Changi Beach on 10 Aug 2010

Readers of my blog might have noticed that I had been blogging a lot less frequently these days. I am still visiting our shores regularly, but just that I have been so busy with work these days, that I really had no time to blog about most of my trips.

But since it has been a while since I last visited Changi Beach, and we saw quite a number of interesting stuff today, I decided to just do a quick listing of the highlights that we saw, just to share with my friends out there who read my blog regularly :)


There were lots of brittle stars on the sandy shore, many of them stranded on dry sand. These brittle stars are rather common on our northern shores, though they usually burrow into the sand in the day.


Near the rocky area, we found a Rock Stars (Asterina coronata). We decided not to spend too much time search for stuff here, since we can usually find more things at the sandy area.


There were several Biscuit Sea Stars (Goniodiscaster scaber), though certainly not as abundant as previously. There were a number of rather huge ones bigger than my palm.


There were a number of Cake Sea Stars (Anthenea aspera) too, but I did not see the really huge ones. This one was about 7 or 8 cm wide.


We saw many of these small sea star, which looked like they could be juvenile Biscuit or Cake Sea Stars.


There were significantly fewer Sand Stars (Astropecten spp.). I saw a few plain ones, like the one above...


and 2 or 3 of the more colourful ones.


Several species of sea cucumbers were spotted, and I'll just highlight a few here. This little sea cucumber is rather abundant, but I have no idea what species this is.


This is yet another unknown sea cucumber, which I have seen on both our northern and southern shores.


There are two sea cucumbers here. Can you spot them?


Ball Sea Cucumbers (Phyllophorus sp.) were really abundant here, and I could see some of their feeding tentacles in the shallow pools.


The little black sea urchins (Temnopleurus sp.) appeared to be in season, and I saw hundreds of them clustering together.


Also clustering were these snails, which look like some kind of murex (family muricidae).


Among the snails I saw a few Orange Striped Hermit Crabs (Clibanarius infraspinatus).


Understand that CH had seen this hermit crab previously, but this was my first time seeing this. Hopefully our hermit crab expert, Yoyo, will be able to help identify this soon. (Update: This is Paguristes longirostris. Thanks Yoyo for the ID!)


There were several other hermit crabs around which I do not know the species.


I saw 2 Noble Volutes (Cymbiola nobilis), prowling around, probably search for clams to feed on.


I was rather glad to find quite a few Miliaris Cowrie (Cypraea miliaris).


Here are 2 of them. Not sure if they were doing anything sexy.


There were a few Hairy Sea Hares (Bursatella leachii), though they appeared somewhat off-coloured.


And also, a few Geographic Sea Hare (Syphonata geographica). These sea slugs burrow, so they could be a lot more abundant than they appear.


I also found a few cockles (family Cardiidae).


There was a Scorpionfish among the sea urchins.


I found many Pipefish, but did not have the luck to find any seahorses this time round.


Somehow, I thought there were a lot more Tube Anemones compared to my last trip.


Could this small carpet anemone be a Stichodactyla tapetum?


There were a few really tiny sea anemones on the seaweed.


This one had lots of red spots on it.


There were several Swimming Anemones (Boloceroides mcmurrichii), and this one attached itself to a solitary ascidian (Polycarpa sp.).


There were a few sea pens half-burrowed into the sand too.

All in all, it was great to be back here. Certainly hope I will have more time to properly blog the next time I am here though :P