First 09 Monitoring

Hello! It has been almost 3 months since we last went down to Labrador Park for our seagrass monitoring and data collection. After not being on the beach and seeing all the sea grasses for such a long time, we felt almost glad to be back there on the 9th of January despite the drizzle. However, due to the slight inaccuracy of the tide table, the tide was simply too high for us to do any monitoring at that specific time. Nevertheless, we stationed ourselves and waited for more than an hour. Unfortunately, not only did the tide not recede, in grew even higher. Left with no choice, we had to go home): (However, one positive takeaway from the trip was doing some coastal clean up! While we waited for the tide to recede, we went around the beach trying to pick up litter! The beach was really quite dirty!)

Our next attempt down to the park was on 12th January. The tide table that we used proved to be really inaccurate as the tide was quite high at our targeted time again. However after a long wait, we were able to conduct our monitoring although the tide was a little too high for our liking (it got our clothes wet D: )

Remember that we were supposed to measure the growth rate of our selected seagrass, Thalassia Hemprichii? We would select a 25cm by 25cm plot of Thalassia Hemprichii, then poke holes at the bottom of the seagrass, thread a piece of fishing line through the hole and leave the seagrass to grow. Then we would come back 3-4 days later, cut away the seagrass and measure its growth from the new base of the grass to the hole with fishing string. Our initial plan was to start another plot to measure its growth. However, since the tide was too high on the 9th and we could not do anything, we could no longer start any plot for January as the only 2 days where the tide is low at an appropriate time was the 9th and 12th.

Therefore, we took the soil and water sample from our plots as well as monitor the seagrass coverage of our other 3 plots! The soil and water sample will be studied further as a factor of the seagrass growth. (We will keep you guys updated!)

Yep, so that concludes our first successful trip down to Labrador Park in 2009. We are very sorry we do not have photos this time round due to the unfortunate and unexpected illness of our photographer thus we do not have a camera on that day D: we will take more photos during our next trip, which is hopefully in mid February.

Danielle, Jolyn and Xinyi