I have visited this beach previously, and had quite a few interesting finds, and thus was quite excited about coming back here again after such a long while.
There were lots of sand stars every where.
While we were not really supposed to be hunting for anemones today, we still saw many of them on this shore.
Several pipefishes were also spotted. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see its relative, the seahorse, found by the others. I happened to be right on the other side of the shore where they found it :(
As I was heading for the rocky shore, I saw something moving among the seaweeds. I've never seen this before, and thought it looked some jelly blob with lots of sesame seeds on it :P
I decided to push it into deeper water using my chopsticks, and it started relaxing and spread out its tentacles. It's an anemone! I shouted out to Marcus, who took a few photos as well. After the trip, he email the photos to Dr Daphne, the anemone expert, who said that it is a member of the family Aliciidae, and could be a Phyllodiscus sp. Even she has only seen Phyllodiscus anemones rarely, and these anemones can supposedly give anyone who touches them a nasty sting!
There were lots of brittlestars crawling among the seaweeds too.
And look at this lovely purple peacock anemone! These animals are not true sea anemones! Unlike sea anemone, peacock anemones live in a tube, and has a circle of shorter tentacles near it's mouth.
While most biscuit sea stars only have 5 arms, I found one with 6 arms!
I also saw quite a few sea pen lying in some of the tidal pools.
The little pinkish sea cucumbers were also back!
And ball sea cucumbers were like every where!
At the rocky area, we spotted sponges of all kinds of colours! Was hoping to find nudibranchs among the sponges, but some how they were either hiding, or my eye-sight was deteriorating, or it's just the wrong season for them.
There were lots of little coral colonies on the rocks too. Each colony is like a HDB flat, housing lots of little coral animal (aka polyp).
Several fanworms were gracefully swaying with the waves. The worm lives in the tube and uses the feather-like structure to capture plankton or plant and animal matter floating in the water.
Can you spot the velcro crab in the above photo?
And here's another master of disguise - a spider crab.
And soon we had to called it a day, but nonetheless, it was a really fruitful trip!
Do check out the Wildfilms' blog for more photos and details!
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