Leaves of (sea)grass

  halophila beccari 
  Originally uploaded by budak.

I have no song for myself anymore, and this is probably apparent to those who come across my taciturn duck be it on daybreak jaunts or shoreline prowlings at dusk.

There seems no hope of escape or respite from this isle of shrinking horizons and diminishing returns save a few short hours of utter loss and loneliness now and then in pursuit of creatures who share a fate only slightly more futile than that of their observers and oppressors. Where else can one turn to find a place, a cranny, a veritable hole in the rock of modern ages before it is chipped away in the name of pecuniary spirits that turn private values and personal joys into provisionary expressions of public prosperity?

For now, the meadows of seagrass dance their daily minuet, a gravitational pas de deux of unequal strengths. Together, the sun and the satellite engage in a long range tug of war that threatens their subjects with dessication as well as the delight of a decapodal dinner. The incoming waters come with an entourage of eager feeders and a legion of minute organisms which live to eat and be eaten. The anemones, sea pens, tubeworms, crabs, seastars, sand dollars, bivalves and barnacles that find shelter amidst the vascular stems take a calculated risk and brave their pelagic foes for an opportunity to feast on a bounty of free-swimming biota. When the sea recedes, a second shift of scourers take their turn to seek sustenance from those unfortunate enough (such as this still-pulsating jellyfish) to be stranded by the banks and exposed to raptorial eyes and tearing talons. Those who can, like this finger sole with a toothy scowl, flatten themselves under a cover of fine silicon, hoping to elude the great-billed herons and swooping Haliaetus while awaiting the secure embrace of the deep blue brown depths.

The seagrasses themselves hold fast to their roots. In these shallow, submerged plains of fine substrate, they form a soft bedrock of living cells, a three-dimensional assembly of cleavages that support life for beasts as small as buttons and as big as cows. In some locations, though not Chek Jawa off the eastern edge of Pulau Ubin, meadows of giant Enhalus acoroides taper over the flats like a salty serengeti. Chek Jawa's broad lagoon harbours instead finer leaved species. Tiny rosettes of Halophila beccarii cling to the baking mud, their speckled blades and slender petioles barely an inch across. Entire patches probably perished in the leaden footsteps of clumsy ducks on their way to sample populations of their cogeneric cousins. Paddle-leaved Halophila ovalis and fern-like Halophila spinulosa share the bay with miniature reeds of needles (Halodule uninervis) and ribbons (Cymodocea rotundata) that bask in the sun's electromagnetic spectrum, synthesising sugars and starches from dissolved bicarbonates, helping in their modest way to capture and coalesce the clouds of carbon dioxide that men expel and choke on.    

Earlier in the year, the unseemly and extended deluge that gave warning of future inundations also cast a spell of doom on many of Chek Jawa's denizens. Sponges, echinoderms – starfish and sea cucumbers – as well as cnidarians, in particular the mats of carpet anemones that prey on many and harbour more, came off the worst, melting in the wake of waves of fresh water from a river that had broken its banks and even brokered a bilateral tiff. Many were found uprooted, dying and releasing a palpable aroma of decay as their tissues reaved and ruptured from a fatal breakdown of osmotic balance. Barely two months later, they are still visibly absent, save the tenacious hope of a handful of new pioneers, mere ball-sized babes yet to grow into bin-sized behemoths. But happily, other members of the community appear to have better weathered the foul fresh water and there were even new discoveries to be made.

Remarkably, my duck is a latecomer to Chek Jawa, arriving long after the rubble of a revival that gave this haven a reprieve of sorts. To my unjaded eyes, the descent from the coastal path through the mudflats and onto the blue-green expanse reveals a place unlike any other in this country, where space is meant to be filled and the sea has been browbeaten into a force that must be tamed, trammelled and taken back for the sake of commerce and cost-benefit assessments in favour of prodigal naked apes. Under the watchful gazes of sea eagles that soar in congregations unheard of over the mainland, the fields fade and flicker, crushing any remaining sense of constraint and caginess that one has brought over from the jungle of imperatives that lie but a straits southward. Perhaps its very existence – an oasis of wealth that cannot be counted and giver of joy that bears no tangible fruit – puts it squarely against the credo of current thought that speeds along and preaches the power of population for profit, knowing and caring not how a limited world will sustain the wants of boundless wills.