The reclamation of Terumbu Bayan, a coral reef south of Singapore, erased a breeding habitat that scientists could not fully save. Divers on a documentation mission reached the site two decades ago and watched barges tip rock into the channel, sending a plume of sediment through the shallow water where they had been swimming minutes earlier.
Scientist and Mongabay board member Debby Ng joined that team and encountered a pair of false clown anemonefish sheltering in an anemone. The female behaved aggressively toward the diver, repeatedly charging and delivering bites while defending a clutch of eggs, tiny eyes visible through the membrane. Ng photographed the scene in 2006.
An alarm called the researchers back to their boat, and from there they saw the first loads of fill dumped directly into the channel. The team managed to salvage some hard corals and a tiger-tail seahorse, but the scale of the reclamation meant many organisms could not be moved. Smaller invertebrates such as shrimp and nudibranchs were left behind, along with topshells and cowries that still had eggs attached to their shells.
Ng later revisited the dive in a written account titled "Requiem for a Clownfish," and that piece recently reached a new audience after The Woke Salaryman adapted the story into a comic. The photographs and recollections from the 2006 dive remain a record of the life that occupied the reef moments before it was buried under reclaimed land.
The episode illuminates the immediate, local consequences of reclamation: sediment plumes and direct infill can convert structurally complex reef habitat into buried substrate faster than teams can relocate vulnerable species. In this case, researchers salvaged a fraction of what lived there, while many smaller and sessile animals were left to perish or be displaced.
