In October 1898, two young men from Cambridge arrived in Singapore on a year-long mission to explore the marine zoology of its neighbourhood. Eschewing the heart of the colony, where commerce thrived and coolies dropped like flies in the hovels of Chinatown, Francis Perch Bedford and William Foster Lanchester established field stations at Labrador, Changi, Raffles Lighthouse as well as Cape Rachado (now Tanjong Tuan in Malacca), where they dredged, trawled and walked, sampling vials at hand, the seabed to draft an annotated inventory of its littoral wealth.

Soft corals, reef flat of Pulau Jong.
The fruit of their labour was shipped back to England to form the basis of a regular stream of scholarly reports by the collectors themselves and their associates. In 1900, Lanchester presented, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, what he intended to be the first of a series of papers describing crustaceans encountered in Singapore and Malacca. On his part, Bedford provided, in the same volume, an overview of the echinoderms found in these two possessions. Lanchester continued to pen treatises on crabs, mantis shrimp, peanut worms and soft corals in the following decade, but his erstwhile companion did not long survive his first formal publication, succumbing to a fatal bout of malarial poisoning on 7 October 1900, aged 26. The passing of this young academic was not overlooked by fellow biologists, however, as his name was soon honoured by way of appendage to an extravagant polyclad and a widespread arrow worm.
About a year before his death, while still in the halls of the Raffles Museum, Bedford had written another article, one more suggestive than scientific, in which he offered "stray impressions" of his surveys, marvelling at the diversity of taxa snared by his nets or hidden under stones, and remarking on the striking similarities in form, features and habits between the coastal invertebrates of Singapore and those of his native land, save in the corners where corals flourish. He also gives a topographical account of the latter, which convey a vision little different from the reefs that survive to this day at Pulau Semakau and other southern islands spared the imprisonment of breakwaters.

Holothuria leucospilota with shrimp, Cyrene Reef.
"In places where the reef is present, its distance from the shore varies from a few yards to half a mile or more, and in many cases no part of the reef proper is dry at low spring-tides; the actual width of the reef itself is also very variable, but rarely exceeds about ten yards; on its outward edge it slopes somewhat abruptly to about five or six fathoms, and then more gradually seawards. Between the reef and the shore there is nearly always a flat covered with mud, and very often with an abundant growth of brown sea-weed which harbours a large fauna.
The mud flat is very nearly level, and at lowest spring-tides there is left about a foot of water in the deepest parts, the highest portions of the 'flat' being just dry. The mud sometimes extends nearly up to high-water mark, but as a rule it is separated from the land by a belt of sandy or rocky ground, or occasionally by projecting volcanic rocks excavated by the sea into hollows, which on the retreat of the water form tide-pools, and contain numerous nooks and crannies in which molluscs, crabs, and other animals find a hiding place.
Here at any rate at first sight the naturalist will readily admit that he might be on English ground. As he looked more cloely he would probably see large fleshy Alcyonarians abounding on the mudflat, and to some extent replacing our anemones, the latter being only locally common; he might also see large Holothurians basking in the sun, either stationary or crawling slowly over the mud... Hermit-crabs abound everywhere, and at night the shore would sometimes be almost covered with them; crabs and prawns shelter themselves in crevices or under stones or in the sand, and Spatangids, Chaetopods, and Gephyreans make their burrows in the sand or rocks; limpets, too, of a diminutive size it it true, but still obvious limpets, stick to the rocks with the same tenacious grip as elsewhere, and obviously fill the same place in the economy of nature; our common littoral Gasteropod genera, such as Nassa, Purpura, Littorina, Trochus, etc., are represented by forms closely similar both in form and habits, and many of the species seem to have extremely variable coloration as on our own coasts; in fact it would be difficult to name any characteristic difference.

Rock formations, Pulau Jong.
Polychaet tabes [sic] project from the surface on nearly every sand-flat, Lamellibranchs abound in the mud and bore into rocks and wooden landing-stages, Nudibranchs of brilliant colours, together with Polyclads, creep about on stones and sea-weed, and even the abundant Periophthalmus which forms so marked a feature of the littoral fauna as it bounds over the surface of the pools, or rests on some adjacent object just above the water, is after all only a goby, such as every boy-naturalist delights to hunt at home."
Bedford also managed, a few months before his demise, to dispatch a brief note, in Nature no less, on a group of animals few have since studied, much less seen, in Singapore. He was probably based on Pulau Satumu when his specimens were nabbed "just outside or over the edge of the reef surrounding the island", amid very strong tidal currents that swept plankton from the depths towards the surface. What he caught was described as larvae no more than 5 mm in length, in various life stages, including individuals with a full complement of fin-rays and ventral fin chambers. Later, he dug up a single adult from about "six fathoms of water on a bottom composed of somewhat coarse gravel-sand close to the west entrance to Singapore Harbour."
Earlier this week, just a little south of a terminal that is supplanting the new harbour of Keppel's day, a sample of similarly rough substratum from the seafloor between Semakau Landfill, Pulau Jong and Pulau Sebarok yielded another lancelet, which was initially thought to be a measly worm but demonstrated its affinities by dashing about the confines of a small container with the vigour of whitebait. Barely an inch long, the beast looks nothing more than a pale, undulating rod surrounded by chevrons of thin muscle and with unpaired flap-like fins running the length of the body. What was probably its last meal could be seen in a strip of colour on the ventral edge that ends shortly before the caudal tip.
Common in East Asia, where they have not escaped the appetites of hungry tribes, amphioxiforms have been described as "a vertebrate with almost everything subtracted, a half-sketched blueprint" (Fortey, 2011). Boneless but not entirely spineless, amphioxi resemble the young of lampreys, and at some point in deep time, a similar creature cultivated and conserved traits that would allow it to brave open waters in adulthood and break into the pelagic zone. Those Bedford bagged he suggested to be Branchiostoma cultellum or B. belcheri, two species then known to occur in the Indo-Pacific. Larvae of the latter species were later observed in Singapore to briefly join the planktonic hordes just after sunset. After the wars, one new amphioxus, B. malayana, was named from this locality, specifically the "extreme eastern end of the island" and large populations of Branchiostoma lanceolatum are said to live in the Bay of Bengal.
Living in loose substrates in maturity, lancelets writhe through sand and mud, exposing only what sections are required to take in suspended matter and unleashing bursts of speed that foil the plans of more advanced chordates. Ed Ricketts, who stamped on packed sand to flush out the animals during expeditions in southern California, recommended that a collector "turn up a spadeful of sand, trusting to one's quickness and skill to snatch some of the animals before all of them disappear." He continued, "Until one has actually seen them in the act, it is hard to believe that any animal can burrow as rapidly as amphioxus, for the tiny, eel-like creatures are as quick as the proverbial greased lightning. Seemingly, they can burrow through packed sand as rapidly as most fish can swim." Swift in body, slim in build and subject to seasons of unfathomability, these stripped-down survivors of prehistory have somehow retained a foothold in the Singapore Strait, where life has progressed so its heirs have all but forgotten their roots and live in disharmony with the land, the sea and the undigested remains of a disquiet city .
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