Endangered Species

It seems like if it’s rare or endangered, it’s an aphrodisiac to someone somewhere.  Rhino horns, sea cucumbers, and, today's lesson: sharks.  Sharks are increasingly threatened by the testosterone-driven demand for shark fins.  Today, I learned of a particularly insidious way to catch sharks.  Build a box of slatted wood, fill it with fish, attach a solar-powered, floating radio transmitter to it, toss it into the Ecuadorian current, let it float to sea for a few days, and then, using the signal emitted from the transmitter, surround the box’s location with a large (and I mean large) net, and pull it shut.  Inside the net, you’ll find lots of frustrated sharks, attracted to the box of fish yet unable to break inside to claim their reward.  Instead, they are hauled out of the water, their fins are sliced off, and their now mutilated bodies are tossed back into the sea (fodder for the sharks coming late to the party).

How did I learn this?  On our way to dive the channel between the Galapagos islands of Baltra and North Seymour, our dive boat abruptly cut its engines, and one of the boat’s crew jumped overboard to cut the transmitter of such an arrangement free of the box.  Fishing like this is illegal in the marine preserve that surrounds the Galapagos, and the trap/transmitter combination had likely drifted, lost, from the mainland of Ecuador.  The owner had conveniently etched his boat’s number and, of all things, his cell phone number, into the glass cover.  When our Capitan called him, he let us know we could keep the transmitter.  I’m not sure what our dive boat will do with it; at worst, it’s an interesting souvenir for the wall.

Diving was amazing; after a brief checkout dive to recall such near-lost skills as replacing a flooded mask and returning a lost regulator to the mouth, Bill, Della, and I dropped 40 feet below the surface to be surrounded by white-tipped (non-aggressive) sharks, all manner of rays, needlefish, starfish, and eels, and large schools of surgeon fish, damselfish, and various other fishes.   Here's Della, at about 35 feet underwater. 

Being underwater is, always, an almost-take-my-breath-away moment.  Hovering in this below-world sphere of blue-green light, with sand and rock and coral below and a dim scattering of shafted sunlight, moves me mentally and spiritually into another realm.   The only sound is the gentle pulsing of my breath and the crackling of the coral forming around me.   Being weightless and free to twist, turn and move without any gravity, is such a liberating experience for me -- once underwater, I always find myself wanting to stay there for hours.  Once on the surface, I never fail to re-commit myself to dive more and more often.

Rays lie in the sand, barely visible until they shimmer slightly, hover gently, and with an almost-imperceptible shudder of the wings, glide across the bottom.   Here, you can see its open eye, as the ray lies covered under a fine layer of sand.  

 

A green moray eel, algae covering its slick bluish skin, peers out from underneath a rocky crevasse, daring the diver to push a meal-like finger in.  I was once bitten by a moray, body surfing off Hawaii.  Bobbing in 6-8 feet of swells, I felt my foot being raked by something horriobly sharp.  Swimming ashore quickly, and thinking it was a coral cut, I spent 4 hours on my stomach in a local ER having the doctor scape the sandy particles from a set of parallel bite marks on the top and bottom of my foot.  Given their tendency to bite and wrap their powerfully-muscled body around a convenient rock, I felt very lucky not to have become a floating-yet-anchored body-buoy off the Hawaii beach.  There, I had disturbed it in its world, and it responded in kind.  Here, I stopped to look, safely and weightlessly floating a few feet away, at a member of the species that had been my brief and unwanted nemesis a few thousand miles northwest, and a few years ago.

 

Starfish – some squat and fat, specked with red, others long and sinewy, blue in color -- lie draped over rocks.   This one is about 15 inches in diameter.

A forest of garden eels lift up from the sandy bottom, the upper parts of their snake-like bodies waving like flexible reeds in an invisible wind, searching for the plankton they feed upon.  Away from us, the eels are 12” off the bottom; accordion-like, they withdraw into the sand as we approach.  The effect is like walking through a cornfield, with the stalks disappearing magically underground as you approach, leaving a path through the corn.

And the sharks.  Dozens of white-tipped sharks in ones and twos and threes.  Lying on the bottom, swimming slowly in circles, and then the magical moment:  20-30 male white-tipped sharks swimming in a tight circle, each chasing each other inside a circle less than 10 feet in diameter, and then, one shark, not of the group, moving to the center and laying, belly up on the bottom, as the increasingly frenzied swarm cut in and out of the center rubbing across her belly.   

 The circle breaks up, moves a few yards away, and re-forms around another female. The mating ritual of white-tipped sharks, 10 feet below me, 40 feet below the surface, on a sandy bottom off the island of North Seymour.  No one else, just me, our divemaster, and the disinterested rays and starfish, and an oblivious radio transmitter, located uselessly in the well of our dive boat, several hundred yards downcurrent, and a thousand miles from its owner.