World Ocean Day 2008 - More than the Big Blue
Published 9th March 2008
More than the Big Blue
Celebrate the Ocean TODAY and help Save Our Seas
There is far more to the big blue than meets the eye. In today’s fast pace life that struggles to find the time to look past the obvious, many people believe that if the ocean looks blue, rises and falls with the tides and continues to roll out its waves all is as it should be. Sadly, they could not be further from the truth, as our oceans and their inhabitants are in big trouble and ocean environments around the world including South Africa’s two oceans are threatened primarily due to over-fishing, unsustainable coastal development, climate change and pollution. Despite covering more of planet Earth than earth itself less than 1% of our oceans are protected in reserves, by comparison 10% of land is protected by parks.
To those who do not know the ocean and have never donned mask and snorkel to discover the wonder below the waves our ocean realm is a deep, dark and menacing place. This World Ocean’s Day challenge yourself to transform your thoughts about the marine realm, which covers more than 70% of our planet’s surface, to that of a beautiful playground of life worthy of respect and protection. Rethink the image of sharks, for they are not the man-eaters of myth and legends but top predators in the ocean food chain that regulates the populations of species below them. As sharks’ numbers are plummeting to the point of extinction a cascading effect is threatening to tip the balance of our oceans into a negative state.
Celebrate the Ocean TODAY - Three ways you can help save our seas:
• Choose sustainable seafood - always think about the seafood you order/buy
• Don’t litter - it adds to marine pollution
• Rethink your perceptions about sharks – they are vital to the health of our oceans
For more information about the marine realm, sharks and rays, what you can do to help and why maintaining a healthy ocean is so important visit www.saveourseas.com
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Echoes of Times Past on Aldabra Atoll
Published on the 6th May 2008
This is the final posting from conservation biologist and photographer Cheryl-Samantha Owen who has been working with the Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) on the Aldabra Atoll to document the abunance of large shark species.
The rough seas of the monsoon season can make it difficult to get off the Aldabra atoll but the Save Our Seas team found themselves wishing for even tougher conditions, making it impossible
Standing closer to the bow than the rest of my expedition team, which sat huddled in wet t-shirts at the back, the ocean’s salty spray lashed at my eyes with each breaker that washed over us and I could see every wave that loomed ahead, magnified ten fold in my blurry vision, before we climbed it. Our Seychellois captain had many years of ocean tales to recount and I assumed he could see more sea than I. While rubbing his eyes in a futile attempt to keep them dry, however, he announced: “You never can tell which waves the boat will glide down or which ones we will fly off”, and my knuckles paled a shade whiter. We flew off quite a few, but considering the battle between the current and its opposing 35knot southeast wind staging all around us the four-hour journey from the Aldabra Atoll to Assumption Island went relatively smoothly.
During this monsoon season research scientists on Aldabra are often unable to get safely off the island for months at a time, and watching Aldabra gradually fade into the blue, I couldn’t help but wish I were one of them. How do you breath in – freeze frame the memories of an expedition to a place so far removed from most places on Earth today that it feels like another, forgotten, world? More importantly, how do you take Aldabra to the rest of the world? The Save Our Seas Foundation has joined forces with the Aldabra Foundation to do just this. Our expedition footage and photographs will be become part of an exhibition, travelling to cities worldwide in an effort to raise awareness of the extraordinary natural paradise that still exists on Aldabra and in its surrounding waters.
Back on Aldabra I realized as I watched a little blonde 4 year old, the daughter of Aldabra’s research officer, splashing in the sandy shallows with blacktip reef sharks swimming nonchalantly past her, that this is how it is meant to be. Day by day the atoll revealed more and more of its treasures to us, and with them uncovered a forgotten past that has existed here, unaffected by human influence, since the age of reptiles, millions of years ago. That existence, which once belonged to every tropical reef and mangrove forest on earth, still remains on Aldabra today. Over time these portholes back in time have been narrowed down to a few fragmented protected areas, and most people will never experience first hand planet Earth in all its glory revelling in a life undisrupted by humans.
Even though statistics show that New Yorkers bite more people than sharks, sharks have suffered terribly at the hands of man, and with more than 100 million killed each year, we are busy wiping a group of animals that has survived since before our existence to extinction. The world needs people to appreciate the intrinsic beauty of sharks and their absolute necessity for maintaining a healthy ocean, and I hope that what we found and have brought back from Aldabra will inspire people to go against the ingrained media driven perception of sharks.
