Crabby rain at Pasir Ris Park Mangrove

For the last fieldtrip of the year, I decided I shall do away with intertidal shore and reef.  Actually, it was not a planned fieldtrip. After reading about Ria's recent visit to the Pasir Ris Park's mangrove at night, I wanted to visit it. Having done a few guided walk at this place with the Naked Hermit Crabs and visited the place myself a few times, I have not actually seen a mangrove at night.

So I spent the last two days of 2012 at the Pasir Ris Park magrove with my friend. Two days because we started late at night on 30th December and ened on 31st December early morning.
Night Time is great for close observation of animals. They hardly move and you are able to get real close to them.

As we entered the mangrove, I spotted a pipefish and a juvenile dog-faced water snake emerging from its hole in a small stream nearby.

Juvenile dog-faced water snake (Cerberus schneiderii)

Pipefish

My work attachment at RMBR

While my colleagues are already enjoying their long deserved holidays, I set aside two weeks of my holidays for a MOE Teacher's Work Attachment programme. I have chosen the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (RMBR) for my work attachment programme.

My work attachment period was 3 - 14 December 2012.
I chose RMBR as it was one of the places which I was interested to find out how specimens, after collected from sites, are processed, preserved, document and kept in a biodiversity museum. Furthermore, the work description posted for this organisation allows me to work with the available specimens to create educational materials.

However the museum's gallery was closing soon in view of the big house moving to the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, set for completion in 2014. There was not much of a need to create educational materials at the moment.

I spent my two weeks of work attachment in the wet collections section of the museum, helping out Siong Kiat, the wet collections' curator. Wet collections refers to specimens (mostly marine animals) that requires storing in preservation liquids such as ethanol and formalin (formaldehyde). Majority of the specimens I worked with are stored in 75% ethanol.

Here's the blog post from RMBR about my work attachment stint with them.

Image capture of the blog post.