The annotated budak

The last of a line

The far west of Singapore is a wasteland of industry, a wedge of long, straight roads that lead to nowhere in particular and have long run out of names, bearing instead digits and mind-numbing epithets: crescents, circles, loops, links, views, places, walks, circuits, sectors and squares in a flat and flattened corner of the island that shunned the city for as long as it could until the town beat a way to its shores and made an offer it could not refuse – a chance to be reborn, remade, reshaped, reclaimed as the engine of a nation and a cog in the transformation of a country from fortress to factory.

The far west of Singapore is a land forgotten by history, a long, ragged line of inlets and capes, rivers and estuaries, mangroves and mudflats, freshwater swamps and fringing reefs that fed and fuelled the residents of coastal settlements who looked away from the city and towards the straits, whose names were lost, reclaimed, buried, expunged as the town turned Jurong into a corporation and Tuas into a broad belt of wharves, yards and terminals. The headlands of Tanjong Gul, Tanjong Rawa, Tanjong Karang and Tanjong Merawang now rise only in expired maps, while Chichir, Kuching, Bajau, Blukang and Merawang have faded from charts and now float under tar and tanks, tracks and threads – isles with no names, no memory and no place in a country that refuses to be constrained by its past and its borders.

The only remnant of Tuas to survive untamed lies between a biochemical plant and a marina, and is marked by a starboard beacon erected on a rocky mound at the tip of a tongue of sand, mud and seagrass that runs northwards along a sea wall, fords the mouth of a storm canal and swells again to host a copse of mangroves, Avicennia and Sonneratia, around which fiddler crabs scour the silt for meals that arrive twice a day or not at all when the luminaries find themselves at odds with each other and temper the tide with their tiffs. Considerable stretches of this shore are littered with rubble, dead shells and skeletons that hint of richer depths or recall a time when the edge of this sea felt the lay of the land and the waters rose to soak, flood, probe, stroke, brush against the folds of hills, farms and forests, only to sink back again when the elements found no clear points of departure, no telling where one ends and the other begins, no lines to be drawn, no love between the lines.

Slippery filaments of blue-green algae cloak portions of the beach like a thin layer of greased hair with limp, unruly partings. The cyanobacteria appear to wax as the flat nears a break in the wall, the final destination of municipal discharges that emerge from a culvert by Tuas West Road and trace a straight, northwestward route to Merawang before a trickle and a sigh, as the waterway meets a grill with two tiers and sheds its burdens into a sallow trough. The lower edges of the canal, along with its floor and a row of bulkheads that guard its gap, are infested with tropical oysters that spare no hard surface below the high water mark and, like the microbial tufts that cling to softer rims, seem to revel in the sweet-savoury soup of rain, runoff and tidal incursions that steeps in this swale of fertile suspensions.

The higher reaches of Merawang are by and large a slope of raw particles, boulders and ridges, miniature ramparts and worn formations, surrounded by the remains of corals, clams and scallops, broken by porous fingers, soft green blades and carpet anemones – cracks, creases and cavities in chunks of loose rubble overrun by porcelain crabs and other filter feeders that prefer the dark side of every mound and slip away helter skelter when their world is overturned and tumbled out. The falling tide also reveals a terrace of pools fringed by algae and Halophila, and holding just enough water to cover the spires of shallow coils. An olive whelk ploughs through a bare patch, its long snout raised and tilted at possible sources of nourishment. Gangs of gold-spotted mudskippers play tag on the surf or cling to perches where the foam dashes against their flanks and washes the silt off their backs. The epibenthos is otherwise dominated by zoanthids, their crowns tucked in columns that perforate the shore with a minefield of squat, shrunken blobs, buttons to a magical mystery tour just a step away from a sinking feeling. 

A small xanthid on a bed of pebbles gave in to the urge to budge, betraying itself and its neighbours: gobies that stuck their heads into hollows and an even tinier hermit that kept calm but refused to carry on. The crablet, identified as Leptodius sanguineus, bore somewhat spatulate fingers, miniature versions of the chelae welded by other, much larger beasts that lumber over reefs in the straits to the south. Though not uncommon at intertidal depths and having a range that spans the Red Sea and Hawaii, this crab is still rather poorly known, the possible artefact of an inconspicuous profile and cryptic habits; the animals tend to lurk in pieces of coral or bury themselves in the sediment. Reported to prey on small shellfish, the xanthids are themselves consumed by swimming crabs that encounter them in exposed positions and manage to crush their defences with brute, brachyuran force.