We went to Aldabra to document the abundance of large shark species. What we found in a place termed ‘the most inhospitable place on earth’ was one of the most hospitable places in the sea for inshore shark species. Inside the lagoon and fringing reef the blacktip reef sharks proliferate in high numbers – they were everywhere on all our inshore dives. Given time, the sicklefin lemon and gray reef could also be counted on for an appearance, both in the lagoon channels and on the reefs, and on a couple of occasions we were graced with the presence of elegant silvertip and whitetip sharks.
Outside the protection of the reef our search for pelagic shark species revealed empty blue water, and considering the amount of bait we used, which can be detected by sharks miles down current, it looks as if they have vanished from the surrounding waters. Reports of tigers sharks in the lagoon haunted us day and night but these gray ghosts with their vibrant tiger stripes eluded us. We cannot say with certainty there are none left, perhaps those that have survived the long lines of baited hooks in the surrounding waters were hunting turtles in the more remote and inaccessible parts of the lagoon or perhaps they were further a-field; Tiger sharks have been recorded migrating between Australia and South Africa. Another explanation is that they are active more at night on Aldabra, but even if one of these possible theories is correct the numbers are still drastically low. As for the other oceanic species, such as oceanic white tip and the great hammerhead, there were none there for us to photograph.
The words of greatest naturalist George B Schaller could never be more poignant than in this day and age: ‘Pen and camera are weapons against oblivion; they can create awareness for that which may soon be lost forever.’ I hope that the images we have come away with of the magic we did find, of a land and ocean living as it is meant to be, will help to fill in and repopulate the blue voids of the places that have lost their life.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment, and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition.
Lured Below Into Aldabra’s Drowned Forest
Published on the 21st April, 2008Frigatebirds are most famous for the crimes they commit against the smaller sized red-footed booby, the Western Indian Ocean’s version of the gannet seabird. The sound of boobies fleeing in terror (or anger) from the frigatebirds has become very familiar to me on Aldabra, be it on land or sea, as the frigatebirds relentlessly chase the boobies until they are forced to give up their hard earned fish catches. Only when they land back at their nesting site in the mangroves is it game over for the frigates and the boobies have won their own fish for the day. Ninety percent of Aldabra’s lagoon is fringed with a thick 1.5kms wide belt of almost impenetrable mangrove forest that grows as high as 10m in places, which provides a safe nesting haven for both the firgatebird and the booby.
The mangroves of Aldabra have beckoned us to explore them since our first dip into their world when we drift dived up the Pass Dubois channel into the opening of the lagoon. This magical ecosystem lives across several worlds, transforming with each tide it survives a mixture of fresh and salt water combined with both dry and watery hours. We ventured into the pristine forest on a high incoming tide and for the first time I was seriously torn between donning my fins or balancing on the boat to photograph the nesting bird colonies in the tall (Rhizpophora) mangrove canopy above.
The different hues of the blue lagoon and the emerald green of the mangrove foliage glowed under that beautiful golden light that only appears in the hour before dusk, but the lure of the drowned forest and the multitude of fish sheltering amongst its labyrinth of buttress and knee roots was too strong and I slipped quietly into their world underwater. It felt wilder – more Aldabra somehow than anywhere else on the Atoll. Large expanses of mud and sand coat a floor upon which a flooded forest with intricate cathedral like structures is built. The tide was at its highest, the water level reached up above the roots covering the trees themselves, and enabling us to swim through their enchanting channels under sunken branches and into caves with black, muddy sink holes.
While the current was still racing down the main channel I hugged the tree roots and toyed with images of a party of black tip sharks lurking in the shadows, while fish as large as 2metres flew past into the main stream. This is what a healthy mangroves system is meant to look like. Thick trees speckled above with the white and black of nesting seabirds, dotted below with a rainbow of fish species and guarded by a healthy population of black tip reef and sicklefin lemon sharks. The only missing character was the elusive tiger shark, but once upon a time his distinctive stripes would have mingled with the pattern of roots here. Once the current subsided we finned down the main channel into an area with a cavity along the floor that forms a pool of water at low tide where fish get trapped. Even on the tail end of a high tide the pool was teaming with numerous fish species in great numbers, turtles swimming in all directions, rays cruising past and one extremely large brindle bass smirked from below a large coral outcrop.
