Two weeks after Chinese New Year, we are out on another evening tide to check out one of our favourite shores: Cyrene Reef!
Cyrene Reef is ringed by petrochemical plants on Jurong Island and Pulau
Bukom. It is also right next to the container terminals on Pasir
Panjang. Cyrene Reef has one of the best seagrass meadows in Singapore
and its seagrasses are home to lots of marine life!
Most of the time,we will be exploring the seagrass and sandy areas of Cyrene Reef as they are thick with critters. On a super low tide, we decided to dedicate a slot for Cyrene Reef to look at the reef edge. However, it coincided with the coral bleaching period and it became a survey to monitor the extent of bleaching.
Happy CNY Day 2 from one of our all time favourite shores, Cyrene Reef! Once again, we were blessed with relatively good weather (except for the drizzling at the beginning).
Happy Boxing Day! We are back at one of our most favourite shores, Cyrene Reef.
We are back at Cyrene Reef, one of our most favourite shores in Singapore!
On the first day of Chinese New Year, we were off to Cyrene Reef! It's been a while since we visited this favourite shore that is situated around Pulau Bukom, Pasir Panjang and Jurong Island. Our previous trip was in July 2014 where we had the "near-death" experience.
On 12 July 2014, we visited Cyrene Reef during predawn hours, starting the trip at 4am. Several marine critters that shy away from sunlight appear at these hours. Let the photos below do the talking for what we saw on this trip.
Our last Teamseagrass monitoring of the year was held on the first week of December at Cyrene Reef! Our December trips are more tricky because of the rainy season.
On 10 Aug 2013, I followed the Teamseagrass members to survey the seagrasses of Cyrene Reef on a morning trip! It was a good weather for us to do our transect for seagrass monitoring. We saw several interesting marine life along the way including rare anemone, blue dragon nudibranch, one pentaceraster sea star and of course lots of Knobbly sea stars!
The title for this blog post is a play of the two contrasting words: living and deadly. It was quite an adventure for us at Cyrene Reef yesterday because we first landed on a stormy and windy weather. Thank God the rain didn't really get to us though our geared-up ponchos were flapping incessantly with the strong wind.
It's our last predawn trip to Cyrene Reef this year and we were once again blown away by the diversity of marine organisms on this shore despite regular visits by the team for various purposes.
Two weeks ago, we went to Cyrene Reef on a predawn trip and set off from Marina @ Keppel Bay way before sunrise. I was quite excited on this trip because I have not visited this awesome shore since September last year.
Today is Teamseagrass monitoring day! We had a wet morning which settled down to drizzles. This allowed us to land at Cyrene Reef to conduct our regular monitoring surveys on seagrass.
We were fortunate that Dr Daphne, world expert on sea anemones, could join us on this trip and we went on an anemone hunt after finishing our seagrass transects.
I was happy to be able to find this weird-looking sea anemone which we have never seen before!
After a very long and tiring Saturday, I was glad to be rewarded with lots of wonderful sightings from Cyrene Reef on Sunday morning!
It is always a joy to visit Cyrene Reef because it is full of life!
It's time to be back at Cyrene Reef, one of my most favourite reefs to monitor the seagrasses.
Despite the dark clouds in the near distance, we continued to land on Cyrene. And along the way, we passed by the North Pandan buoy (Cyrene is actually called Terumbu Pandan).
Yesterday was our second trip to Cyrene Reef in the DARK! Yes, complete darkness. But our reefs are usually more alive at night because there is no scorching sun. Talk about the night is still young, these creatures love to party all night long.
This photo was taken when the sun was near the horizon towards the end of the trip. I like this scenic postcard shot of the knobbly sea stars against the dawn with the giant cranes of Pasir Panjang at the background.
I'm not talking about the unreachable stars high up in the sky but the sea stars (aka starfish) that can be found at our reefs. This morning was our first ever night (predawn) trip to Cyrene and it was also considered to be my extended birthday party with the marine life at one of my most favourite reefs in Singapore!
Of course, landscape shots can only be taken after sunrise. How many sea stars can you find in this photograph?
It's been half a year since my last visit to one of my most favourite reefs.... Cyrene Reef!
This morning, there were more people than usual as we have with us personnels from URA and NParks to explore this lovely shore with us.
After an afternoon of rain, we were once again blessed with good weather at Cyrene! This time for the last Teamseagrass monitoring of the year.
We were shorthanded so each of us has to do a single transect by ourselves. Nevertheless, all of us got the monitoring done, which is great. Here's Jocelyne working hard on her transect. It's hers and Kah Ming's first time to Cyrene as well.
