Saturday, October 11, 2008

Reef Survey @ Pulau Satumu.....

Another reef survey was conducted by ReefFriends today. This time at the southernmost off-shore island of Singapore, Pulau Satumu, where Raffles Lighthouse is located on.



The area around the island is a restricted zone and thus an access permit from MPA is needed. Perhaps because of this and its distance from mainland Singapore, the reef is at least somehow well protected. Thus, one can find amazing variety of corals here.

This is also my first dive at this island. My previous trips to the island were for intertidal documenting. Having seen the corals coverage and diversity at intertidal, I must be crazy to volunteer to do the LIT and coral genera records at the shallow transect.

Nonetheless, I quite enjoyed it even though I had to swim against the strong currents that never seen to stop throughout my dive. I was like swimming for 2 meters before being pushed back by 1 meter by the currents while writing on my slate.

Due to the diversity of the coral, I also had a hard time at some point trying to figure out which genus is that coral. Thus, took me one and a half hour to finish recordings one tape at the shallow and another at the deep transect. On the other hand, seeing some coral genus in a different life-form is a plus for me.

As I was concentrating to finish the transects before running low on air, these are the only pics I managed to grab as I swim along the transect line:






1 Comments:

Blogger Ria Tan said...

Thanks for sharing yet another fantastic look at our reefs underwater. Those crinoids look huge!

October 12, 2008 5:08 PM  

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