The annotated budak

Truce

It's a quarter past one in the morning, and something, or someone, is wailing outside in the nameless pigeonhole of a submarine parade. It's hard to decide if it's a petulant child, like the boy next door who has surrendered his childhood for the heart of a whine, or a small creature in genuine distress. The crying soon stops but no ship stirs. The foghorns are silent, and the ides beckon with a new year of low springs that will draw us from our cradles to the coast and lay bare what lives beneath the waves on such swift, swollen nights, these brief hours of truce between the sea and the men who shun sleep to seek its fleeting secrets.

A rare club

Most of the dragonflies seen coursing about urban parks and degraded streams belong to the family Libellulidae, a diverse assemblage of aerial hunters in red, blue and yellow that includes highly territorial scarlet pygmies and broad-winged gliders consumed by wanderlust. As insects go, libellulids are giants and share the top of the hexapod food chain with robberflies, mantids, hornets and tiger beetles, treating as fair game tiny gnats as well as teneral members of their own order.

Second in local speciosity, but far less conspicious to casual observers, are clubtails, a family of often heavily built dragonflies distinguished by their relatively small, widely separated eyes and general elusiveness, even in undisturbed habitats. Many gomphids bear visibly thickened terminal abdominal segments, which are thought to act as counterbalances during sharp banks to out-manouerve victims or evade avian foes. Despite their reputation for environmental sensitivity, Singapore is home to at least nine species of clubtails. All but one are rare beasts, however, with the island's sole surviving patch of pristine freshwater wetland serving as their stronghold. 

An outlier in a family of canopy dwellers, the common flangetail owes its numerical strength to its preference for the fringes of exposed waterbodies, where adults can often be seen perching on sunlit twigs in between sorties for prey. More than twice the size of the parasols and dashers that flit around lilyponds, this aerial juggernaut easily outguns sympatric libellulids as it cruises over the edge of reservoirs with serene purpose and tangential speed. Few individuals permit close approach, however, taking off with audible beats when a broad comfort zone is breached to lead eyes astray on a futile pursuit of a hunter at home on the wing.

An even larger gomphid encountered in what remains of the island's alluvial forests tolerated our attention as it clung to a thicket of fallen branches one afternoon late in the year of the tiger. The forktail is a gunship of an insect whose dark green, teardrop-shaped eyes suggest the presence of a more knowing mind than the joined globes that dominate the heads of smaller odonates. Drawn from the treetops perhaps to oviposit in nearby streams, the dragonfly held stiff its richly veined wings and posed on six short legs before a clumsy step shook its perch and launched a whirr of muscles that propelled the forktail with slingshot power to a realm beyond the reach of landlocked men.

Scenes from two sides

The island across the water reaches up to the sky, releasing billows of heat from the vapourisation of crude hydrocarbon particles that rise to caress the air into a cloud of twisted warps. At dusk, the installation ignites into a fey vision of chimneys, silos, towers and heat exchangers, a world of twinkling columns and reinforced curves in which fossil fuel is reduced to functional fractions to be in turn set alight in chambers of internal combustion and flights of casual fancy. The refinery sparkles with cold beauty, a sprawling, shining city that envelopes the surface of small islands with a coenenchyme of steel and concrete, a maze of distilled warmth by a shallow sea gnawed by corals whose slow advance is just a spill away from instant calamity.

A different plant grows when one turns southward on a swimming lagoon that has become unfit for simple leisures and a silty flat where stars with spiny arms race between thickets of sponges and seagrass. Three large mangrove trees occupy a thickish hook of Pulau Hantu Besar that threatens to separate two artificial coves built to turn reefs of old growth into weekend retreats for the young.

The largest of the trio, a perepat with the girth and gnarls of a juvenile ent, has outlived the trauma of land reclamation and so revelled in its freedom from neighbours that the secondary branches have outgrown their own strength and now flounder on the mud. Skinny cones sprout from the sediment in meandering formations that surround the main trunk and provide footholds for hermit crabs and snails who scorn the fiercer depths. In darker times, the boughs with their opposite leaves and outrageous blooms might have harboured a battery of fireflies and welcomed the clumsy beats of fruit bats from nearby isles. But in this era of false economy and uncommon sense, the night and its natural excesses have given way to scenes of stray light that pay no heed to warnings from the brink and the plight of coastlines long past their peak.

