lekowala!

Sometime in 2006, I was looking for a seashore environment to bring students to study the intertidal zone. The Changi coast near the Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal was a nice choice but there were too many sandflies. So one day, I decided to go to Sentosa with my family. The reclaimed beaches just didn’t make it cos it was void of life… almost except for pesky sunbathers. I was there for about half an hour when Joshua needed to pee, so I brought him to the toilet in one of the areas in Sentosa. It happened to overlook a sandy/rocky seashore beach which happened to be exposed as the tide was low. That was the beginning of many visits to the area.

Beautiful Life

The tide was low and the waters just reached ankle height even when we waded far from shore… I was instantly brought back to my childhood days of beach exploration when my parents used to bring me to the beach and I would explore the rocky areas and look at the rock pools, fascinated by the creatures like hermit crabs and little fish that got trapped with the outgoing tide. Josh, Matt and I waded in the waters for about an hour or more. We met a carpet anemone, sea cucumbers, an octopus (would you imagine that!), a leaf porter crab. Every now and then Josh and Matt would be amazed at the little crab who would hide under a leaf… how curious it was.. and I was there to show it to them. We spent the remainder of the time chasing crabs, fast swimming flower crabs that darted about in the surprisingly clear waters… The kids’ amazement and wonderment were enough to make me satisfied. It was an enrichment class, or place-based learning experience, well call it what you will but we totally were in the flow (see “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csíkszentmihályi”)

Just some of the beauties at the beach area.

Naturally I was excited about this and decided that this would be the place to bring some students to experience it as a fieldtrip. After assessing the safety and planning and making sure that the students wouldn’t affect the environment, we went there and had our fieldtrip. We caught several creatures, displayed them in tanks and released them back to their habitats. The feedback was good and generally, most would not have experience that kind of environment here. A year later we brought another batch of students there and the same “magic” was felt. I had hoped to instil some kind of love for the environment and creatures in this students. This year, I have expanded the fieldtrip to an enrichment programme called the Biophilia Programme where students will propose and study the ecology of the site to assess biodiversity and ecology there with minimal impact.

However, the last field trip there last week left me with a heavy heart. Just a few hundred metres away, there was a big barge and major construction works. I guess for the resort world. Was this place going to be affected, will it totally go? Can the programme still continue… will Joshua and Matt see Mr Octopus? My heart sank further when I realised that the patch of halophila (or sea grass) that was verdant the year before had now been razed to the muddy substrate.. all the sea grass and sea weed was gone. Those seaweeds and seagrass were home to the octopus, the carpet anemone and the many leaf porter crabs my sons and I had discovered by flipping the the floating leaves. They were now gone. Naturally I am upset… depressed if you will. Even more so when I read this post by Rambling Leaf monkey… here.

This rich patch of halophila and seaweeds is now gone…

I can’t reconcile with the fact that the rocky shore habitats at Sentosa may be gone along with its denizens, the octopus, the curious leaf porter crabs, the many scurrying crabs, baby squids, the file fishes, the carpet anemone, the sea cucumbers will be gone… Will there be an Oceanarium there? Will it be part of the habitat destruction? Already underwaterworld puts me off with the lonely dugong and a gazillion fish swimming in what seems to be overcrowded tanks. Honestly, I think picking up some hermit crab along a rocky shore is more authentic. I can’t help but feel the greed of society impinging on God’s creation or mother nature, whatever floats your boat. Will Sentosa become more artificial again. I had hopes that all the rocky shores might be left unharmed and I hope that they will be, but the razed patch of seagrass has me thinking deep.

In this age of science, I would think that as Carl Sagan, puts it albeit a little righteously, that Science will be a candle in the dark. Its a demon-haunted world in a different sense today where biodiversity is concerned. Look at over-fishing, pollution, animal slaughter in the abbatoirs. No longer are people ignorant, they just turn a blind eye. I hope that this isn’t the case for the Sentosa management and that the people at Sentosa realise that the rocky shores are precious and hopefully, hopefully, any biodiversity surveys of the rocky shores there will be a candle in the dark for them…

Matt was smiling in his sleep one afternoon and Jen took this and sms’ed me. Its really calming and I must ask him what he was dreaming about…  Here’s another one of him kooning in a post exactly one year ago entitled Tidur

So, the other day we were at the East Coast Park beach playing with the sand when Josh picks up a “brain”, well a hard fruit the size of a lime that looks much like a brain. It took me a while before I did a double take and realised, my goodness, he had picked up a rare legume… the fruit of a member of the bean family.. That family of plants basically contains the peanut, soya beans, rain trees, in essence anything that has a pod, to be more accurate, a legume. the legume is a fruit that has 2 valves that will split along a line and reveal beans, which essentially are seeds. A pod is more layman and can be applied loosely to other fruits.

