Singapore’s Sea Cucumbers: A Dichotomous Key

The last weekend has been especially exciting because of the inaugural Festival of Biodiversity organised by the National Parks Board.

For this festival, the South-east Asian Biodiversity Society set up a booth together with Lewin Education in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. There was a continuous flow of kids who love designing the free photo frames being distributed. We also took the opportunity to educate on-lookers about what we actually do. Being a young society, every single person we reach out to is important.

I was tasked to design a poster on a mini-project which I have been planning to do for awhile; identifying our local nameless sea cucumbers. The purpose of this poster is to basically let people know how I derive the identity of each sea cucumber, right down to their family level by using a simple Yes/No dichotomous key.

The key was generated based on my current knowledge of the families and species of sea cucumbers in Singapore. Note that the pictures of spicules are not unique to all species within the family as there are some that do not possess the spicule designs. I will not be surprised if one or two more families are added next time; upon which I might update the poster again.

But for now, everyone is free to download this poster free at the Downloads page at the horizontal navigation bar. For anyone who requires a higher resolution file for printing at A2/A1 size, please email me separately to request.

Many thanks to Ria, Lewin Education, and Carmen for contributing their valuable photographs, sponsoring the printing for the exhibition, as well as helping to design the poster respectively.