Mangroves the world over are essential for the health of the ocean, provide a source of income for coastal people, and protect coastlines from erosion, surge storms, and tsunamis. They support a unique ecosystem and provide a habitat for a wide spectrum of animals, from adult and juvenile fish to sponges, crabs and shrimps. Shrimps use the muddy substrate as their home, and sadly mangrove forests all over the world have been totally destroyed, cleared for intensive prawn farms. (So think again when you see prawns on the menu.) Mangroves desperately need protection – in recent times over half of the world’s mangroves have been lost. Thankfully the mangrove forests here on Aldabra are protected and photographing in them with the sun percolating through the leaves and between the roots is a rare experience. As the tide dropped around us their fascinating aerial root systems were uncovered, giving us our cue to head back to base before we were left with a dry lagoon and a heavy tin boat to carry.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition
Slow and steady, like the tortoise and the rail
Published on the 10th April, 2008
Conservation biologist and photographer Cheryl-Samantha Owen is working with the Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) on the Aldabra Atoll to document the abundance of large shark species in the surrounding waters.
Like the hare, the Aldabra White-Throated Rail, cannot fly. It has large wings, a characteristic contrary to expectations of flightless bird forms, but usually only fans them wide in a move to make itself look larger than life when defending its nest and chicks. Like the hare, the Rail can also leap - another use for its wings, but it is has long been considered the last flightless bird of the Western Indian Ocean Islands. Considering the fame attributed to the dodo, a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, which man pushed to extinction in the 17th Century, the very much alive Rail deserves its share of the limelight.
Over the years humans and introduced predators such as cats, which have since been eradicated on some islands, have caused local extinctions and range reductions and today two subspecies survive, one on Madagascar and one on three of Aldabra’s islands. I met my first Rail shortly after arriving here on Picard Island, which thanks to a re-introduction of the species in 1999, is now running with rails, but I didn’t really get to know the Rail until we rode the rough seas to the northern side of the Atoll and camped in a place affectionately known as ‘middle camp’ a few days ago. Situated near the mouth of Pass Houareau in between the islands of Malabar and Grande Terre is a little wooden hut with a corrugated tin roof that crawls with coconut crabs scratching their claws across the tin, which screeches like nails down a chalkboard, all night, and clinks with dimorphic egrets catching insects in the guttering in the early hours of the morning. Sleep was not a priority anyhow as we were there to photograph the marine life of the mangrove forests and the frigatebirds and boobies nesting in foliage above. 
A tropical down pour on our first morning at middle camp, forced us to shift gears slightly as the bad light rendered photography underwater in the dark mangrove forests impossible and I was left photographing this little bird, endemic to Aldabra on the coral rubble around the camp. Their breast musculature is simply too small for them to engage enough power for level flight, and they evolved on Aldabra in the absence of any predators as ground foragers without any apparent need to fly. Flightlessness does come with perks, as flight muscles are amongst the most energetically demanding organs in a bird, thus lacking them has energetic advantages, and one theory is that the original impetus for them becoming flightless may have stemmed from their need to store fat during periods of scarcity – making flight difficult.
Another character joined us on Malabar that has kept us company since our Save Our Seas Foundation expedition team first impressed footprints on this shore here. Slowly and steadily four elephantine legs covered in tough leather and etched with rough scales climbed over the crest of the beach slope from seemingly out of the blue and headed directly towards my toes. Aldabra’s very own giant tortoises are almost as old as the Atoll itself. They are the old men of the island, the equivalent of sharks in the marine world; they too survived millions of years prior to man’s arrival, and only thanks to the difficulty sailors had in penetrating this coral limestone fortress and the foresight of early conservationists do these herbivorous reptiles still dominate Aldabra’s living natural history museum today. Elsewhere they have gone the way of the dodo.
Like the fabled Tortoise this Aldabra fossil has so far won the race for survival and,
in our camp at least, beat the Rail to eating most of our food leftovers. Despite the Rail’s beautiful rusty red and forest green feathers its attention span and dedication to eating paled in comparison to that of the tortoise’s, who sat wafting onion breath around our camp.
I hope that slow and steady will prove one day to win the global conservation race, but now we need to accelerate our pace in working together to help save our seas, especially the sharks who, although they have lived on our planet for millions of years, are struggling in this day and age to survive in the wake of their decimation by our species. We did eventually leave the tortoise and the rail and spent two magical afternoons on a high incoming tide photographing the mangrove forests, a shark and fish nursery ground that is crucial for the repopulation of our oceans.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF and the marine environment.
