When I was choosing my sabbatical for term 2, although I am the sporty type of person, nothing stands out more than ecology. Nothing else caught my attention other than ecology. This involves interesting activities and trips, and even includes a cool presentation by the seniors! This is an alternative fun way to learn science, and is neither boring nor mundane. As I was also learning about ecology in term 2, I decided that that will be my sabbatical for term 2. I wanted to learn more about that topic as the things being taught in class is very broad. I was determined to get into it. Fortunately, I got what I wanted.
Week 9 came quickly after that. It is time to attend this interesting sabbatical. On the first day, I was told to form groups of 5 to do activities together throughout the sabbatical. As a few of my friends also chose this sabbatical, I decided to form a group with them. We were also told that over the next few days, we will be going to places filled with biodiversity and nature like the Underwater World, Sungei Buloh and the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity. At this point I knew my decision is correct. This is the sabbatical that I have been looking out for all this while.
There is a fieldtrip that still remains vividly clear in my mind. It is none other than the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity. It was a rather small museum but filled with many ANIMALS! There are many animals that are being put on display. Those animals are not life ones, but dead ones. According to Mrs Tan, most animals are found in Singapore dead quite a long time ago. Some of these animals can’t be found in Singapore again today as urbanization and development has occurred since then. I was amazed of the size and the breed of animals that are being found. For example, there was a huge turtle that was about one meter wide. There was even a fish that is 3 meter long! I was amazed that such large animals could be found in Singapore in the past. There was a question that popped into my mind. How are the animals being preserved till date? According to Mrs Tan, these animals are being spread with arsenic, a poisonous chemical. It was so poisonous that we cannot even touch those animals!
My group and I had learnt a lot from this sabbatical, from ocean and mangrove ecosystems, to prehistoric museum organisms. There are many organism relationships that we had learn : commensalisms, predation, mutualism and parasitism . In parasitism, it is a situation where an organism benefits but the other party get is being harmed or in another word, which one organism benefits at the expense of an organism of a different species. Let me give you a real life example, a mosquito and a human. When a mosquito bites a human for blood, the mosquito benefits by getting what it wants. But the human will feel itchy after that and may even contract dengue fever. In this way, humans are being harmed. Through this sabbatical we identified several alternative relationships, like mutualism and more. I could remember the relationship on parasitism very clearly as it was it happens to us very often like the mosquito and human example.
Through this sabbatical, my love for mother nature grew. I began to appreciate what is around me, appreciate the wonders of nature. I began to love animals more. I learnt that the biodiversity in Singapore is fast disappearing. Animals are getting smaller in size and numbers, all the forest and swamps are being burned and reclaim for urbanization without a second thought for the rich biodiversity we have here in Singapore. It is like oil that is slowly disappearing day by day. Soon, the biodiversity in Singapore will vanish. As a Singaporean, I have the responsibility to stop all these and conserve what remains here in Singapore. All in all, this is a meaningful and enriching sabbatical with I truly enjoy myself and learn something precious at the same time.
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