Showy flowers in urban forest

It has been a while since I last blogged here, the reason because I had been spending all my effort contributing to another one. Won’t talk about that since it is still at the infant stage.

Anyway, besides that, I have been wandering around taking pictures of plants for the past month, so I thought I might as well showcase some of the nicer ones here. Urban nature while can’t compare to the wild, is also remarkable in its own ways.

A pretty species of a Passiflora flower, Love in the mist (Passiflora foetida). Though pretty, its crushed leaves gives a stench, hence its specific name ‘foetida’, which means stinky.

The Noni plant, Morinda citrifolia, pops out spontaneously in the urban regions, the fruits and flowers often swarmed with weaver ants.

This white glittering lily, Zephyranthes candida, is one of my favourite herbs. Yea, its an exotic plant though. ;p

I was lucky to take a nice close up shot of this native bird, the black-naped oriole, which was perched above me.

Wild climbers might look messy sometimes, but when it flowers, wooo…. This is Thunbergia grandiflora, the Clock Vine.

And the Skunk Vine, Paederia foetida, another smelly climber.

This is a cultivar of Syzygium campanulatum which bears dark red leaves and bloody red inflorescences…

compared to the normal S. campanulatum, with lots of Asian honey bees flying around the flowers.

Managed to get a lucky shot of another bird, Pink Neck Green Pigeon feeding on the fruits of this common tree, Vitex pinnata.

And lastly, a changeable lizard on a Macarthur’s Palm (Ptychosperma macarthurii) inflorescences. Hey, maybe it is a pollinator for the plant too!

Semakau Walk

Finally was back in Pulau Semakau after several months. Today I guided together with Iris, students from Nan Hua High School.

Here is my group, the seagrassers, with Iris at the back crossing the seagrass lagoon. They were unprepared in getting their feet wet but luckily, all were sporting enough to carry on to carry on with the intertidal walk.

And here we have Iris telling them more about hard corals. We saw many other animals like the giant clam, sea urchin, sea cucumbers, sea stars and a giant nudibranch more than a palm wide (Dendrodoris tuberculosa).

And at the southern most tip of Semakau, the three guys reluctantly posed for me. lol~

After a long day out from 4am from their school till noon, some just slept the entire way back to the mainland.

Purple-under-a-stone identified

The ‘purple-under-a-stone’ sea cucumber as named in Ria’s wildfact sheets is identified as Afrocucumis africana! This was reported in a short note in Nature in Singapore which me, Lionel and some other friends from plant systematics lab did. You may click on the picture to download the free article.

We have another sea cucumber article in review (which was actually submitted before this paper, but for some reason delayed). Watch out for it!