Raffles Lighthouse on 23 Mar 2011

Finally, Raffles Lighthouse with fine weathers! The past few trips were all rainy :P

Raffles Lighthouse certainly is one of the best places to look at the amazing coral diversity in Singapore, and so here I am going to focus on the hard corals I saw during this trip.


Just look at how dense the coral cover is! A lot of people would probably find it hard to believe that this is part of Singapore.


In just one small area, I could already spot quite a few corals from different genera.


Here's another patch.

Some of coral genera I saw include:


Massive colonies of Goniastrea with the typical paliformed lobes in the corallites.


Favites, where the corallites have joint walls without paliformed lobes.


Encrusting Oulastrea colony, with black coenosteum.


The so-called brain coral, Symphyllia sp., with distinct septal teeth and the corallites have joint walls.


The similar-looking Lobophyllia with separate walls.


Psammocora sp.


The "leafy" Pavona sp.


The mushroom coral, Fungia sp. Doesn't it appear like a big mushroom?


The galaxy coral, Galaxea sp., with crown-shaped corallites.


Echinopora sp., in the plating form with a few branching structures. The surface of the colony is granulated.



The turban coral, Turbinaria sp., which exhibits a plating growth form.


Closely related is the cave coral, Tubastrea sp., which is usually found under rocks.


A branching Hydnophora sp.


Another branching coral - Montipora sp.


This one with fine branching is the Porcillopora coral.


The most abundant coral here will be the Acropora corals. And here at Raffles Lighthouse, there are many different species with different growth forms!


There are the encrusting ones with hardly any branching.


The ones with antler-like appearances.


And table-forming colonies.


This colony is also green in colour like the previous one, but it has finer branching.


There are reddish colonies too.


All Acropora species will have a polyp at the tip of the branch.


I even found one growing on a spider conch (Lambis lambis)!


This is a blue coral (Heliopora coerulea). Technically it is not a hard coral, even though it has a hard skeleton, as it is more closely related to soft corals.


And among the blue corals I found a Hairy Reef Hermit Crab (Dardanus lagopodes).


A few other animals we saw include this Saron shrimp (Saron sp.).


A pretty little brittler star...


Several nudibranchs, including this Gymnodoris sp., were spotted.


And there were many little fishes in the lagoon.

Glad to see so much life returning to this little island, as we witnessed massive coral bleaching last year. I did not see a number of hard coral genera which were commonly seen last time though. Hopefully they will soon re-establish themselves here...

Recent Trip to Raffles Lighthouse

The RMBR Nature Guides went to Raffles Lighthouse earlier this morning to check out the intertidal life there. Not sure why, these days things appeared to be a lot quieter compared to last time, though we still saw a number of interesting stuff.


The intertidal reef was still tightly packed with different species of hard corals.


When we were here last month, we saw quite a number of the Acropora Corals (Acropora spp.) dripping some kind of mucus, like the above. Not sure why was that happening. We did not see any of these though.


The coral bleaching, however, was still quite bad. I will estimate about 50 percent of them bleached.


Even the solitary Mushroom Coral (Fungia sp.) above was bleached.


On some rocks, we found little cave coral.


The soft corals were probably bleaching worse than the hard corals though. Most of the ones I saw had turned white.


I found a few Tube Anemones in teh shallow lagoon.


Ying Wei spotted a Black Phyllid Nudibranch (Phyllidiella nigra). This nudibranch can secrete toxins into the surrounding water when it's stressed.


Robert found this pretty Bornella stellifer in the lagoon. This nudibranch supposedly feeds on hydroids.


This Bristle Worm (Eurythoe cf. complanata) was found stranded on the sand.


There were many octopuses here, and their ability to change their body colour was rather impressive.


Here's the same octopus which had turned a lighter tone.


This was my first time finding a Land Hermit Crab (Coenobita sp.) on this island!


I had seen this reddish hairy crab here before, but unfortunately still did not have the ID.


Marcus spotted this crab on a piece of wood floating on the water surface. He had checked the ID with the crab experts around, but again I can't remember what was it. Update: This is probably a Varuna litterata. It was spotted by Iris actually and Marcus was just kaypohing around. According to "A Guide to Seashore Life in Singapore", this crab can live in both fresh and saltwater. It can be found not only in streams and ponds far inland, but also in mangroves, the edge of the shore., and even on flotsam or floating seaweed, drifting with the currents.


I spotted this cute Acropora Crab (Trapezia sp.) among a colony of Acropora coral.


We also found several of these green -coloured shrimps with huge pincers living with many of the Acorpora colonies.


LK found a File Clam (Lima sp,), and later, I found another one.


We spotted two Arabian Cowries (Cypraea arabica) - one among the rocks, and another among the corals.


Not sure what these 3 Giant Top Shells (Trochus niloticus) were doing.


I saw a total of 4 Spider Conches (Lambis lambis)! I am sure there were probably quite a few more which we missed, since they were so well-camouflaged.


A Stonefish Sea Cucumber (Actinopyga lecanora) found by Hen.


We did not find this Juvenile Cushion Star (Culcita novaeguineae) during this trip, but on another trip we made here last month. However, since I did not blogged about that trip, decided to post it here :P

It was nice to be back on this shore, but somehow it just didn't appear to be as rich as before. Not sure what has caused the problem?