Saddening sight.... at Changi

Just yesterday, Ria and Chay Hoon both explored Changi and shared with us about beautiful sea apples and many bunnies!

Today I brought out a group of 6 students from SMU, SMUX (a co-curricular activity that comprise of 6 activity groups - kayaking, diving, biking, skating, trekking, and everything-under-the-sun Xseed)... They were so hyper and excited early at 530am... hee... We started talking about what is a reef walk like and a bit about Changi itself...

We head off straight to the beach but alas, the tides will still rather high at where we were... As we continued on, all of us noticed the long fishing lines that could possibly kill us since it's so thin... Finally we reach the seagrass bed and they were really good at spotting animals! We saw many hermit crabs, fishes, eel blenny, snails, clams, starfish, sea cucumbers, etc etc... The list can go on... Below are just a few of the animals that were sighted in a decent abundance!

Peacock anemones... They are not true anemones (due to their physical morphology and oral disk). They occur in a great number of colours, from brown, to yellow and pink!

So many stranded swimming anemones that refused to swim... :P

And tons of sea bunnies! All stranded but fortunately the tides were coming in to save all of them... They were really awed by how the sea hare glide in the water when submerged. Thank you sea hare! :)

Unfortunately, we also saw poor ethics from two fishers... One held a bucket and the other a shovel... These are lethal weapons on the shores and look what they did to the seagrass bed! We were all so shocked and they dug out peanut worms, octopus and squids! Oh goodness me!

Look at the top right of the pictures below showed how much was dug up and this was only halfway of what they did... :(

EVILLLLLLLL!

On the other side of the coin, they harvest these animals for food... I don't know much about their backgrounds (e.g. could they be homeless? They were barefooted). They even dug up a horseshoe crab and tossed it by its tail! OMG! I felt devastated and didn't really know what to do as confrontation can be bad. They cut so many worms into halves while digging... It was such a terrible sight after the end of the walk.

Sigh... I'm glad that everyone enjoyed the trip and have learnt several things from the shores including how detrimental it can be just to even step on the shore (what more dig :S)...

Hope the shore will recover soon...