Sex on the web

Nephila pilipes, Lily Beach, Christmas Island.

For all the popularity of web-slinging heroes, spiders continue to suffer scorn and aghast. Many who cross paths with the arachnids refuse to appreciate their intriguing beauty, much less acknowledge a mutual alliance against hexapods the latter are always happy to honour. Fear and loathing, rather, greet spiders unfortunate enough to encounter the average stroller who craves nature in the form of shorn lawns and sterile fields.

Yet, widespread appall and a religious bent for appeasing unreasonable gods by spraying a fog of death at every patch of urban green have failed to eradicate the city’s wilder fringes from webs that span gaps in the shrubbery. With seasonal regularity, the sprawling orbs of each new cycle of Nephilas begin as modest constructs with a zone of buffers that probably shield the primary trap from insects large enough to blunder through the silk of a young spider. With invisible speed, juveniles who outflank predatory wasps and web-savvy birds develop into monsters that hunt in broad daylight. The most common local species is a creature with gold flecks and spots on the ventral side of the opistosoma and the joints of her legs, a pattern thought to strike a dynamic equilibrium between attracting flying pollinators and even fiercer predators.

Observers who overcome the disgust of their childhood conditioning would usually spot specks of orange littering the orb-webs of large Nephilas. Some of these eight-legged droplets will prove to be members of a thieving tribe. But a few will reveal the lankier proportions of males, each wielding a pair of sperm-laden palps. The puny spidermen are often too high up for close inspection or dwell in webs that never tire of swaying to mocking winds, but on a recent walk from Noordin Beach at Pulau Ubin we found a number of webs by the road that harboured near-adult females and an entourage of suitors who probably sip from the same sup as their landlady while they await her final moult into sexual maturity.

Brandishing two fistfuls of baby batter, male nephilids often wage a war of proxy within the epigyne of their mates, with each individual attempting to, literally, seal his fatherhood by breaking off a rigid portion of the palp called the embolus while the organ is inserted into the female’s sperm duct. One species, Argiope aurantia, takes a strict view of la petite mort by dying shortly after he has penetrated her ovular depths to become a cadaveric block to other cocks. A couple of other genera, Herennia and Nephilengys, simply severe the entire palpal bulb, accepting self-castration as the price of paternity, their broken-off parts serving to hinder the entry of later lovers.

The genus Nephila, save the basal fenestrata which boasts large, effective palpal plugs, make do with slim emboli that do a poor job of preventing sloppy seconds. This development, along with the vast sexual dimorphism of Nephilas, is a possible result of an arms race in deep time whereby males try to monopolise their mates while the ladies seek the thrill of multiple trysts. It’s a habit that should add to the mental arsenal of a populace who looks askance at female choice and fails to recognise the true nature of things beyond faith in material gains and blinkered morality.

Polyphony

The reef blooms when the sun sets and the wine-red corollas of sea hibiscus trees have fallen for half a day and are breaking apart to become fodder for beachfleas and other minute scavengers. A chill wind blows through the gap in the seawall at Pulau Subar Laut and toys with the tide as the water seeps out for but an hour over a morass of coarse weed. The ripples turn the lagoon into a basin of parallel motion that shatters the thin interface between airspace and the life aquatic. Taking care not to misplace caution or miss a step, we descend onto a flat that blinks a blank from the shelter of the high shore but turns into a scene of lurid hues before harsh beams of diode light.

The colonies that invade the lagoon fail to attain the dendriform proportions of corals in deeper waters. What branching genera survive here are modest shrubs and sparse in distribution compared to the trees and tabletops of submerged reefs. Massive boulders, buffered against wave damage by their convex anchorage, litter the shore with fissured domes and rosettes of lime that vie with other coralline settlers to chart a broken mosaic on the rubble of dead kin. Tiny globes encrust the edges of pools filled with startled fish, while little crabs graze on larger outcrops with pates shorn by heat and desiccation. Columns of sandpaper and the skeletons of cranial lobes inject a semblance of structure to the sway of fronds and fruiting bodies. On the sand between the mounds lie wandering mushrooms which extend fat, fleshy tentacles from gaps between radiating septa that form a single parasolic polyp.

