Weekend Argus, 27th April, Aldabra Journal Part 08
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
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Weekend Argus, 20th April, Aldabra Journal Part 07
Frigatebirds 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. 90% 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
Weekend Argus 13th April, Aldabra Journal Part 06
The Tortoise and the Rail went to Sea
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.
…Stories from Aldabra’s mangroves next week, meanwhile, visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition
Weekend Argus 6th April, Aldabra Journal Part 05
Lying in Wait For Oceanic Sharks But All We Find is Emptiness
Our fresh fruit supply has dwindled to nothing, the last extremely over-ripe banana was cooked a few days ago, the Seychellois school kids who won a privileged visit to Aldabra have wiped out the chocolate supply from the island tuck shop (a sight I foresaw but was too slow to beat them to it), the bait is smelling extremely rotten, and someone forgot the energy bars… but we are all talking big fish, photography and watching new footage every evening – so we are still full steam ahead keeping our fins wet and on the look out for Aldabra’s large shark species.
Co-incidentally I am here in 2008, the International Year of the Reef, ten years after the record high sea temperatures and coral bleaching event, when the coral polyps lost their symbiotic zooxanthellae, that wiped out 40% of Aldabra’s corals. On our mission to film and photograph the marine life and shark species in particular we have been diving on fringing reefs along the rim and in coral gardens up the Atoll’s indigo channels almost to the azure heart of the lagoon. Coral reefs are the most diverse and productive ecosystem on our planet, far more so than tropical rainforests, and as such are critical indicators of the global marine ecosystem’s health. Despite slopes and valleys of coral rubble, the aftermath of coral bleaching, it is refreshing to see and photograph healthy coral reefs, teaming with a profusion of fish, boasting more than 200 coral species and bursting with new life. It is recovering well from the 1998 mortality.
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 and why they are proving so resilient. 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 depleted 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 of a domino effect throughout the reef: fewer sharks leads to an increase in their prey, large carnivorous fish such as grouper, who 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 on the reefs I was greeted by a gigantic 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.
Aldabra’s formation as a massive seamount rising from the dark depths of the ocean floor means there is a sharp gradient along its edge, allowing deep open water to lick the Atoll’s outer rim. With the deep open ocean comes the large pelagic (oceanic) species of sharks, and we only had to venture out to sea 2km on the other side of the rim to enter waters where we thought we had a good chance of finding such species. Despite gargantuan efforts to attract them, our cameras came back with empty memory cards and blank videos. Out there sharks such as oceanic white tip, tiger, and great hammerheads are beyond the protection of Aldabra’s reefs and vulnerable to fishing in almost every part of the ocean they travel. The big blue is looking very much like an empty ocean.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition
Weekend Argus 30th March, Aldabra Journal Part 04
Waiting for the Big Sharks to Show Up
Our life on Aldabra revolves around the turning of the tides. Each evening we sit with tide tables, scheming plans for the next day in between bouts of discussing how we can inspire the world to care about plummeting shark populations, and determining what time we need to leave in order to make it over the reef. At low tide the water is too shallow for the boat to pass over the reef so we must wait for the tide to turn or catch it before the level drops too low. This morning we were up before dawn with all our equipment lining the shoreline ready to carry aboard, but we had miss-calculated, underestimated the depth and our weathered boatman said it was too late, “we will not be leaving for another six hours.”
Since arriving on the Atoll we have done a series of recci dives to get a feel for the underwater topography of the Atoll and the marine life in general. Our first dive was a fast paced 2knot drift dive in Pass Dubois, one of the smaller channels situated in between Picard and Grande Terre, which swept us into the opening of the Atoll’s azure lagoon. Aldabra itself consists of four islands encircling a tidal lagoon, Picard, Polymnie, Malabar and Grande Terre. Picard is where the Aldabra research station is located and where we wake up, go to sleep and are fed like royalty by the resident Seychellois chef, Grand Terre, as the name suggests, is the largest island.
Yesterday, we explored the main channel for the first time and with approximately 60% of the lagoon’s tidal flow passing through it at a rate of 6knots it is not the channel to get caught diving in on an outgoing tide, else the current might see me joining the lemurs in the next Madagascar film sequel!
So far the only shark characters that have joined us have been our friendly black tip reef, sicklefin lemon, and tawny nurse sharks, though they are extremely difficult to photograph and film as they are too scared to come in close enough. These species are inshore reef sharks and, as expected, we have been seeing them on most dives. In our quest to find the large shark species we have attached two baiting stations that are creating an odor corridor of fish smells irresistible to any shark that catches a whiff. Once a shark picks up the scent of chummed mackerels and tuna oil it will follow the ripe-scented slick with its extraordinary sensory system all the way back to the source – us and our perforated drum stuffed to the brim with delicacies, anchored to a boulder and suspended in the water column by a red buoy. One baiting station sits in the Pass Dubois channel and the second in a productive section on the outer edge reef. No large sharks have thus far found us or visa-versa, though in the main channel SOSF’s HD video cameraman Dan spotted a great hammerhead, which turned tail in terror at the sight of us.
The large potato bass with expressions akin to dopey puppy dogs, throw their weight around at the bait stations, and although they do their best, unsuccessfully, to get to the fish inside the drum they normally resort to attacking the flash strobes on my camera’s underwater housing. When we are not in the water we have a remotely operated camera sending images to a laptop; at the moment it is serving its apprenticeship with the blacktips in the shallows outside, but we hope to move it to deeper waters soon. There is something fishy in the air and it’s more than the smell of chum slick in our hair, but the SOSF team is determined to find and film whatever sharks are out there.
Visit http://www.saveourseas.com to learn more about SOSF, the marine environment and to read my daily blog of the Aldabra Expedition