For someone who loves colours and patterns, I'm absolutely excited to visit this part of Tanah Merah!! :) This shore is flooded with button snails and sand dollars..
Button snails (Umbonium vestiarum). It seems that the patterns on each button snail differ from another, making each button snail special on its own!! However, i like to point out that though the snail's shell are really attractive and tempts one to collect them, PLEASE DON'T!!! The empty shells could be used by the hermit crabs as their homes...
Tons of Sand dollar too!!!
Close up of a sand dollar. From here, you can see that the shape is very similar to the seastar. Both sea star and sand dollar belong to the same family! :)
Flowery Swimming Crab. When sighted, it started to crawled frantically, however it was easy to spot it because it had seaweed on it!!! HAHA.
We found another swimming crab that just had moulted. Cool!!!
Acorn Worm (Class Enteropneusta). For people who have never seen this pile of weird sand, this is actually a worm. The yellowish portion is actually the back part of the worm!!!
Peanut worm (Phylum Sipuncula). My first sighting of this worm. Though I'm not a fan of worm, observing the worm move is really interesting!!
Mating Hermit Crab??
We also found a pail of hermit crab. Someone must have collected them and forgot to take them home!! Fortunately, we saw it and decided to release all the hermit crabs back. Well, I really hope that people would learn that these animals have the right be where they are and not bring them back!!!
Other than a pair of mating hermit crab, I also found a couple of snails mating too!! HAHA. Here is a mating pair.
Rare-spined murex snail's shell. Once again, no luck with the snail. Maybe next time!!
Moon snail. These pretty snails are actually fierce predators of button snails... Like the button snails, they come in different kinds of patterns!!!
Ball moon snail (Polinices didyma).
Lined Moon snail (Natica lineata).
What I like best about moon snails are how they quickly they could dig into the sand and hide. They could dig and bury themselves within a minute!!!
Dig!!!
Dig Somemore!!!
Almost there!!!
GONE!!! :)
My favourite fauna for the day is the spotted moon crab (Ashtoret lunaris)!!! This is my first sighting of this really pretty crab!!! Initially, at the start of trip, I found the shell of this crab. Then, a couple of us found the live crab. We were frantically chasing it as we were trying to get a good photo of it. However, the energetic crab refuse to give up... At the end of the trip, we found this crab again. But this time, A PAIR!!! probably mating pair?? This time after chasing it for a while, the crab stopped moving and we could take some good photos of them. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment