101230 Well it's been a year.

And quite a good year it was too. A brief round-up of places and things in chronological order.


100102, Pulau Tekukor. A Phymanthus anemone in a bed of zoanthids.


100102, Pulau Tekukor. Sunset.


100110, Tanah Merah MRT Station. A long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) shuns modern transportation, preferring to rely on self-locomotion.


100110, Chek Jawa, Pulau Ubin. Gold spotted mudskipper (Periophthalmus chrysospilos) spitting mud from its burrow digging.


100326, Venus Drive. Bioluminescent mushrooms.


100507, mango tree in my garden. Amorphoscelis mantis. It eats ants and has very small forelegs which are not needed to catch prey.


100515, St John's Island. Stonefish (Synanceia horrida). Stonefish skin actually form a substrate for organisms to grow on.


100528, Pulau Tekukor. Hairy sea hare (Bursatella leachii). My favorite slug.


100602, Singapore Botanic Gardens. Pale grass blue (Zizeeria maha serica). Introduced species.


100613, Southern islands of Singapore. Anemonefish (Amphiprion ocellaris) in its home, a giant carpet anemone (Stichodactyla gigantea).


100613, Southern islands of Singapore. Blacktip reef shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus). Sharks can have very good hearing. Field and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that sharks can hear sounds with frequencies ranging from about 10 Hertz (cycles per second) to about 800 Hertz, but are most responsive to sounds less than 375 Hertz. So if one is inclined to scream at the presence of sharks, make it a high pitch scream?


100619, Venus Drive. Unknown beetle on the bark of a tree. The oval eyes are unusual enough though the filiform antennae are really bizarre with the branching hairs, somewhat resembling plumose (midges) antennae. Kindly identified by Ted MacRae as likely from the Anthribidae family based on the head shape and tarsi.


100619, Venus Drive. Two-tailed spider (Hersiliidae).


100626, Cyrene reef (Terumbu Pandan). Bornella nudibranch.


100710, Upper Seletar. Derbidae. These true bugs (Hemiptera) are often mistaken for flies.


100711, Cyrene reef (Terumbu Pandan). A shrimp (Caridea) on soft leathery coral (Alcyoniidae). Shrimp are differentiated from prawns externally by their caridean bend at the 3rd abdominal segment and the overlap of their segments with their 2nd segment overlapping their 1st and 3rd. They are also differentiated internally by their lamellar gills. Prawn gills are branching which give them their suborder name Dendrobranchiata (dendro: tree, branchiata: gills).


100721, Admiralty Park. Singapore tarantula (Phlogiellus inermis). Their presence is a pleasant surprise and probably indicative of their prevalence.


100724, Venus Drive. A caterpillar on a bed of cocoons. This caterpillar is likely to be a victim of a parasitic wasp. The silk cocoons are the wasp larvae and the caterpillar is transformed into a zombie guardian.


100809, Cyrene reef (Terumbu Pandan). Soldier crab (Dotillidae). These tiny crabs process a relatively large amount of sand while feeding, many times their own body volume.


100818, Lower Peirce. A Singapore tarantula (Phlogiellus inermis) makes its home between the planks of the boardwalk.


101128, my garden. Schizomida, a most surprising find. Schizomida are poorly studied arachnids, identified by the split dorsal surface of their prosoma, hence the order name (schizo: split).


101219, Lower Peirce. Fascinating caterpillar. Its location among the leaf litter is quite odd. Perhaps it was disturbed. Some caterpillars, like beetles, release their hold on leaves and fall to the forest floor to escape danger.


101222, Chestnut Avenue. A harvestman (Opiliones) makes a meal of a severed mushroom cap.


101222, Chestnut Avenue. A moth releasing pheromones. These small 10 mm long moths hide under leaves to escape predators and at the same time broadcast their location to other moths to mate, not an easy life.