Stone crabs are far more visible bruisers, being probably more than a match for most portunids. Young individuals occupy the chambers of coarse rocks, while full-sized specimens peep from incomplete shadows and tight corners, which they grip with bulldog force and belligerent glares. Come dusk, the menippids emerge from their dens to taste the ground for stray snails and bivalves, whose shells they crack with a blunt, broad tooth on their major claw. Deliberate in nature and thoroughly indifferent to the rhythms that hold us captive to the hours, to the clock that fails to talk and to our singular fear of a temporality with no ends in sight, the crabs are unlikely to make a dent in the molluscan population, which still seethes with recruits from recent emissions into the thick, brown broth of a shuttered sea. This corner of the straits, the far west of an island in love with larger dreams, still strains against its walls, against the lines that seek to carve and conquer its waters, to turn the tip of the peninsula into a dry and promised land. But the sea may never rise again, save with a slow, warm wrath, for the time for trysts is over, and the city has turned its back, shut its eyes, buried its heart – this straits has shrunk and gulf has widened between two worlds too removed from each other, too close for comfort, too long apart.

A beetle at sea

Insects, other than water-striders that surf on the open ocean and lice that suck the blood of seabirds and diving mammals, occupy a marginal position in marine ecosystems, where they are probably outflanked and kept at bay by the crustaceans that have long conquered every aquatic niche and more than match the Hexapoda in diversity of function and form. What passes for marine insects are largely confined to saltmarshes, mangroves, tidal pools, beaches and rocky shores, peripheral habitats shared and contested with isopods, beachfleas, coenobitids and brachyuran crabs that have learnt to roam beyond the surf but still regard the sea as an ally, a refuge, a nursery, a womb that restores and repossesses the spawn of its podigal children.

For arthropods too far removed in time to embrace the sea without a storm of misgivings, the littoral zones offer the worst of both worlds, a trade-off between the bounties of the deep and the safety of the shallowest end, an environment at once too wet and too dry, too forgiving and too demanding, where the ability to swim or fly is outweighed by a penchant for staying low, hanging tight and making the best of the hours between the tides. Insects have done fairly well in wetlands, but most adaptations for breathing in fresh water, such as spiracular tubes and regular trips to the surface, falter when the waters are too high and rocky for bugs to tap on the air supply. Intertidal insects thus rely on cutaneous respiration or gills called plastrons to survive as larvae; adults take to the wing or hide in cracks, recesses and shells offering pockets of air and protection from the waves.   

Marine insects tend to be minuscule and fugitive, so encounters with the order during forays to reef and flat probably deserve more scrutiny and less dismissal as wayward explorers or victims of rogue winds. One such sighting took place at daybreak on the eastern fringe of Lazarus Island more than two years ago, en route to a lagoon built to be forgotten. A small beetle, little more than a third of an inch long, crept about a damp rock, in the company of nerites and periwinkles, with no sign of distress or displacement. The beetle was no stunner, but it was still a pretty thing with a black-blue lustre on its elytra and orangey basal antennae segments. The find was shot and stored until recently, when a smarter eye pointed to a genus named after the father of Oedipus, King of Thebes. Laius, which occurs from east Africa to the Asia Pacific, belongs to a family of coleopterans commonly referred to as soft-winged flower beetles, as terrestrial representatives usually feed on pollen and pollinators as adults.

Enlarged second antennae segments are male hallmarks of a number of malachiids, so the beetle was probably a female and superficially matches the description of Laius flavicornis, which has been recorded from the coasts of Java, Sarawak and China. The genus has been observed on rocky shores, under stones on beaches, and on "the surfaces of reefs" and other substrates subject to tidal inundation, and one species, aptly named submarinus, is said to inhabit "cracks and holes of sandstone that reach pretty far out into the sea, quite covered during the flood-tide but dry during the ebb." The beetles, which are likely to be scavengers or predators of other intertidal arthropods, evidently have ways of coping with periods of submersion, which they can endure for up to 30 hours, and colonising oceanic isles, on their own power or by clinging to natural rafts. But the secrets of these maritime midgets are still largely out of reach and lost in translation – cyphers on the margins of two worlds and nodes in the tree of life that will remain in bud until curiosity blooms and stirs a much closer look at what moves these bright little bodies on the thin edge of the blue.

