25thJuly09 7.45am – 9.10am

 

Went for our second seagrass monitoring on 25th July, Saturday. We started early in the morning at 7.45am, and had to climb over the fence since the gate to the beach was not open. The tide receded to a -0.1, so we could see a lot of things we couldn’t see very clearly last time, such as the patches of thalassia which stretched unusually far out.

 low tide!

Monitoring went much faster this time, as we split the work among us, and so got the work done in a jiffy. On top of that, the grey skies forewarned the storm, so we were motivated to work faster. Fortunately, there was only a slight drizzle which we managed to work through. We finished ahead of time, giving us an opportunity to explore the rest of the beach, and observe more of its interesting flora and fauna.

Also, we collected 9kg of rubbish, even though the beach was relatively clean. We classified the rubbish according to plastics, glass, metal and others. Here are some pictures:

 

 

a newly formed coral (which will grow around 2cm per year!) So we shouldn’t break off coral because to form a large coral it takes a very long time.

 

 

the anemone which sucks onto the finger! (it’s actually stinging us, but we have thick skin (: )

 

 

 

brown algae with air sacs (sargassum) which help them stay upright when the tide is higher.

 

 

 

 

the relatively clean beach

 

 

us and the rubbish we collected!

 

till next time!

Grace, Zenia and Yifeng

Team 2 Reporting….

On 29^th May, we headed down to Labrador Park to start our first official monitoring session on seagrasses. After a demonstration by Mr Lim on how to read off data from the quadrats, we proceeded to do it ourselves. Pinning down our quadrats wasn’t all that easy as the rocks beneath prevented the pegs from penetrating deep down. We had initially planned to thread a fishing line through each seagrass but unfortunately the needle holes on the needles we had were too small for the fishing line to pass through. Hence, we used these sharp tool with needle-like tips to poke holes just above the leaf sheath of each Thalassia leaf. After completing two quadrats, we went to help the other team with the last few of their 33 random quadrats. The beach was relatively clean so we did not pick trash on that day.

 Three days later, on the 31^th May, we went back down to collect the Thalassia in our quadrats in order to monitor their growth. As the tide was a little too high, we could not really see the seagrasses as clearly as on our previous visit. Fortunately, we could locate our quadrats and proceeded to collect the seagrass.

 The trips to Labrador Park were then followed by the weighing of the biomass of the Thalassia we collected. In the lab, we measured the length, average width, weight, as well as, growth of the baked seagrasses. This time, the seagrasses were a little over baked as the temperature of the oven was set too high. Hence, we had to handle the seagrasses with extreme care as they were rather brittle.

This trip has taught us to be well prepared for any emergencies like how the fishing line couldn’t thread through the needle, as well as to prepare all equipment well beforehand so as to ensure that we can carry out seagrass monitoring and collection well. We look forward to our next exciting trip to Labrador Park on 25 July, where we may also try out monitoring Enhalus.

 Here are some photos taken:

A plot of Enhalus found surprisingly near the beach

Our quadrats

Until then….

Hua Zhen
Regina
Li Ying