#70, Hunter-seeking @ Semakau on 31st July/ LIT on 14 Aug

Oops this post is really really backdated, at least for the 31st July hunter-seeking. It's where we scout around an area of about 20 metres wide and perhaps about 100 metres long, looking for little sea creatures that can be found along the way, and record it down when we see them. We don't usually include corals/ algae/ seagrass in this survey. Anyway, it's not an easy task sometimes because some of the organisms can be quite hard to identify!


Yeah anyway was paired up with a lady from HSBC. It was her first time doing this survey. This post shall be very pictorial and brief.

We spotted a horseshoe crab.


A snail shell...

which turned out to be a hermit crab living in it.

and so we captured it, because the hermit crabs at Semakau were not identified to the species level yet.

Here's another shot of it.

Here's a hairy crab. Blended into the environment.

An unidentified crab juvenile, we didn't capture it anyway cos it was juvenile and it would probably be hard to ID?

Sentinel Crab.

Probably a Sea hare.

Knobbly!

Yet another knobbly!

Fan shell.

Un-IDed worm which we didnt capture.

Snail... I cant rmbr which ID we put it as alrdy. T_T My snail ID is seriously just horrible.

Another weird shell which we took back in bottles... Not sure if ID. Had thought initially it was cowrie but it isn't.

And other snails.

Anyway, the next Semakau trip was 14th Aug. That one was something new I tried: the LIT (line intercept transect). It's pretty cool. Like you lay the transect tape thirty metres from the start point to the end point, and so if any algae/coral/seagrass 'comes in the way', you record it down. Motile animals too, in 1 metre of the line. It was also one of my partner's first time doing it as well... so we both just tried our best. Haha.

Mainly we found for algae: sargassum, Hypnae, mermaid's fan (Padina), TuRb (can only remember code name lol) and some others I cant remember and for the corals it was really hard to identify. Need to brush up on identification for corals, definitely. Seagrass was mainly Halophila ovalis, Enhalus acoroides.