A View To A Thrill

Posted originally today on my Save Our Seas Blog

Until August arrived the manta season had started fairly bleak. Mantas can be found in these waters normally from early June. For the first time since I had started my work here, I had managed to secure enough funding to be in the field from mid July, and my volunteers and I were keen to make the most of this initiative and we were set to collect data from much earlier in the season.
The mantas however had other plans. Puerto Lopez sits amongst a range of low slung mountains that rise up somewhere along the road between the large industrial port of Manta near the middle of the country’s coastline and Ecuador’s second city Guayaquil some three hours to the south. This atypical topography attracts a thick blanket of cloud to the area during the winter months of June though October, a result of warm humid air mixing with the cold air generated by the Humboldt current running up from the south. One precursor for the arrival of the manta population is a band of cool water that hangs in this coastal zone for those months, sitting a comfortable but hardly tropical 21 to 24 degrees Celsius. This year though, by some quirk of Oceanographic trend, the skies were blue, and the water temps were up a massive 4 to 5 degrees. This was a disaster for our early start and the mantas stayed well away. We saw one solitary manta in the middle of July on one of our remote cameras placed on a cleaning station, and nothing more.
It was not until the 4th of August when mantas started to show regularly, and even then they frustrated our ID efforts by staying well away from divers. Fleeting glimpses seemed to be the order of the day before we eventually got our first ID shot on the 16th of August, more than a month after we began our field work. I felt particularly sad for my first dedicated volunteers Juliet Lennon and Natasha Snowden who put in hours of hard graft and only Juliet got some fleeting glimpses of our distant giants before she left. It is at times like these when you realise how fortunate we are when the mantas do eventually come. It is not by pure luck that this migration event happens, but an apparent melding of oceanographic elements that combine to set up perfect conditions for their presence, and it is the study of these elements that this project aims to identify.

I am overjoyed to report that now the mantas have arrived sporting full colours. Over the last week we have had some incredible encounters and our surface observations have seen numbers of mantas on the surface way off into the distance, as well as excellent activity on the cleaning stations.
We have recorded some 67 identifications over the last couple of weeks, many of those in the last few days, and we are currently processing those through our database to see how many of them are brand new individuals. With only one repeat sighting recorded since we started our database, we expect this number to be high. The next couple of weeks seem very promising for new ID’s
In my next blog I will be able to publish up to date ID figures, and perhaps allude to further fascinating information on this exciting population.

Inspiration...

It is not diving with sharks per se that inspires me about the human/shark relationship. It is the men and women who have developed their bond with the ocean to such an extent that they can happily become a part of it. Only from the viewpoint of within can you truly understand any kind of environment or situation. Walk a mile in [my] shoes...

Not for these free spirits the tumultuous clank and spume of scuba equipment, as divers using such machinery, we do not so much enter the marine world, as try clumsily to take our world down with us...and is a rebreather really a step away from that notion, or closer to it?

This article in the LA Times explains...

It's the Irish in them!

A shark that one of my groups sighted last week has been confirmed by the Irish Basking Shark Project as having been tagged on the 20th of April off the coast of Ireland. This is the first international re-sighting for that project for 2011.
The shark was sighted during difficult conditions. The week had been challenging with unseasonal brisk winds delivering a heavy swell, and a particularly inclement day at the beginning of the week had kept the food sources deep below the surface. Any shark sightings for the following three days had frustrated us buy showing only fleeting glimpses at numerous spots all around the coast of Coll.
Out of necessity, on day four, I sat atop the cairns of coll taking an unusual strategy for us of static coastal observations, with the chance that some of these fleeting glimpses develop into some prolonged feeding. I remember my teenage years spent angling, and know all too well that the number one law governing fish behaviour is sods law.
Only thirty minutes into my observation, this unmistakably large fin appeared on the surface very close to the coast, and continued to feed for a good 30 minutes within a tight pattern about the size of a football pitch.
Frustrating lack of phone signal meant that I could not let the boat know for about half an hour, and by the time they had headed south and turned about again, it was another hour before they got to the feeding area.

