A thick reef lies beyond the long bund of Tanah Merah, mirroring in spirit the cliffs that once set the coast aflame before they were levelled for industrial parkland and empty courses. At times, the sea rises high enough to engulf the barrier or at least drive its minions through the porous wall into an inward fringe, where a calm shoal abuts an artificial beach. Purple crabs and plodding snails patrol the damp upper layers of these boulders, alert for edible filaments but doing little to prevent an invasion of the lower strata by recruits from the outer flat. Thus, stinging polyps, sticky tubes with swaying locks, and swelling colonies of soft bodies in hard cups have established themselves on coarse rocks and foreign sand, turning the grim layers into a land of glowing things.
Many fishes, including several species associated with coral reefs, are also drawn to the seawall for its provision of safe chambers and silty refuges. Groupers, tripletails, stonefish, scorpionfish, snappers, flatheads, morays, cardinalfish, rabbitfish, filefish, emperors, sergeants, damsels, halfbeaks, squirrelfish, gobies, silversides, tuskfish, eeltail catfish, wrasses, mojaras, dragonets, whitings, cowfish, remoras and even an eagle ray have found their way to the sheltered side of this eastern shore. Here, in pools that slither up stony terraces and under shelves of slime, predators slip into the shadows to join their prey in a truce that endures scrutiny but probably not a moment longer. Here, too, are butterflies in ill-advised forays to the littoral zone, compressed hunters born to suck the life out of crevices and which may at times turn on the very polyps that build their home. Prisoners of stripes that cross their eyes and confound their foes, young chaetodonids add a welcome dash of colour to the dull shades of grey that cloak the scene and which conceal, in a long, shallow grave by a lonely road, the memory of hills at once bright and burning.
A quite different flash lit up the dim expanse beneath the canopy off Chestnut Avenue, where a craggy trail winds through a scrubland of albizia before plunging into denser woods. The shaded track is fought over by big blue dragonflies with dark wing tips and a fierce devotion to sweeping routines. Metalmarks also favour this habitat, hopping from leaf to leaf with half-opened wings to capture the sun in small doses. One of the few members of this family to survive in Singapore, the Malay tailed judy is a beast of reserved temperament, ill at ease in exposed parks and present in rare numbers even in the lowlands of the peninsula. Unique among local riodinids, Abisara savitri savitri bears on its hindwing a white-tipped tail and ocelli that recall the false heads of hairstreaks. But this little brown butterfly, suffused with scales of delicate confection, still prefers active flight to casual deception and so lingers just long enough to catch its breath and reveal, in the briefest of glimpses, a blink of its powdered beauty.
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