Tuas (22 Dec 2011)

The last TeamSeagrass monitoring at Tuas and Sheryl is doing it alone!

Jerome and I were there to do a quick check of the shore, under threatening skies.

Well, it is that time of the year when lots of folks are clearing leave. Sheryl did a great job as usual with the monitoring. The seagrass patch is quite lush here! All Spoon seagrass (Halophila ovalis). Sheryl points out that there seems to be growths of brown seaweeds among them. But this is probably normal for this time of the year, when there's lots of seaweed bloom on many of our shores with the flush of nutrients during the monsoon period.

The tide wasn't very low but I could see that the Halimeda seaweed (Halimeda sp.) zone in the mostly sandy shores are still there. Settled among them were lots of sea cucumbers and Haddon's carpet anemones. The soft corals, sea fans and other reefy creatures were still out there in deeper water.

One good thing we realised from this trip is that it is possible to monitor seagrasses here at moderate low tide. This opens up more windows for monitoring, which will be helpful as next year there are so few very low tides during daylight.

Sheryl and her team of volunteers at Merck have been stalwarts at looking after this shore. I look forward to another great year of seagrass monitoring at Tuas!

I took the opportunity to take a closer look at some of the soft corals found on this shore. More about these on the wild shores of singapore blog.