This is a monthly activity where volunteers will help Nature Society to pick up the horseshoe crabs from the mudflats to allow the crabs to be measured. Once the data collected, the horseshoe crabs are released back into the mudflats.
Woke up early to reach the Mudflats by 7.30 am. Wow this was my first to the Mudflats! Even though I know about this research programme for a few years and have been wanting to join, I have never managed to go until now. Apparently according to Chenny, the volunteer liasion officer from Nature Society, the Mudflats is only exposed during low tide. Looking at the expanse of the Mudflats, it is simply amazing.
The group of volunteers yesterday included a group of primary school children who were very
enthusiastic. There was another group of corporate volunteers and a few of individual volunteers like myself.
Picking up my first horseshoe crab was easy. After that for some strange reason, I got a bit hesitant and took a while to pick up the rest. I had to dig through the mud to expose the whole horseshoe crab first instead of just pulling them out by their shells which was much faster. There were many tiny ants lookalike creatures crawling on the mud too.
The Mudflats is a very interesting place. On one stretch of it, it is covered by fine green seagrass (looks like seagrass but not certain). Is really soft the grass. Seems to me like a nice green carpet over the mud.
There are many clams that can be collected from the rocks too. Saw some fishermen just plucking the clams from the rocks. I believed the clams would eventually end up being sold in the market.
Coming back to the horseshoe crabs, they are pretty harmless. Not like your usual crabs. They also move quite slowly. The males are actually much smaller than the females. We were supposed to pick the crabs and put them in a pail. Once the pail is full, we had to go back to the research desk to empty our pails before going out to pick some more crabs. Any mating pairs should be brought straight back to the research desk. Picking up one horseshoe crab every time was already a handful for me, thus I let others bring back the mating pairs. I would say the children were much braver. I could hear them very excited when they found mating pairs and needed to bring back the two immediately.
After about 2 hours of picking the crabs, we were almost done. After letting the researchers collate all the statistics, it was time to put back the horseshoe crabs. I must say it was really much easier to put back the horseshoe crabs onto the mudflats. This time, I managed to hold horseshoe crab in each of my hands to expedite the release. The tide was coming in as we released the horseshoe crabs. Could see the mudflats progressively being covered by the seawater.
It was really an interesting and educational experience.
