Tag Archive
Scientists and Scuba Divers Working Together to Save Cocos Island’s Spectacular Marine Life
By Todd Steiner, Executive Director of Turtle Island Restoration Network Twice each year, for the past seven years, I have made the 20-hour trip by boat to Cocos Island, 350 miles from the Costa Rican mainland. This journey is well-worth the effort - Jacques Cousteau described Cocos Island as the most beautiful island in the world, and I would have to agree. At this remote location, my organization, Turtle Island Restoration Network, and our partners have established an active citizen science project through which divers and scientists work together to study one of the most biologically-rich ocean ecosystems left on the planet. [caption id="attachment_1380" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Cocos sea turtle, photo by George Duffield"][/caption] I'm heading back to Cocos in April, and for the first time, people with no diving background will have the chance to join me - to tag and monitor sea turtles and even take a journey in the DeepSee Submersible to see some of the deepest reefs on earth. The deep reefs are just one of Cocos Island's wonders. A shallow fringing reef encircles the island's bays and then the seafloor drops sharply. The unique confluence of ocean countercurrents, wind currents, and underwater mountains combines to create an ecosystem that supports one of the most amazing displays of marine life on the planet. [caption id="attachment_1379" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Cocos scalloped hammerhead, photo by George Duffield"][/caption] Hundreds of scalloped hammerhead sharks spend their days being "cleaned" by the butterfly and angelfish that pick parasites from around their gills. Also regularly seen are whitetip reef sharks resting on the sand or hunting in packs in the shallow coral reefs at night. Cocos' abundant marine wildlife has made the region a magnet for scientists and scuba enthusiasts, who often rank the waters as one of the top ten diving spots on the planet. Yet despite its designation as a Costa... More »
Shifting Baselines
Our dear friend, the webmaster for Undercurrent has been complaining about his empty blog queue. Burt and I have been busy with personal stuff rather than the scuba world because we just moved across the US to a new home. But, I haven't written a blog in months, so I thought I would write about something personal. Here's the story. We're decorating our new home. It's been like Christmas for the past week as we unpacked cartons of things not seen for nearly a decade. The last few boxes moved into our storage locker directly from our first Mexico incarnation, when we lived south of Cancun from the early 1970s through the late 1980s. One of the largest boxes contained quite a few non-PC items in today's world: two hawksbill turtle shells, an impressive shark's jaw (probably grey reef), two green turtle skulls, one with the lower jaw intact, two meter-plus-long bills from saw tooth sharks, numerous other marine-related vertebra, and one dolphin skull with upper bill. We found most of the parts while beach combing or snorkeling, and I have little remorse about having kept them. But we did buy the shark's jaw and saw tooth bills from fishermen back in the '70s. We thought they were very cool and displayed them on our living room wall. From my 2012 perspective these remnants of endangered species make me very sad and have no place in our home. Around 1978 or so, a group of shark fishers moved into our little village, which was located a few kilometers south of Cancun. Before dawn they took small skiffs out beyond the reef to recover the night's catch and reset their long lines. For about six months they pulled in almost every species of shark that existed in the Caribbean, the prize being half... More »
Working to Protect Marine Ecosystems: Oregon Bans Shark Fin Trade
In June 2011, Oregon passed legislation that prohibits the distribution and possession of shark fins within its state. Oregon House Representative Brad Witt, House District 31, sponsored House Bill 2838, which declares that an individual may not "possess, sell or offer for sale, trade or distribute a shark fin" within the state. Bill 2838 effectively closed a loophole that existed in Oregon state law, which prohibited the practice of "shark finning" within state waters but did not address the possession, distribution or trade of shark fins. House Bill 2838 prohibits such activity and effectively clarifies the rules adopted to prevent the establishment of a shark finning industry within Oregon. Shark finning is the process of removing the dorsal, pectoral, pelvic, anal, and tail fins of a shark. After all of a shark's fins and its tail are cut off, the rest of the shark is discarded back into the ocean. The shark is then left to survive without any of its limbs, which often results in starvation, suffocation and eventually death. In 2010, nearly 73 million sharks were killed as a result of shark finning. Sharks' slow reproduction rates raise many concerns over the survival of many shark species. Sustained growth in the demand for shark fins, which are used in traditional Chinese shark fin soup, may deplete worldwide shark populations and leave marine ecosystems without an important natural predator. Representative Witt's bill follows the passage of Hawaiian Senate Bill 2169, which also prohibits the sale, distribution, possession or trade of shark fins within the island state. Guam, Chile, the Bahamas and Washington State have already approved similar legislation. California [passed! -- editor] and the Northwest provinces of Canada are currently considering adopting shark finning laws as well. In 2012, Taiwan will move to ban shark finning at sea, and it will be... More »
Some Good News: Raja Ampat Big-Fish Now Thriving
I heard from a few people who thought that my blog about illegal fishing Komodo National Park was depressing. I agree. If we can't protect marine life in one of the world's most iconic parks, is there any hope? Burt and I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, especially for the two years we have been living in Indonesia consulting with Conservation International. Our primary focus has been exploring new sites and photographing marine life in Raja Ampat, which has, in case you haven't read a dive publication in the last 5 years, more species of fish and coral than any other tropical reef system on the planet (up to 1352 fish species and still counting!). We've been back a few weeks from our last R4 trip of the season ("ampat" means "four" in Bahasa Indonesia), a place where there are still new reefs to discover, new thrills to experience. Even though we wrote the guide to diving in R4, on this latest trip we dived several new (to us) sites. We concentrated mostly of on the Dampier Strait, perhaps the first area in R4 to be dived by tourists who began arriving and staying in primitive scuba camps about 15 years ago. The most amazing thing about these new sites was the fish. It's hard to imagine what Raja's reef were like about 10 years ago when the first tourist divers saw them, but believe it or not, there's a lot of evidence that fish counts have risen steadily during this time. [caption id="attachment_704" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Schools of bigger fish now thriving in Raja Ampat"][/caption] Now I'm not talking just your usual (for R4) masses of fusiliers and surgeonfish. I'm talking a reef where hundreds of tuna flashed around making "fish thunder" (cavitation) as they were chased by meter-long Spanish... More »
Paper Parks?
The text message came in about 9 AM a few Sundays ago. It was too early in the day to receive bad news, and just early enough to ruin my day. Essentially it was a call for help issued by one of the day boat operators in Komodo National Park. It seems that despite the area's status as a national park (and a World Heritage Site), nearly two decades of conservation work were being challenged by fishermen who had cast nets on two of Komodo's most prolific reefs. Where were the authorities, where were the patrol boats that were supposed to stop illegal fishing within park boundaries? No one seemed to know. A little background on Komodo and how it came to be one of the world's premier dive destinations: I believe Valerie and Ron Taylor had already dived Komodo, but few other western photojournalists had been there when we went on our first exploratory dive trip in 1992. Back then Komodo was hard to access and the facilities were far below basic. The main reason we endured the first trip (and eagerly came back for more) was that Komodo is one of the few places in the world where divers can experience two very different marine environments. The northern part of the park borders the Pacific with it's clear, warm waters and lush reefs. Southern Komodo abuts the Indian Ocean. The water is cooler, richer, and so packed with invertebrates and fish life it still amazes us even after more than 1000 dives in south Komodo. During our initial survey we wanted to photograph the difference between the two habitats, and so we motored toward the southern border of the park. The wind was raging in the channel between Komodo and Rinca, the park's two largest islands, but the current was with... More »
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