Sentosa (12 Jan 09)

Hello to everyone... I'm new to Team Seagrass although I have been blogging about some of my fieldtrips on my personal blog: Psychedelic Nature. So I apologised for not having many photos of the seagrass this time!

My second seagrass monitoring site was at Sentosa. This area is mainly rocky and harbours several other habitats, including seagrass patch. I learnt that we are monitoring this seagrass bed for a good reason: to see if there would be an eventual habitat shift with new niches. So it's very important for us to do the monitoring here regularly. The two main seagrasses observed at Sentosa were Spoon seagrasses (Halophila ovalis) and Tape seagrasses (Enhalus acoroides).

When we first arrived, the tides were not low at all! We had to wait for another hour or so before the tide receded a little for us to tread through the murky waters. The seagrass beds are mainly found on the sandy areas, which is also our main monitoring site. I noticed that some seagrass patches could be found further down the coral rubble area too.

The epi-cover on the tape seagrass seemed much higher than those I have seen at Chek Jawa. Check out this photo with a soft coral and some tape seagrass beside it. Most of the upper parts of the leaf blade is covered with almost 80% epiphytes.

It was a random sampling of transects and I had paired up with Jocelyn and Travis to finish our task. After that, it was some exploration. Some animals that were spotted - Blue spotted ray, Giant reef worm, Red egg crab, Hairy crab, Sea Spiders. I did up a short post on Sentosa on my blog too.

It was a nice and cosy trip with a small group of us. Thanks to all who came even though it was a working or schooling weekday: Jocelyn, Timothy, and Siti's sister. Special thanks to Travis, a shore visitor who lent a helping hand to both Jocelyn and I during our monitoring. And special thanks to Siti who guided us throughout the monitoring.