It pays to shuffle your feet when paddling in the sand and to avoid plodding into murky waters. As the tide turned at Changi this morning about an hour before sunrise, we came across this good-sized ray in a shin-high patch of silt and sea lettuce. By far the largest Dasyatid our crusty crew has encountered, the animal's body measured about half a metre with a 1.5 m whip of a tail that could probably perform surgical incisions with flippant ease.
What was it doing in this stretch of weedy banks and seagrass-filled lagoons beyond the high shore of ghost crab burrows and litter line of rhu trees? Perhaps it glided in during the wee hours, seeking this shore for its rich pickings of shrimp, crabs, worms, clams, snails, urchins, flatfish and other benthic fauna that shelter under the grains and build with fins and feet a hidden world under a sea of sand. Or maybe it had nowhere else to go, for the wealth of such shores with their green and growing things are no match for the pleasure domes of those who prefer their waters as mere backgrounds of blue, buried under walls that hide the true beauty of sunlit waves and the life that dwells in the land beneath the wind.
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