Manta dance - diving and snorkeling with

Manta dance - diving and snorkeling with - manta rays

© Sierra written by Sallie Tisdale

After an encounter with rays, nothing is quite the same

The Makai turns south along the Kona coast late on a January day. We've already done a quiet dive under glittering afternoon light, and a dozen people rest on the upper deck, watching the red disc of sun. When the sun sets in Hawaii, it slides into the ocean so fast you miss it if you turn around to sneeze. Out to sea, a humpback whale spouts against the pale sky. Dozens of spinner dolphins pace us, riding the bow wave and leaping out of the water in wild pirouettes, darting forward in sudden sprints, falling back again. The glowing sun disappears, the water turns from slate to violet to indigo, and the sky erupts with stars. It is a day to be glad of boats.

Those of us on the Makai are on our way to dive and snorkel with manta rays. Mantas are one of the largest fish in the sea, strange creatures rarely seen even by scuba divers, who usually catch only brief glimpses from a distance. For most people, they are little more than tantalizing shadows sliding away beneath a boat, a distant flutter of wide, dark wings underwater. Mantas frighten many people, who assume they have stingers or huge teeth, but they are something else entirely: harmless, benign monsters full of grace.

Manta rays are elasmobranchs, cartilaginous fish that are almost entirely flexible. Their nearest relatives are sharks, stingrays, devilrays, and skates. They are marked by mystery, a seductive sinuosity, a strangeness hard to penetrate.

What look like wings to us are the manta's pectoral fins. In spite of their size (mantas that live in the open ocean can be more than 20 feet across and weigh over 3,000 pounds), they are notoriously shy. But they are strong. If a manta gets entangled in an anchor line, it can pull a boat for miles.

Most rays live sliding along the sandy ocean floor, digging up mollusks. But mantas are planktivores; like the baleen whales, they are big creatures dining on tiny ones, eating almost 13 percent of their body weight in plankton every week. The fins on their heads have evolved to form flexible scoops around their enormous mouths, and they feed by swimming placidly with mouths wide open, sending great quantities of water through sets of branchial filters that collect the miniature sea life.

No one knows much about mantas; they are biological and taxonomic puzzles, and those who study them have far more questions than answers. They usually die in captivity, refusing to eat and seeming to experience tremendous stress when confined. Three mature mantas in an aquarium in Okinawa, Japan, are the only ones known to have survived any time in a tank--and those three are in a really big tank. "They do not fit easily into museum jars," is the laconic comment of one reference book.

The Makai reaches the dive site, just south of downtown Kona, in full darkness, not far from the shoreline and a line of hotel lights. These days, thousands of divers and snorkelers come to this one bit of coastline every year. When I did the same dive last year, four boats lined the shore and at least 50 people crowded the water. But on this beautiful night, the Makai, with its dozen divers and four snorkelers, is alone.

The manta dive, as it's routinely called in Kona, began more than 20 years ago, when the Kona Surf Hotel first hung underwater lights offshore. The lights attracted certain kinds of plankton and the manta rays followed, swooping and gliding in the light to entertain the Kona Surf's clientele. They came, and came again, night after night to the same brightly lit spot of coastline. Eventually divers began joining them, and eventually those divers realized their own dive lights could concentrate the plankton even further, luring the mantas in much closer to humans than mantas ordinarily came. One thing led to another--to 19,000 people a year.

Keller Laros, a talkative and infectiously enthusiastic divemaster and scuba instructor, first dove with the rays in 1985 and has continued once or twice a week ever since. In 1994, he started Manta Pacific, a business "devoted to the research and conservation of manta rays." At first, Laros began sketching the mantas, trying to distinguish individuals. Then he started taking videos, and is now able to use the mantas' skin markings for identification. He still tries to keep a ledger of every manta seen at the site.

"When I started identifying them, they stopped being just fish," he says, adding that he thinks the mantas who return regularly to the Kona Surf lights display distinct personality traits. "I've got a feeling for them. To be so close to a large ocean creature that's so docile, so beautiful, so graceful. It's thrilling!"

