Cyrene Reef offers a glimpse into the lost baseline of seashores past. At Chek Jawa, it is said that knobbly sea stars were once so abundant that the villagers gathered the calcerous bodies en masse and ground them up as fertiliser. Thanks to overcollection, fatal freshwater runoffs from the Johor River or simply a marine environment unmitigated by measures to reclaim land from the sea, these charismatic asteroids are now quite rare sights on the northern shores where they served as icons.
The seagrass beds of Cyrene form a southern refuge for these stiff bodies that spread themselves out across the meadow in such densities that my duck is in danger of losing his sense of starstruckness at their vulgar ubiquity. Only the odd individual with an even number of arms stirs more than a passing acknowledgement of their reign on the reef. The knobblies share their rubbly home with common sea stars, which occur here in even greater numbers that it is nigh impossible to tread on the sand bar and the channels in between without pounding several beneath one's booties.
Generally, the stars exhibit a passive disdain for those who track their motions and pry into their formless minds. Some, however, wander off tangent far from their makeshift markers. Others seem to think it fit to interrupt serious exercises with a feast of fury. Too young to even don raining knobs, one starlet cast aside its usual menu of biofilm to slobber over the remains of a swimming crab. So unabashed was its dining that the star did not even bother to let go when a brave tracker inspected its catch to determine if it were merely a measly moult or a genuine stinker of a carcass. It proved to be a meal that only one with a chip on each of her five shoulders could stomach.
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