Starry honeymoon at Cyrene

We had our ever first wedding couple having honeymoon at Cyrene Reef today!


Of course the couple is NOT this pair of flower crabs mating on the shore. =_=


The wedding couple is Shufen and Kevin and they are getting married this weekend. Despite this, they are still needed at TeamSeagrass today. Haha.

Thanks to Andy and Nor Aishah, we had a cake and drinks on the boat to celebrate the wedding of the loving couple.


Of course everyone had a great time eating the interesting banana chocolate cake. Of course we had to get down to the main task, which is to monitor seagrasses!


It was my first time meeting Jac from Nparks and it was her first time doing seagrass monitoring and also first time visiting Cyrene Reef. Throughout the course of monitoring, we saw many knobbly sea stars on the seagrass meadow and they even came within our quadrat.

After our finishing our transect, we had some time left to explore this reef that always have somewhere new that we have not properly looked into.


I went to check out the reef area and saw a number of hard corals.


A closer look at this faviid hard coral reveals many individual coral polyps. Each polyp is an animal, so can you imagine how many animals are there in each coral colony.


There are also nudibranchs on the reef like this blue dragon nudibranch that look more purplish than blue.


I also saw this stonefish sea cucumber.


And this cute pair of black-lipped conch.


This part of the reef has plenty of soft corals of different sorts.


Consisting of the flowery soft coral (left) and the leathery soft coral (right).


What surprised me was that I saw a glimpse of a cushion-star looking motif underneath the leathery soft coral. I took a closer look and found out that indeed it's a juvenile cushion star.


That's a real treat as cushion stars are very pretty, this one has yellow and black coloration and pattern on its aboral surface. They are different from other sea stars because they don't have arms when they grow older. This is probably to prevent predators from having a good grip of the cushion star to eat on.

Indeed today is a starry day for the wedding celebration! There were more stars encountered!


Even the flowery soft corals have stars!! You might easily dismiss the flowery soft coral have threads of carrot on top.


Thanks to Chay Hoon's keen eyes, we get to know that these are actually tiny weeny brittle stars that are completely orange in colour. There are a lot of them at this particular flowery soft coral. Why? Hmm...


A closer look of this orange brittle star reveals some kind of rings on its arms. I have never seen this brittle star before. How interesting!


Of course, there are plenty of common sea stars on Cyrene, and this one is slightly special, with six arms.


Cyrene is also full of juvenile knobbly sea stars! Every few steps you take on the seagrass meadows will be encountered with different knobbly stars.


I like this pair of knobbly sea stars that are beige and orange in colour.

I was also looking out for this Pentaceraster-looking star that was last seen in the August's seagrass monitoring trip.


My wish was granted when Robin called me over. He found the exactly looking ambiguous sea star that we do not know exactly what it is. We could only predict it might be a cross between a knobbly sea star and a Pentaceraster sea star.


As Chee Kong, the Star Tracker expert advised, he told us that knobblies tend not to have the spines at the tip of their arms like this one. So probably this is not a true blue knobbly sea star.

I thought today was already so star studded enough to call it a day! Until a short while later, Hannah called Chee Kong and I over and they said they found yet another similar looking star.


A look at the sea star they found revealed a star that indeed looks very similar to Pentaceraster mammilatus, the first record that we found in May. Wow!


What was most attractive is the super orange-red madreporite.


The underside was also very pretty with red and purplish coloration.


The tips of their arms also have spines similar to the ambiguous star earlier on.

Earlier on, a Pentaceraster looking sea star was also discovered at Semakau and it also has a orange-red madreporite though it does not look exactly the same. Haha. How I wish I have the skills and knowledge to identify all these wonderful new starry creatures.


The guys later went on to arrange the three different looking sea stars though for a good comparison.


Towards the end of the trip, Robin found yet another weird looking blondie sea star.

What a great starry day we had!


Last but not least, there are many of this soldier crabs scurrying over the sand bar which amazes me. They are not common in many shores anymore due to habitat degradation.


The trip will not be complete without the adventure to leap onto the No problem boat that provides for our amphibious landings. It was quite a wild and wet adventure with the crashing waves and the high platform to step on to get into the boat. Very fun also.

That's the last Cyrene trip for the year 2008, be back in 2009. And all the very best wishes to the newly wed couple!

Exploring Southern Semakau

In continuation of my old post on "Exploring Northern Semakau" which was during May, finally I got a chance today to explore the southern part of Semakau intertidal area since the place is HUGE. We were there with the Semakau book team.


Unfortunately, the weather did not look promising at all from the northern direction.


