Ria had an earlier visit to this shore earlier in May and found many beautiful corals and stunning animals that greeted her. One special invertebrate that littered the shores was the Red feather star (Crinoid) that usually can be seen near our local coral reefs. A team of seven decided to cover more parts of the shores to see what we can find...
Flora: There were too many different algae (or seaweeds) to fully document it properly! We also found the two species of seagrasses that Ria had previously seen: Tape seagrass (Enhalus acoroides) and Sickle seagrass (Thalassia hemprichii) (shown below). The seagrass covers were quite sparse and few - perhaps competition with sponges and corals?
I found a small patch of corallimorphs attached to the surfaces of the coral rubble. They are closely related to the anemones (Cnidarians) but are not true anemones. Like anemones, however, they have stinging cells, so please refrain from touching them!
Hard coral diversity was amazing! I have dived quite a bit in Singapore, and have not seen such beautiful and big Acropora spp. except at Raffles Lighthouse and Kusu Island! The tides were very low, and if you realised, we were actually fairly close to the reef crest/edge already!
A huge lot of other corals were seen growing healthily. Favid hard corals (Ouslastrea sp., Favites sp., Platygyra sp., Echinopora sp., etc), Montipora sp., Pocillopora sp., Turbinaria sp., Goniopora sp., Symphillia sp., and so on!
This picture shows the dense and well-packed diversity of algae, hard corals, soft corals and encrusting sponges!
I even spotted a single mushroom coral (Fungia sp.) attached onto a blue sponge!
Soft corals were highly abundant and can grow up to really big! Kok Sheng shared a photo with James posing beside a huge soft coral. 
Dense soft coral garden... :)
One of the prettier sponges is this Oceanapia sagittaria... I found a few but not as much as the encrusting types of sponges!
Moving onto some of the mobile invertebrates... The rocks were full of nerite snails, turban snails and some had barnacles and limpets (seen below).
Only one flatworm sighting for me - Spotted black flatworm (Acanthozoan sp.)
A few reef octopuses came out to play and some of them (like this one below) was stranded out of the water.
The team bade farewell to Dr. Daphne just the day before this trip and everyone missed her stories about the anemones. We still looked high and low for any anemones but could only find both the Wiggly star anemone and Phymanthus spp.
Quite a shore with a lot of crustacean life! The usual suspects of transparent shrimps darting about the waters.
Swimming crabs (adults and juveniles), hairy crabs and floral egg crab... Chay Hoon even found a mosaic crab!
James pointed out the commensal coral crabs hidden in both the Pocillopora sp. and Acropora sp. corals.
Only managed to capture these few photos of fishes: carpet eel blenny, crocodile flathead, and other gobies (that I can't identify!).
A new shore with so much potentials! I'm glad for this opportunity to have seen this shore and would love to head back to survey the other parts of these reefs. Once again, thanks to Shao Wei, Xi Lin, Sheila and Sylvester for making this trip possible and hassle-free for all of us! :)
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