At the Pulai River estuary, hundreds of hectares of mangroves and a huge seagrass bed in the middle of the Johor Straits are about to make way for development.

Few picnickers would dare to plunge into the silty, smelly waters at Pantai Lido in Johor Bahru. For decades, the heavily populated city has been discharging pollutants directly into the Johor Straits, contaminating the waters with sewage, heavy metals, oil and all kinds of garbage.

But less than 50km away in the southeast corner of Johor, where the straits meet the open sea, the water condition is significantly different.

In fact, one will be amazed by the richness of the marine life that abounds in this area, and in particular, the seagrass bed over a kilometre in length and between 80-100m wide at Tanjung Kupang. It is arguably the largest seagrass bed in Peninsular Malaysia.