Chek Jawa survived the monsoon period

On 22nd January 2008, many friends and I returned to Chek Jawa for a monitoring health check. First thing we can all happily declare (at least for now), Chek Jawa has survived the monsoon period. There was no mass death occurence.

This time, I had the honour to bring with us a team of three mediacorp personnel: namely the producer, soundman and the funny cameraman to share with the TV audience in near future about Chek Jawa, our work there, and a little more on myself.

That also means I had to also leave most of the people to do the monitoring tasks as I tried my best to share with the TV crew the facts and stories throughout the trip. Interestingly, I chanced upon a marine professor, Prof Chris Todd, from University of St Andrews. Went to approach him to check whether he had a permit to get down to the flat and I slowly understood he is doing marine work and writing an intertidal book. Exchanged contacts before he left.

During my time away with the crew, I am glad to have several trusty people that did their job well. Ria the carpet anemone head with her team-mates: Sam and Wei Ching. They did the checks for the remaining less than 20 carpet anemones as more and more went missing over the months. They are able to uproot themselves and move with the current so either they died or they migrated.

Ron, July and Alicia are those who worked on monitoring peacock anemones where we went back to the five 10x10m fixed quadrats to search for them and do measurements. We also have the intrepid and longsuffering team doing the mussel bed mapping consisting of Alex and Audrey. Armed with a GPS set, they worked the boundaries of the patches of mussel bed so that we can later find out the relative positions of these invasive species patches changing over months. One covered the northern Chek Jawa and the other southern.

Last but not the least of course, we have the salinity checks done by Yikang and Chun How. Well, from their measurements, we are relieved to know that the salinity is normal at about 28ppt, which is norm for Chek Jawa as the salinity is affected by its proximity to the river mouth of Sungei Johor. They also did the photographing of the above bird's eye view and also the other 19 photographs to compare with those taken before the mass death in Chek Jawa.

I apologise for lack of enough photos as I didn't have time to take photos due to work with the crew. Thank you Yikang for the 2 photos in this post.

To end off, share with you a photo of the crew and I. :-)



Other blog entries about the trip

• Ria's wildfilm blog
• July's discovery blog
• Sam's blog ramblings of a peculiar nature