At this southwest part, the mangroves looks matured, different from the replanted juvenile ones at the eastern side.


There are rocky areas where you can find many onchidiums.


These onchidiums have tough skin to reduce water loss. Onch slugs graze on algae and lichen on rocks at low tide. They are more commonly seen on cool mornings or evenings. Perhaps today is cooling due to the imminent rain, thus we saw a lot of these slugs.


In between rocks, I got a surprise to see water squirting out. A closer look reveals an octopus inside!


There are also cryptic stars (Cryptasterina sp.) found. The aboral surface shows the mottled yet variable colouration.


The underside is not as cryptic but with many bumps on this oral surface which is probably important to cling onto rocks.


Found another cryptic star that is more reddish.


I like it that the stomach of cryptic stars is blue, which is quite special in my opinion.

More about the cryptic stars here.


What was interesting is that we saw many Stichodactyla gigantea anemones near or at roots of mangrove roots. How nice to know if there are nemos swimming at the mangroves during high tide!


Near the silty and sandy part on the extreme south, there are flatworms found including this commonly sighted one with yellow dots on its black body.


A special find there is this beautiful brownish black flatworm with white dot patterns on its body. I have not seen it before!


Flatworms can swim and they do it very gracefully don't you think so? Pretty right!


There are also many common sea stars found in this area, in different sizes.


Walking towards the seagrass meadow, there are more carpet anemones with nemos and this nemo here is a baby nemo. It's so small and not as shy as adult nemos, thus I can take a photograph of it. It looks photogenic in this photo and don't you think it is smiling? Hahaha.


Semakau is also rich in noble volute snail.


I later saw another large one with pattern and smooth shell.


On the seagrass meadow are also juvenile knobbly sea stars which we found two today, one by Marcus, one by Mei Lin! Can't wait for them to grow up?


Here's the adult one to show you. I found this at the coral rubble area. Too bad, no weirder stars were found today as the tide was higher than usual, possibly due to the barometric pressure affected by the rain that can affect the tides.


Also at the coral rubble area, I found many of these sunflower mushroom coral together.


Mei Lin found quite a nice find of two pipefishes, one in black (quite obvious in this photo) and the other in white (can you see?).


Off in a distance is another oil rig, in fact the waters nearby seems to be usually allocated for oil rig repair.


Going back to the high shore as the tide returns quickly, I saw this seashore pandan.


The fruits look very much like pineapples. Cool right?

Hahaha. Though the rain hit us for more than half of today's trip, we were quite resilient and tough, unwilling to surrender to bad weather. Took out all the rain gear like umbrella and poncho to explore the area. Was nice in overall! Be back at Semakau on Saturday for Team Seagrass monitoring!

The adorable cats from St John

At the terrestrial side of St John Island, not only there are peacocks that display their stunning plumage, there are also many adorable cats that will approach passerbys in the morning or evening for food.

And there are quite a number and variety of them living on this island. To me, their appearance is more of a greeting rather than a pursuit of cat food, maybe due to the fact that I am not the one that buy cat food for them. Haha... nevertheless they are really cute!


It's quite heart melting to see cats that are affectionate to each other!

Below are the different cats you can find at St John and there are even more, just that I didn't take their photograph.











The more popular cats, in my opinion, include this one below called Becks.


So who is Becks running to?


Yes, to Jani! Jani is a cat lover who really adores Becks because Becks is tame and doesn't run away from human when we get too close to them.


Becks is really sporting and enjoys the company of Jani carrying like a baby.


Even Yujie couldn't resist hugging Becks! Who says Becks is not popular? Haha.

As for me, my favourite cat is...


this kitten, whom I named as the leopard cat due to its black stripes on the body. It's really very cute but is ultra shy as well! Only when you feed this kitten then you will get a chance to sayang this cat. Otherwise, it will run away from you getting too close.


We also saw this just borned black kitten hiding below the tree trunk. It has very short hairs!


A closer look at this kitten reveals its blue eyes! How cute. :-)

White Peacock at St John

As mentioned in my earlier post, there are peacocks in St John Island. There are the normal colourful one and also the white peacock. The white peacock is not an albino but their pigment is due to a colour mutation. I have no idea where does the ones in St John come from. Haha.

This morning, I had a close encounter with the white peacock. For my first time, I finally get to see it open up its plumage.


It is stunning! And the peacock was very cooperative, it did not run away from me.


Instead, this handsome peacock turn one big round for me to take photographs with different angles, just like a professional model!


And a wonderful frontal shot.


Soon, the peacock sort of knew I had taken enough shots and started closing up its plumage.


Hope to capture the beautiful normal peacock the next time! :-)