The animals that reside in smaller polygons emerge, too, to taste and trap the flavours of the sea when it is too dark to catalyse a solar brew. Some colonies have corallites that maintain a tenuous individuality; their soft columns dwell within discrete or shared walls with nowhere to grow but up. Others develop as irregular, meandering moulds from which a glassy fringe of tentacles protrude; it is not clear if each elongated favid arose from the ontogenic fusion of adjacent polyps or an inevitable dilatation of a once cylindrical clone as it lays down fresh layers of calcite to capture every available inch of the water column. The gleam of a torch reveals a battery of colours as fluorescent tissue creeps over sharp ridges, but the polyps quickly shy away from the glare, retreating into embedded theca to offer the hospitality of a home with hard edges.

We try to avoid direct contact with these old school architects that pulse and play in the waves, for their apparent ubiquity by reclaimed isles disguises a stony refusal to adopt a contemporary pace of growth that could fuel their revival in a sea smothered by coastline development and untimely deluges. But it’s a task hobbled by the spite of a naughty breeze and the danger of losing yourself to the beguiling motion of builders who struggle to turn bare rubble into monuments of natural artifice. And there’s never enough time to finish asking one long, longing question before the elder of two sisters hastens to drive us from her grace and bid night to the lightbearers of a city that fears the dark and has forgotten how to dream.

Little things

Paleomonid shrimp, Pulau Hantu. 

It's the little things that matter. The tiny bodies that scatter as your feet plunges into every weedy pool. The transparent dancers who refuse to let a big black bootied foot disrupt their daily routine and regroup to continue their dainty waltz on grains that roll with the tide. The eight-legged sprites that stride by a reef as it encircles the walls of two artificial shoals and pick out morsels from the sandy bottom before their turn to ascend the higher reaches of the seafood chain.  

Paleomonid shrimp on Bryopsis, Pulau Subar Laut. 

It's the little things that catch my eye as the drive rolls down a coastal road punctured by pineapple farms and houses on stilts surrounded by lemongrass and beefsteak. Swollen after days of rain, the wayside ditches are peppered by the dry hearts of water lilies that float amid a sea of duckweed and unruly sedges whose blades burn a brighter green than the dull fronds of palms that threaten to overwhelm the land with their promised fruit. Gaps in the vegetation permit glimpses of waders on a mudflat that serves as a midden for a fishermen's village, but there's no time to stop and smell the squalor of the swamp as it passes by with the haste of grander dreams.

Isopod on Bryopsis and Sargassum, Pulau Subar Laut. 

At parts, the road is close enough to the shore that some of the larger ditches shake off their straight, narrow ways and begin to chart a wilder course. Clumps of nypa gather on the seaward side and the shallow drain becomes a brackish stream rimmed by trees with grey-green leaves and skinny roots that reach for the sky. One brook is choked by a colony of aroids with stiff, lance-like leaves, whose kind has conquered much of the Indo-West Pacific but is probably extirpated in Singapore. Another has its banks tethered to small boats that rise and sink to the rhythm of the straits, a fleet of crude vessels ill-equipped to sate a hunger that ranges far beyond these low, littoral seas.

Paleomonid shrimp on Bryopsis, Pulau Subar Laut. 

It's the little things that matter. Not the second-hand ambitions of tigers who roar with sound and folly nor the legacies of strong men who should rue the day they gave themselves the right to reign without measure. Not the schemes of rulers who can only count the gains of four quarters but fail to recognise the value of old growth. Not the hopes of mothers who wish for the best but are ill-prepared for the worst in a generation who refuses to play by the rules and join the game of numbers where nature is always at a loss.

Amphipods on Bryopsis, Pulau Subar Laut. 

It's the little things that remain when the tide forces us to retreat to high ground and give up these brief intrusions into the slow theatre of life amid a bloom of green and brown. Clutching hollow straws, the actors wave a battery of feelers at each other and in search of invisible cues that may signal the difference between survival and sitting in another stomach. Offering drama in specks of dust, the cast of this intertidal stage return each season to play to the gallery before the waves bring down their wracks and clear the way for a shower of even smaller things that will scatter in the currents to settle and build brittle reefs of living, little matter.