Hedgey

The roads of the lion city are dominated by hedges of camwood, an African treelet that probably gained traction with local planners for its leguminous ability to thrive in poor soil, the shy, undistractive flowers that never seem to set seed in this country, and a singular lack of character. The plant's high tolerance for regular pruning is a boon to estate managers who spare no effort in creating bland, green walls that separate pavements from parks and screen the street from the smart. The natural habit of Baphia nitida is markedly less tidy, however; left to its own devices, the shrub tends to explode in all directions with long, intrusive sprigs bearing dark, shiny leaves, and may even grow a trunk and attain its true height under a canopy of blight.

Strays are seldom allowed to mar the serenity of suburban fences, so every sapling that breaks the monotony of sanctioned thickets is removed with extreme prejudice by men who are also under orders to inspect the gutters that run alongside the hedges and slice off any shoots that peek out from the slopes. The ferns, vines and herbs that temper the harder edges of the heartlands suffer a cropping but they come back again and again with every breeze and storm that sends spores into the ditch and seeds down cracks and culverts, where they vex the efforts of councils on the warpath against untrimmed maladies.

The green reapers do miss a few spots that are hard to reach, easy to overlook or hidden between paths where few bother to stop and nobody gives a damn. One such recess, tucked in one of the busiest corners of a satellite town, ends by a deep monsoon trench as a grassy cul-de-sac fringed by camwood and ornamental gingers. Palmflies, day-flying moths, grass blues, chocolate pansies and small brown skippers rest on leaves between sips, changeable lizards guard the feet of rain trees, and bees – blue-banded as well as carpenter – work their way through the costus, unbugged by passers-by consumed by sweeter stuff. The vegetation also harbours a flutter of dragons: some use the shrubbery to recharge after flights of passion over a nearby pond, while others hunt from the safety of dense foliage until they gain the livery to make a play for open waters.

The farthest end of this nook also hides a wild cinnamon, barely visible among the camwood but still holding its ground against the onslaught of municipal blades to reach the height of its neighbours. The bushlet has also managed to weather the appetites of browsers, with perhaps a little help from parasitoid friends, but the odds evened out for at least one common mime fresh from its penultimate moult as a wingless grub and sitting smug on an exposed leaf. Having run a gauntlet of beaks, stings and bites for nigh ten days, the cat probably felt entitled to a breather and a break from its daily routine of hide and feed.

In its earlier stages, Chilasa clytia discourages predators by offering a passing resemblance to fowl poop, but the disguise probably wavers as the cat grows and crosses the line between excrement and enticement, from shit to sweet. By the fifth instar, protective mimicry has given way to trigger warnings that bring up the memory of off-flavours and bitter treats. The pre-pupal mime, a gaudy contrast to the greys, browns and greens of other local swallowtail cats, sports a streaky pattern of cream and pale black, with rows of carmine spots and bicoloured processes between the head and final abdominal segments.

The cat presented a chance to observe the later stages of its life-cycle, so its perch was plucked, rolled into a makeshift cocoon and shoved into a side pocket. It then spent the next four days in the safe haven of a clear plastic container, munching on young cinnamon leaves (picked from a largish tree by a quiet bend in a nearby neighbourhood), resting for hours at end to process its meals, and extruding copious pellets of frass that recall black peppercorns but consist of globules of undigested fibres. When molested, the cat readily everted an osmeterium from its prothoraic segment, creating the effect of a miniature kaiju as it reared up and issued silent screams of rage and odorous emissions accompanied by the thrashing-about of pudgy forequarters.

The cat put a halt to four days of surreptitious detours when it abandoned its feast and fury to take up a spot on a twig in its cage. After securing its butt to the bark and throwing a belt of silk around its back, the caterpillar entered a stupor that caught me off-guard, for it shed its skin during a mid-morning economic noodle run, by the end of which the larva no longer resembled a bug but the broken remains of a minor stump, albeit with an ill-disposed head capsule at its base. The pupa then dozed for nearly a fortnight before the imago emerged, again with infortuitous timing, to float around the desk and frustrate the other captive cat as it sought the sky beyond a wall of glass. There was a brief pause, for the record so to speak, then the mime found a crack in the screen and fled this high estate for a spell on the wing and sips of heaven in the gardens of a city on edge and in loathe with its drains.