Anyway, what Josh had picked up was a rare native of Singapore called Cynometra ramiflora L. var. ramiflora, its an inhabitant of back mangroves, which basically means, somewhere behind the mangroves where the ground isn’t so muddy anymore and resembles more a a forest.

Why rare? When I revised the group for the Flora of Singapore, I listed it as “probably extinct”, following a previous status accorded to it by other botanists. After a few years, someone else spotted it along one of the offshore islands. So it was really great that Josh simply picked up the legume from the strand line along the east coast park beach.

Here’s Josh presenting the rare legume. He had inadvertently picked it up and brought it to the at first unappreciative local authority on the Caesalpinioid legumes of Singapore.

This is Matt contemplating the size of the fruit. Its hard and corky so definitely buoyant. I am not sure where it came from though but at least it is here.

I looked around the strand line for more of the fruit and found another. How serendipitous.

Here’s my botanical illustration of the species.

Counting the leaves of one of the branches of the big tree in SING bot gdns.  Recounting them as I had learnt in Chokher Bali.. by Tagore.  Its pure communication with the tree; I’d like to believe.

A camp out just by the sea at East Coast. A barbecue is one of the most fun things to do. You are just in the flow and turning the food over and over, placing it on the plate and then eating it. A must have on the grill is of course a large eggplant/ aubergine/ brinjal (Solanum melongena).  After it is nicely cooked over the charcoal, the tasty berry takes on the smoke of the charcoal and really is in a class of its own in terms of taste. Number 2 on the list would be sotong (can wikipedia “sotong”),   seasoned with just about any spice you can find and wrapped in tinfoil with a bunch of herbs… yummilicious.

This is then followed by setting up the tent, mats and a few candles lit on the sand and a kooning session under a Rhu tree, Casuarina equisetifolia, and the gentle sounds of the waves crashing nearby, staring into space, counting the stars, recounting them just to make sure the numbers are correct.

Here’s one ugly elasmobranch at Ocean Park in Hong Kong. Its teeth… yikes were all sticking out. “Sharks may have 3000 teeth at any one time”. And of course these teeth are just a simple modification of their placoid scales. Well I guess sharkey with its fierce dentition caught our eyes.

Another highlight was the Peak. Here’s the macs at the Peak… weather was nice about 15°C. And all the time were the raptors circling the vents.

Matthew is kooning until damn shiok one morning

On Sunday morning, went for a hike from MacRitchie to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve summit with Siva, Anand and Aaron from Berkeley who’s giving a talk on Museum Databases. We were discussing about how loud the forests in the region gets in the evening. I then remembered that insects in the forests were crepuscular.

The same evening, Jen and I went for a jog along the same HSBC trail in MacRitchie in the early evening. The night began to envelope the sky and we were halfway into the walk. We were inundated with a delightful din of insect and frog chorus as well as clouds of perfumes as we walked along the trees which were obviously vying for pollinator visits…

Everytime I go to the beach, and Changi beach in particular, I reminisce about my childhood days spent wandering around the shoreline and rocky shores turning over rocks and looking into the rock pools. My parents used to bring us there and because they were civil servants, got to book the chalets there.

There was a stay at a Punggol bungalow 20 yrs ago I remember vividly. The bungalow was situated right at the shoreline and at hightide the water would reach the walls of the elevated garden. All you had to do was walk down the stairs and you would be wading ankle deep in clear seawater for a long way off the shoreline. My dad taught me how to cast a net, catch crabs with a trap and my late cousin Anissa and I would wade around in search of Portunus pelagicus (flower crab) under a full moon.

My parents brought my elder sis and I to the beach quite often (Nat wasn’t born yet). One clear, sweltering afternoon, I saw 3 water-spouts dancing on the surface of the water and another afternoon, sailfish cut the surface with their dorsal fins. I got stung by jellyfish once when my dad decided he’d catch and bring one home in a pail… Of course there would be Curry by the Sea, complete with french loaves and hardboiled eggs.

The beach is an inexpensive place to go to but the time spent there is always special.