Return of common sea star

Photo taken by Ron Yeo on 25 November 2007.

Elated to find out that common sea star (Archaster typicus) has returned to Chek Jawa. They were missing since the mass death early this January.

Read more about Ron's account at his "A Rainy Day at Chek Jawa" post from The Tide Chaser blog.

A little more about these creatures fom Ria's Wildsingapore online Chek Jawa guide page and also at this gallery.

Now for the exciting part, will there be any changes to the huge mussel bed population after the sea star's return?

Getting wet and out of time

A day after our monitoring session, I was out with the Team Seagrass gang to Chek Jawa again. And this time, I did not intend to help them with the monitoring as kindly approved by Siti, but decided to tie up any loose ends, do up unfinished work from previous days, redo some wrong stuffs, and many more housekeeping work.

Everytime when I want to do housekeeping work like checking out my points and tidying up my transect start and end points and also anemone markers, something will crop up. Unfortunately, this time either. Was happy when I set off on a sunny weather, but only to realize dark clouds over Changi and Ubin before we we set off. On the bumboat ride, rain poured like nobody's business and we were waiting at the jetty for a hour before we could finally reach Chek Jawa.

Thinking the rain's over, we all cheerfully started work. Yet again, I saw another dark cloud patch looming from Johor, now with more thunder and lightning. And what happened next was another hour plus of rain and getting trapped in poncho standing in Chek Jawa, unable to do any work. So I ended up doing a bit of seagrass monitoring with Ria. Wow, waterproof datasheet works wonders. Will try to get them for December rainy season's trips.


And finally, after the long long wait for the rain to be over, I was only left with less than 45mins to complete 3 hour plus of job. All the stress made me having to run all over the place again. Thank God that Sijie, Gaytri, Marcus and Jerald volunteered to help me out.

Above: Photo of Chek Jawa after rain.


Another photo of Chek Jawa after a rain. Leads me to think of the pre-mortality scenario where rain kept pouring down nonsense and if it coincides with a series of low spring tides, salinity will be much lower than usual, affecting the osmoregulatory systems of the marine creatures.


I had to really go and only had time to re-monitor a couple of carpet anemones to check for errors.


Close-up of these squares that were positioned for future counting of tentacles.

Sijie was kind to climb up the Jejawi tower to take a panoramic photo for October. Below are a series of photographs taken from July to October for comparison of any major changes.


Above: Taken on 15th July 2007.

Above: Taken on 16th August 2007.

Above: Taken on 28th October 2007.

One thing that is obvious from a quick scan and comparison of these three photographs chronologically will be the increase of algae cover over Chek Jawa from July to October, which is most likely due to algae bloom season.