When the photographers got to the area, they could see that there was a very localised bloom of plankton, and also large numbers of lions mane jellyfish and also a lot of comb jellies. We have noticed that these two types of jellies seem to be present with feeding sharks and could be predating on the same types of plankton.
Alex Mustard was shooting some underwater shots for the 2020 Vision Project and managed to get a clear shot of the tag that was later confirmed with the Irish Basking Shark Project.

Such information is essential to understanding the lives of sharks and how we can best protect them. National legislation is only effective within that countries waters. Once the sharks leave sovereign waters, usually only a few miles from the coast, they can only be protected by international legislation, which is sparse, when it comes to sharks.

Shark Finners move from Costa Rica to Nicaragua..

The true scale of the shark finning problem peeked its head over the parapet this week with the news that efforts to prohibit shark finning operations from using Costa Rican docks has resulted, not in a reduction of shark finning activity, but the moving of docking operations into Nicaragua. The finners had used private docks in Costa Rica to land their catches, until authorities closed them down and forced them to use public docks, hence falling foul of regulation and the media. Now it seems the finning mafia are taking a stride ahead of the conservation movement by using docks in Nicaragua.

How do you stop water with a sieve? Read the full article here.

Of frogs and sharks...

...or how DNA research gives clues to the longevity of speciation and the subsequent effect in real terms of the loss of species.

Phew..after making that title I think I need to lie down. So, this article from Stony Brook University gives us an insight into a soon to be published paper in the jouirnal "Ecology Letters" which attempts to explain why it is that certain areas contain more species than others, despite having similar ecosystem characteristics; for example, some tropical rainforests outside of the Amazon basin have no more species than some sites in temperate North America. The reason for the high diversity in the Amazon is not due to the warm and humid conditions as we might expect, but the length of time that the species have been in the area, developing over an enormous time span greater than 50 million years. It seems the later in history that a colonisation occurs, the lower the species diversity will be in that region. Although this particular study used tree frogs as a study group, the report states that the findings could have implications for other species such as trees, birds and insects - and why indeed not for sharks?

This next report highlights the ability of DNA to pinpoint the home range of sharks when they are targetted and sold in the fin markets. By analysing DNA scientists have been able to identify a difference between sharks of the same species living along different continents. This allows the science and conservation community to identify shark fins sourced in world markets and identify whether these are being illegally sourced from protected regions.

There is a considerable link between the two articles. By trading strongly in low fecund species, we are not just risking the temporary absence of one or other type of shark, we are disturbing the development of species that has taken millions upon millions of years to occur. As we know, apex predators play a vital role in the trophic pyramid and so if we remove a key species, we are not just removing one organism from time, we are disturbing the building blocks of our most critical environment - the ocean. If that one building block took, let's say, 200 million years to develop, then how many blocks and mortar will fall around it, and how many millions of years of ecological constitution are we undoing? How serious, how long lasting, how never-mending will be the cascade?

A couple of nice basking shark video

Oooohhhh.....I can't wait....





Want to come too?

The wildest trip in the UK?

This warm weather is making my feet itch. It feels like it is the middle of summer and I should be loading my car up and heading off to Scotland already for the basking sharks. I have to pinch myself to remind me that is only April...still, it's only a handful of weeks before we will be up that way once again, on the beautiful coast of Mull and her surrounding islands, seeking out our photo-quarry, the mighty basking shark.

This year could see us having possibly the wildest trip known to the uk tourist. We will be camping on some nights to make the most of the location, the atmosphere, the heavy salt air, the clean washed seaweed that will tackle our toes as we land, and to be nearer to those leviathan shadows that haunt the coastline. It will be the anti-live-aboard. The rejection of luxury in exchange for the embrace of raw adventure.
Fade wicked sun, and let me be back in April, where I can imagine such magnificent things are still a while away.