Tanah Merah - The sandflies are out of control.

Well I have to visit what is reputedly Singapore's best mainland reef eventually. It really is a wonderful reef and with a very low tide, we could see quite a lot of it. Corals were everywhere and it was very hard to find a path through without stepping on any. Lack of stable footholds however meant very little camera action for me.




Some of the coral don't seem to be doing well.


At the much more walkable beach :




Today I learned that flathead heads are less flat than dragonet heads. So this was suggested to be a flathead.


More flatness in the form of this flatfish spooked by a moon crab spooked by us.


Sweetlips?


Baby halfbeak.




No idea what these fishes are.


Rabbitfish do funny things like beaching themselves.


Or trying to swim up a dry tube.


Trying out a borrowed lens. Pretty good! Nice and sharp.


Swimming crab. I need to get a white torch, the xenon bulb is too bright and too yellow.


Ghost crab. Another strange creature that flees from approaching humans but stays still as a rock even with some prodding once you get too close to it.


I love these shrimps, always sticking together. My photos always end up capturing more than twice the number I spot.


Freshly dead squid.


My first time seeing such a clean moon snail.


There were many fan worms as usual.


Peanut worm?


Here's another one that seemed to have abandoned the sand.




Liana spotted this strange slug-like creature with a shell. Looks like a Hoof-shield limpet (Scutus sp). It seemed to be doing poorly.


As usual, the horde of Batillaria zonalis give no peace to creatures too slow to run. Or maybe they were harvested to serve as camouflage?


Stichodactyla haddoni.


Boring bob.


Phymanthus. We saw a couple.


A soft weird growth among the zoanthids.