Fieldwork on Pulau Tikus near Jakarta

This time I will be here for 6 weeks only, visiting seagrass meadows of Pulau Tikus (Pulau Seribu, in front of Java) and Derawan (Kalimantan) again. I am working together with Wawan Kiswara (the Indonesian seagrass expert from Jakarta) who is very helpful and has a never-ending hospitality surge. Together with his daughter Nina we had our first long fieldwork day in Pulau Tikus. In Pulau Tikus we could find mono-species meadows of Halodule uninervis like we have in Derawan Island, but the big difference is that here they are still ungrazed.

After 3 weeks we went back. Arriving in Jakarta from Derawan we left already the next day for the last fieldwork on Pulau Pari and Pulau Tikus. My planning was very tight, maybe a little bit to tight because Wawan and I already also worked for weeks without weekends and making long working days (7-22) every day but there is so much to do,! Based on the field station of LIPI on Pulau Pari (=stingray island without stingrays) we could reach Pulau Tikus in 30 minutes. I added some more pictures of the end of experiment on Pulau Tikus. The gaps in the ungrazed seagrass recolonized the sandy gaps (created 20 days ago by us) very fast. So the experiment was a success, now we compare it with the seagrass regrowth in gaps of in the grazed area of Derawan.