The annotated budak

It's mothin

Just a Spilomelid in Ubin's mangroves with deltoid windows on its forewings and a pose of stiff indifference to the harsh realities of adulthood. For in the world of microlepidopterans, only the larvae enjoy a bed of roses, as they burrow through leaves of grass and chew coiled tunnels under thin blades.   

The caterpillars make the most of their feast, for life after metamorphosis offers scant meals in place of the power to fly and taste the flavour of choice mates. For some, there is not even the possibility of a sip, as mouthparts only get in the way of an urgent mission to couple and recreate.

Up close, many of the larger moths become cuddly owls with compound eyes and eminently kissable labial palps. What appears to be luxuriant fur are actually scales that dust fat bodies and coat broad wings. In some species, a scaly tuft protrudes from the tip of the abdomen, which the female uses to cover her eggs. In flight, these scales may come loose and are liable to tickle the nasal passages of walkers who venture into a realm where every step stirs a legion of silent wings and the still warm air rises with the fleeting scent of amorous nocturnes.

Furled

Welcome to the land of wilful naïveté and unnatural scepticism. Where no man is an island, yet many dwell in glorious isolation from the place they call home and even the waters beyond. Hovels scrape the sky, but few high risers can recall dawn's golden hour or slow down for idle descent of dusk. Green lungs and urban parks disturb the seamless advance of a garden city, but these isles of rare tranquility offer no respite for weekend warriors in the hunt for bargains and bars.

Do those who take shallow pride in their state of national impatience have any inkling of the depth of their natural heritage? Show them a wonder, a scene, a beast, a beauty – and they declare surprise, then doubt. And repeat the old lie that there is nothing at all to see, do or care for. For a country poised to woo the world remains mired in the business of bread-and-butter and can ill-afford neither the luxuries of living treasures nor the wherewithal to make room for creatures too costly to save or causes too rich to support.

Ship shapes

On a scorching Sabbath of animal spirits, this bungalow of a vessel plied the narrow passage between Loyang and Ubin's last village. Steering a zigzag course around empty nests and unclad masts, the homely ship is an anomaly in a straits of sleek yachts and steel hulks. Seemingly built for both fishy business and private abode, the haphazard craft shares kinship with the bumboats that ferry islanders to weekend idylls. And like its humbler brethren, the crude hull and colours of accidental brilliance are wont to earn the unkindly notice of flatlanders who view the sea as a beast to be tamed and a sight unfit for inward eyes.

Night of shiny armour

Head-on, there is a fleeting resemblance to the hulking arthropods that bug post-apocalyptic worlds. But this is a far more primitive beast from a time when the air was thick with spores and no wings fluttered through damp forests of ferns and horsetails. Phylogenetic siblings to the silverfish that lurk in pantries and dry pages, bristletails prefer the great outdoors, where they happily bewilder peepers more used to pterygotic hexapods.

At nearly an inch, this bristletail was hard to miss as it rested on a mossy tree trunk. The creature is vaguely prawn-like; its tapering abdomen bears ambulatory styles that recall the pleopods of shrimp and the carapace-like thorax gleams with an oriental armour of iridescent scales. The business end is cluttered with a pair of compound eyes in medial contact, whip-like antennae and long maxillary palps that threaten none but lichen, algae and plant debris.

Built for flight rather than fight, the humpbacked thorax and flexible abdomen provide leverage to flick the bristletail into the air when danger looms. Despite its lowly status on the tree of life, this bug was smart enough to know that my duck posed no plausible threat. So it refused to display its somersaulting prowess and instead dashed into a crevice under the bark to chew over the night's fowl encounter.

With just 500 or so species in two families, bristletails are Devonian holdouts in a world of winged dominance. They may run fast, but grow slow, taking up to two years to reach sexual maturity. Moulting is lifelong and complicated by the insects' strange need to fasten their body to the substrate using fresh droppings. And if the shit doesn't stick, the bristletail can't shed and will die. This combination of simple ontogeny and long lifecycles may have contributed to their limited speciation as well as their ability to cling to marginal habitats such as Arctic grasslands and rocky shores.

Locally, bristletails are known to occur on algae-covered rocks (Pedetontus), tree trunks (Megalopsobius) and the ground (Machilontus). One species, the camel rockspringer (? Dromadimachilis gibba) is thought to be nationally extinct, as it is known only from a swamp that now lies in the waters beneath Seletar Reservoir. It's a fitting burial for a bug that has outlived its time and offers nothing of value to a nation where deep curiosity is drowned out by a morbid fascination for unnatural developments.

Gone west

The end of the road is the place to be when you have run out of juice and can find no respite from the daily swirl. Here, there is no need to brave a gauntlet of empty pleas and discarded promises; a gulf of turbid water erases all traces of misplaced emotions and forces the feet forward lest the tide outpace each blind and blundering step.

In this season of stormy mornings, the whistling squalls threaten to drown each descent into the shallow depths. But far worse are the still in-betweens, when the tepid air is thick with thoughts that run aflurry and allows nothing to fall into place. On such days, the brightest sky is no match for these dull drums of irregular heart beats that cast a petrifying shadow just south of the sunlit west.

View from the last resort

Hermit crab spotted while surveying seagrasses at Sentosa.