Height can be a shortcoming on bare flats, where the grains present, to eyes focused on standing rooms, a mosaic of fine particulates into which sand, silt and small sea creatures meld and merge as a seamless expanse. Some inhabitants of these puddled shoals, where the tide, during its futile pursuits of the moon, exposes shallow trenches embraced by heaps of weed and invaded by nodes of seagrass, are large, or restless, enough to draw attention to flattened profiles and outspread fins.
There are also fishes which, on account of their sheer size, or lack thereof, compel one to stoop and stare with strained vision, flickering as they do between faint dashes and bolts of invisibility. Dragonets in the genus Callionymus, such as this half-inch juvenile on Changi Beach, may dive under loose sediments, but such efforts are merely icing on a granular cake, as these benthic hunters come in shades of grey, brown and burnt quartz that shield them from sight, even when they fail to keep still and dart about the tiny pools they share with glassy shrimp, young portunids and toddling filefish. Amid playmates with chitinous teeth and nippy dispositions, young callionymids can do no more than trust in their epidermal defences and acquire the wisdom of knowing whether to sit tight and when to take flight.
Another bottom dweller whose babies may settle on littoral banks is the seamoth, a relative of pipefishes and seahorses with a long snout and a swollen torso encased in bony plates. Crypsis and heavy armour share the cockpits of these dense submariners, which waddle on the seafloor using stiff ventral spines and suck in prey with protrusible jaws. Rigid hindquarters add occasional thrust, with a measure of lift from wing-like pectorals, to propel the fish towards morsels of interest before the pegasid, lacking swimbladders, sinks to fin the gap between meal and maw. Equine comparisons are thus a stretch, but Pegasus, even squat little things on the low end of northern shores, is always a compelling find and a scene for celebration in a region where myths are still mined for medicinal illusions.
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