CJ Transect (23 Dec 07)

In less than 20 hours, I'm back in CJ again. This time to help Kok Sheng for his CJ project.



Today, we were going to do the transects closer to the northern shore so Kok Sheng showed me a route that I've never taken before. Through the mangroves, across a ditch and eventually down on the flats. After some briefing, we were spilt into our groups and my group consisted of Samantha, Laxton and Yikang.

We had to put a red flag at the start and end point of the transect and use a yellow flag to align the path for the tape to be laid out. Sound easy it may seem but with the 100m long tape and the strong wind, it's definitely not. My group got T5 (260m) and T4 (400m).


Group photo with the transect line and quadrat. Can you see the yellow flag? I bet you can't see the red flag, and that's how far it is...


On the datasheet, the distance of the tape was given and we just need to locate the distance and place the quadrat on it, and...


Snap a photo. Kok Sheng will then do all the hardwork at home to count the alage cover, number of critters including snails etc. Good luck!

Having only two 100m tapes means we had to consistently shift the tapes. At one point, my group's tape decided to dance and twirl itself into a hopeless entangling state that we spent almost 15 to 20 mins 'un-twirling' it.

As much as we spent most of our time doing the survey, we did have time to look around, especially at the start when Kok Sheng was trying to find the start point. Haha...

In my usual style, here goes the list...


Moon snail. My first sighting of the elusive snail (for me, at least). I always see the empty shells and sand collars.


Warty sea cucumber



Lots of baby carpet anemones


Can you see it? It's a well camouflaged flat fish.


Another flat fish and a different species.


Gong gong with someone at home.


Cake sea star found by Kok Sheng.


Sand dollar


Last but not the least - button shells, also known as the 'Jewels of Chek Jawa'.

It was indeed a long and tiring day, but nonetheless it was fun as usual. Despite the heavy downpour just as we reach house no. 1 (Kok Sheng and Gun Kiat was caught in the rain as they were measuring the salinity), we managed to get ourselves out and back on mainland for a nice, rewarding dinner.

*Photos courtesy of Laxton, Kok Sheng and myself.