!


Among the rocks, especially underneath, are many Porcelain crabs (Petrolisthes sp.)!


And among the sandy part of the shore are juvenile swimming crabs (Family Portunidae) waving their claws to intimidate me.


There was also this Thunder crab (Myomenippe hardwickii) and several of its juvenile that I came across underneath rocks. These crabs are usually more commonly found in the north.


Overturning another rock made me discovered this pair of Hairy crabs (Family Pilumnidae). One of these crabs tried to hide when the rock was uncovered.


The carapace of a box crab was washed up, which suggests that these rare crabs can also be found here!


I simply love the patterns produced by this hermit crab.


Also adding to the colours of this shore are many sponges of both branching and encrusting lifeforms.


This shore has many adult sized Haddon's carpet anemones (Stichodactyla haddoni), which is a rarity in mainland shores.


I'm not too sure what bivalve this is. Is this an oyster?


Neither am I sure of what this thing is... hehe!


As a result of looking underneath rocks, I found many Ovum cowries (Cypraea ovum), including this pair.


There were many mudskippers all over the shore, though they were shy as usual... :)


The special finds of the day will be the FOUR dead Burrowing Giant Clam (Tridacna crocea) shells found on this shore (waves to Mei Lin hehe). This suggests that these clams were quite commonly found in the past. Does this shore still harbour living ones?

Another special find will be two juvenile Estuarine moray eels (Gymnothorax tile) found underneath rock. However, they swam very quickly to escape from my sight and I couldn't snap a photo of them.


Not ball sea cucumbers, but there are golf balls found on the shore, as a golf course is just beside.


It seems that work has began to build the boardwalk on Berlayar Creek. There were poles with tapes attached on top. Perhaps these are used to indicate the area of work in the site. Read more about this new boardwalk at Ria's wildshores blog. Hopefully the work will minimise its impact to the living shores and mangroves of Berlayar.

This trip is the first time I used my new camera, Sony TX5 on a field trip. Hope the photos turned out okay! In case you don't know, the flash of my Pentax W60 died. :P

More photos of the trip here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koksheng/archives/date-taken/2010/12/05/