Little Sister's Island, revisited.

Wow, it has been 2 years since I last visited Little Sister's Island but I still remember all the funny critters we'd encountered back then. This time, we were there with "anemone people" who were studying frilly anemones -- so in between photographing critters, we looked out for these normally abundant anemones and hollahed when we saw them. We had terrible luck finding them until much later into the trip, and the tide was already threatening to claim our sorry lives by then.

It was a quiet day for marine critters that morning, in the small lagoon, I encountered this lone peacock anemone, looking very forlorn.

In the lagoons, fishies were everywhere! While ambushing a very shy reef crab, I spied this pretty pinkish scorpion fish pretending to be invisible.


This filefish lolled past as Kok Sheng called me to join him outside the lagoon.

And I encountered a number of these mystery fish:

The team trotted up to the famous giant clam that resides in one of the lagoons and had a nice time examining it before Mei Lin set up her transect.

Over at the reef near the seawall, there were many beautiful finds. Ivan bothered to double back and hunt for this featherstar just so I could take a look at it. It's gorgeous.

I encountered another feather star nearby.

It soon turned out that this stretch of shore is feather star central! Kok Sheng and Geraldine brave the very scary reef edge to eyeball the many red feather stars that gathered there, treacherously dangling off the side of the deep drop, where we all know the deadly undercurrents of Sister's islands have claimed lives.

There were also a number of black sea cucumbers.

The shore was teeming with octopussies!

Sadly, the only nudibranch we encountered was this polkadotted Jorunna nudibranch that Kok Sheng found. We all quietly complained that we needed Chay Hoon with us.

Kok Sheng found this huge arabian cowrie! My first time seeing it in real life. What a kick I got from observing it.

Over on the reef, I spotted a number of these wandering cowries too.


Stepping with much caution, negotiating the coral rubble of the reef and the edge of the lagoon, I nearly had a heart attack thinking of all the recent encounters with stinging animals on the shore that the other beach fleas had! Fortunately, it was an accident-free trip. And in between appreciating all the pretty things on the reef, we were treated to a gorgeous sunrise over Big Sister's Island. :)