Opportunities to visit Cyrene Reef are rare but each trip offers a reward of discoveries old and new. In the brief hours of the retreating tide, the submerged seagrass meadows appear as a vast field of green straps and golden sand between a city of smoking stacks. Before we landed, a port authority vessel hollered a warning that the area was dangerous as it might harbour wanted men and we face death by drowning, but we mooned the men who moved off in lunaric shock waved off the concern and disembarked from the main boat into the Baby Dolphin that drew as close as it could to the sandy edge of the reef to discharge its load of waders.
The knobbly sea stars that conferred iconic status to Chek Jawa on the northern shore abound on Cyrene, where the seagrass beds apparently offer an abundance of food and shelter for these stellate asteroids. The stiff arms and central disc are lined with pigmented nodules that resemble small horns (or chocolate chips to hungry tidechasers) and some specimens have bits missing, probably chewed off by triggerfish or puffers. We found many animals all over the patch reef; small palm-sized babies were hiding amidst the blades of turtlegrass by the transect line, while larger ones found themselves in pools where they basked with flabby discomfort. Most were in good shape but a number of individuals appear to suffer from a misguided complacency, clearly not having worked out for a while, thus losing their tautness to become sorry pancakes that flounder in shame at our approach.
A fresh discovery after an overdose of knobs was what seemed to a member of their tribe that had gone over to the dark side. With wicked colours and a punkish array of tubercles, this star puzzled us as we compared it to its commoner cousin. Later, Kok Sheng and Chay Hoon cornered its identity to be the Red Tubercled Sea Star, a meaner kin of its scavenging relative that extrudes its guts to gobble up everything in its path, from algae and anemones to sea urchins and unwary fish.
The broad sand bar that borders the northern edge of the reef is littered with the imprint of sleeping stars that have slithered under the soft grains to shun the sun. Sharing their bed are sand dollars tunnel with tube feet and soldiers with stalked eyes and the colours of clowns. With feet tipped with taste receptors, these crabs assemble in the safety of dry hours to conquer the sand in edible grids that are combed through their mouthparts for debris of fine flavour. The seabed rises to greet the dry air so fast that some swimmers lose themselves and their lives in the shallows. When we arrived, a penaied in cooked livery was already at its last legs. Similarly clad but in healthier shape was a small star with cylindrical arms and deep blotches of red. Gangs of tiny tube feet wave from its ambulacral grooves surrounded by overlapping plates that resemble fish scales. More at home in waters too deep for non-diving ducks, this subtidal star is known to prefer fissile propagation by breaking off an arm to the fusion of gametes. Such slow pleasures are perhaps too rushed for such times when the sea sloshes back with furious haste to hide her children from those whose hunger for land is unmoved and insatiable by neither time nor tide.
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