I’ve never seen a whale shark before. The other day, as I was drying off on the top of the Ark Royal’s dhoni (a traditional Maldivian vessel) after a snorkel, a 6 meter whale shark came swimming into Hanifaru Bay, the small semi-enclosure on the southern edge of Hanifaru Lagoon. Within about a minute of it being spotted, there were dozens of cries of ‘whale shark! whale shark!’ emanating from all ten of the boats inside the football-field-sized bay. After another minute a swarm of snorkelers, fifty strong, was chasing the shark full speed out of the bay. I didn’t bother getting in.
Unfortunately, this scene has become a regular occurrence this year at Hanifaru. The main attraction on most days, however, is manta rays. Local fishermen have no doubt known about the phenomenon that occurs in the bay for decades, but it’s only recently been publicized. Baa Atoll, home of Hanifaru, is an immensely productive marine region. Large quantities of phytoplankton bloom between July and November, in turn providing food for zooplankton which make up the diet of the mantas. Thanks to the unique reef structure forming Hanifaru Bay and the combination of the monsoonal and lunar currents’ behavior, a confined area about the size of a football field can become a thick soup of zooplankton for anywhere from thirty minutes to six or seven hours.
As the currents collect and concentrate the plankton, mantas patrolling the surrounding waters come across the swarm one by one, following it into the bay as it’s coerced by the current. At first, two or three mantas begin barrel rolling. Their flat bodies suddenly expand as they open their gaping mouths to accommodate hundreds of gallons of plankton-rich water passing over their gill rakers each minute. The number of mantas seems to double and triple right before my eyes. A squadron of ten gracefully swoops into the bay in a chain, each about a foot above and two feet behind the manta in front. A group of three appears out of the gloomy water, then another, and another – mouths wide-open and cephalic fins unrolled to help channel the rich plankton soup into their mouths. Now they’re coming from all directions, returning from a lap around the bay or arriving from a more direct route over the reef crest from open water. I’ve landed myself right in the thickest patch of plankton, and mantas seem to be materializing before my eyes. Closer to the surface, they perform their graceful loop-de-loops, while a few meters down they seem to be doing laps across this tasty patch of water.
All of a sudden, the feeding dynamic drastically changes. The mantas making laps begin to take wider turns, creating an oval feeding pattern, and eventually a circular pattern. Those doing barrel rolls stop and join the others below, spiraling faster and faster, and plunging to the floor of the bay, 60 feet below. The vortex grows as mantas continue to arrive in droves, and within just a few minutes I’m looking down at a hurricane of black wings and giant open mouths feasting on a thick slurry of copepods.
Or at least this would have been the scene last year in Hanifaru. What’s new to the equation in 2010 is tourists: over a hundred of them at a time in an area about 200 feet long and fifty feet wide. As the first mantas arrive, they’re surrounded by twenty snorkelers wearing bright yellow lifejackets from a nearby resort. As they begin barrel rolling, seven divers from a safari boat (a dive liveaboard) arrive down below, blowing bubbles up and into the mantas, dispersing the plankton that they’ve come to feed on. One manta becomes aggravated by the bubbles and leaves in a hurry, kicked by startled snorkelers on the way. Fearing that the remaining manta will leave soon as well, the three photographers in the group of divers struggle to get their perfect photos. They get closer and closer to the manta, bubbles flowing and strobes firing. As the manta goes into a barrel roll, one photographer intercepts to get the ‘money shot’ of its open mouth, but it’s too late for the manta to maneuver to avoid collision, and it smashes head-first into the diver before taking off at full speed. This is a quiet day at Hanifaru. There’s no mass-feeding event; only a handful of mantas have come today, and for each one there are about fifteen eager tourists.
On a day with a hundred mantas you can expect to see mass chaos. When the feeding begins there may only be three or four boats in the bay, but within minutes they’ve called and radioed all of the boats and resorts in the surrounding area. Ten minutes into the feeding there are anywhere between six and twelve boats in this tiny bay. There’s no saying if the feeding will last one hour or six, so the operators are eager to get their paying customers in the water. They drive their boats directly over the center of the bay to drop divers and snorkelers – exactly where mantas are barrel rolling and swimming on the surface. Now the mantas have to either avoid or tolerate walls of bubbles created by forty or fifty divers as they attempt to feed. At the surface their feeding is stunted by what has become a ceiling of yellow-lifejacketed holiday snorkelers. As the feeding dies down or the tourists become bored – after all this is just another optional day trip at many of the surrounding luxury resorts – the boats crisscross the bay to retrieve their guests. Because it’s so difficult to maneuver the dhonis in the confined bay, some will literally back up, propeller first, over the feeding site to pick up their divers and snorkelers rather than having them swim the ten meters to where the boat was anchored. With divers swimming just a few meters below the surface and mantas unexpectedly surfacing during a barrel roll, it’s a wonder there haven’t been any serious accidents yet.
But perhaps even more important than the safety concerns is the question of sustainable tourism. Eco-tourism has become all the rage these days, but what is happening in Hanifaru Bay is the furthest thing from sustainable. Government regulations decree a maximum of five boats and eighty divers or snorkelers in the bay at any given time, but there’s absolutely no enforcement of these guidelines and the number of boats and tourists in the bay is double that limit on a regular basis. The fear is that the increasing tourism pressure on the bay will disrupt this unique feeding aggregation by either physically hindering the mantas from feeding, or by creating an association between the bay and harassment by tourists, dissuading the mantas from returning.
Some might suggest shutting down the bay entirely to tourism, but I would disagree. As I’ve said many times, I believe the only way we can make real changes to how people view and interact with the oceans is if they feel some sort of personal and emotional connection. For the everyday people who will never be in a position to interact with the oceans, I believe films can begin to build that connection and evoke emotional responses. Hanifaru, on the other hand, is a far better alternative. The bay is basically an open aquarium where hundreds of the most famous charismatic megafauna come to feed on a relatively predictable schedule. The bay is extremely accessible, and there are a handful of luxury resorts just half an hour away by speedboat. I’ve never heard of a better situation to expose hundreds, even thousands of people to an event that could impact the way they view and interact with the marine environment. If done right, tourism at Hanifaru could be an incredible educational opportunity, and remember that the people staying in these luxury resorts are likely in that group of consumers that have the greatest impact on the environment today.
I spent ten days aboard the Ark Royal with Michael AW to observe and capture the Hanifaru phenomenon, and unfortunately we were one of about eight safari boats anchored outside the bay for the week. After my time with Michael I hopped over to the research side of things with Guy Stevens of the Save our Seas Foundation, the first scientist to describe and study the unique feeding behavior in Hanifaru Bay. Guy has built up a photo identification database of all the mantas that visit Hanifaru, along with other sites around the Maldives over the last six years. By monitoring how the manta population uses the bay, Guy hopes to determine the importance of the site both to the most frequent users and as a seasonal feeding ground to a more general population of mantas in the Maldives. By understanding the site’s importance, we’ll have a better idea of the impact that disrupting the animals’ natural feeding patterns here could have on the population as a whole.