Aldabra has the feelling of a true Jurassic Park
Published on the 3rd April, 2008
Conservation biologist and photographer Cheryl-Samantha Owen is working with the Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) on the Aldabra Atoll to document the abundance of large shark species in the surrounding waters.
Watching giant tortoises and gargantuan crabs crawl along the high tide mark scavenging washed up offerings from the sea, while shark fins slice through the surface of the deadly calm water beyond I feel as if I am sitting in a true Jurassic Park. This is after all, one of the Indian Ocean’s most remote islands and as such is relatively untouched by humans.
The geological nature of Aldabra has enabled a complete, isolated ecosystem to develop, incorporating all the key tropical marine habitats and processes. The volcano that became Aldabra emerged roughly 20 million years ago; a massive seamount rising from the sea floor it is the island’s foundation. As the volcano ceased to be active it gradually subsided and the coral growth on the 35km wide limestone ring maintained contact with the ocean’s surface, leaving a huge circular reef structure. This process is what made Aldabra the World’s largest raised coral atoll, standing today about 8m above sea level.
Aldabra itself consists of four islands, Picard, Polymnie, Malabar and Grande Terre, encircling a vast central lagoon that fills and empties via four channels twice daily, leaving 80% of the lagoon dry each low tide. Picard is where the Aldabra research station is located and where we are based.
We have dived in the main channel, between Picard and Polymnie, to film and photograph the abundant coral life there, but since our first fast pace drift dive in Pass Dubois, a smaller channel between Picard and Grande Terre, which swept us into the opening of the Atoll’s azure lagoon, we have synchronised our dives with slack tide. With approximately 60% of the lagoon’s tidal flow passing through main channel alone the flow can reach a rate of 6knots; it is a dark blue river in the ocean and not one in which I want to get caught diving on an outgoing tide as its current will see me joining the lemurs in Madagascar!
This UNESCO World Heritage Site, since 1982, was once a well-known location for large shark species, but with heavy fishing pressure, particularly from long liners, in the Western Indian ocean linked to the huge trade in shark fins we want to know if man has spoilt even this most remote of locations. Has the shark population, especially the large species such as tiger, oceanic-white-tips and great hammerhead sharks, here been decimated as it has in all our oceans? The deep ocean surrounding Aldabra makes it possible for us to look for pelagic (oceanic) species of sharks, but they have eluded our cameras. Even the majestic tiger shark, which should be here, has not unveiled its whereabouts.
Thus far we have photographed and filmed an abundant population of reef and inshore sharks including, black tip reef, grey reef, sicklefin lemon and tawny nurse sharks, and I have been lucky enough to free dive with and photograph one of my favourite shark species, the silver tip. As their name suggests their fins, especially the pectoral fins, are splashed with a prominent silver sheen. Shy at first with me in the water she soon lost her inhibitions and became a very fast and inquisitive subject. They can reach up to 3 metres but we are only seeing small ones here of 1.2 metres in length, the fully-grown adults are probably in deeper water – if they have not all been fished out. 
Spending so much time underwater in the protected reefs that encircle and penetrate into the heart of Aldabra it is refreshing to see that exuberant coral growth and profuse fish populations still exist here despite the rise in water temperatures that destroyed 40% of Adlabra’s corals. Co-incidentally, I am here in the year marked as the International Year of the Reef exactly ten years since this coral bleaching event. Reading a recent study of coral reef organisms, that covered everything from microbes to sharks, I can understand why the Aldabra reefs are so healthy. The answer is simple; they are teaming with reef sharks. Predators accounted for 85% of the total fish weight in the study’s pristine reef site, a complete reversal of life on reefs across the world today where most of the sharks have ended up dead on rows of baited hooks and where the reefs are depauperate of life.
Sharks are essential to coral reef health because they are the pinnacles of the food chain, and if they are removed from the ecosystem the whole ocean tilts off balance. 
Sharks have a very slow reproductive rate and do not recover well from exploitation. Over fishing sharks sets off a domino effect throughout the reef: fewer sharks leads to an increase in their prey, large carnivorous fish such as grouper, which in turn decrease the number of important plant-grazing herbivorous fish, such as parrotfish. Once this happens the reef is in danger of shifting from coral to algae domination and it is less able to withstand other human disturbances such as rises in water temperatures.
At the end of a long dive this morning photographing the coral gardens I was greeted by a huge yet weary lemon shark. Perhaps one day this regal predator will be given the respect it deserves as guardian of the reefs. Until then at least the inshore waters here are a welcome sanctuary.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF and the marine environment.