A few mantas have returned often enough to be identified and affectionately named by Laros and his wife, Wendy--"Shadow," "Taz," "Big Bertha," "Cousteau." Some have come for many years; the one known as "W" has been seen since 1979. "They all show up now and then," says Wendy Laros. "They'll feed for a while, then go on their way."

When local dive shops started bringing people to dive with the manta rays, they sold a hands-on experience. Although the mantas often skittered away from contact, people routinely touched and even rode them. After a while, alert divers began to notice that several of the returning rays were developing sores and infections on their skin, and after talking with ichthyologists, learned that touching rubbed off a protective mucus-like coating. Several years ago, the local diveshop association drew up a set of voluntary guidelines for customers to follow, including the exhortation not to "ride, chase, touch, grab, or harass the mantas!" Today most of the local shops cooperate in an informal schedule, trying to take turns at the site policing diver and snorkeler behavior.

Rudy Salazar, a stocky fellow with thick salt-and-pepper hair, is one of the Makai's divemasters. While the rest of the crew drops anchor and places a set of lights underwater to draw the rays, Rudy leads a briefing. He explains that we have to wear extra weight to stay still on the sandy bottom. The divers are to form a circle around the stationary lights, adding their own handheld light to the column, while the snorkelers form a similar circle on the surface. We are to hold still and stay out of the mantas' way. "Do not touch the mantas," Rudy says several times, as divers struggle with damp wetsuits and a few begin nervously fiddling with equipment.

As Rudy talks, I glance over the side and see first one, then another ray slide by just under the surface, rolling away and down. I point, and Rudy abruptly ends his lecture. "We've got mantas!" he says. "Divers, let's get in the water!" He comes over to the rail beside me, glances into the water at the dark shapes passing by, and grabs my arm.

"Oh boy!" he says with a big grin. "I've done this three hundred times and I never get tired of it!"

Neither do I. The ocean draws and disturbs me, seduces me, comforts me, slaps me awake. I can dangle my legs in deep water and be caught by an instinctive fear of the darkness below me--a fear without reason, primitive and sharp. And I can sink into the same deep water, hearing nothing but the whoosh of my own breath and fall without a care in the world as slowly as a pea in syrup.

This night, I step into bouncy, black water happily, under a million stars. Below us hangs a blue fog from the submerged lights, a vague and distant point; as I wait for the other divers to join me, I see a ghostly silhouette glide across the light, a vast black shadow below.

"RAYS ARE VERY POORLY studied," says Chris Lowe, a professor of ichthyology at California State in Long Beach and a leading manta expert. Scant DNA evidence has identified a single manta species, Manta birostris. No one knows if more species exist or not, but Tim Clark, a Texas A&M graduate student of manta genetics, is convinced there is more than one. He believes the Kona mantas are similar to rays seen in the Hawaiian archipelago and the South Pacific. No one knows how many manta rays there are, how long they live, or how quickly they reproduce. (It's generally accepted that mantas have only one or perhaps two young at at time.) No one knows how widely mantas range, whether they have small territories or circumnavigate the globe. Lowe and Others think it's quite possible an entire ray species could become extinct before it's even certainly identified. Lowe has been trying to get funding to put radio tags on some of the Kona mantas, so they can be followed when they leave the area, but hasn't had any luck so far.

A lot of the local divers in Kona think the lights attract a specific population of mantas who take advantage of the artificially increased plankton column. The Kona mantas range in size from 4 to 12 feet across, considerably smaller than mantas found in the open ocean. A number of the Kona mantas have physical problems, which may simply reflect their proximity to boats. "Lefty" has a paralyzed or broken left cephalic fin. "Righty" arrived with a monofilament line in her right cephalic fin.

Humans do encounter manta rays where they may not expect them. Mantas and their close relatives--mobulas, or devilrays--are heavily fished in Baja, the Philippines, and throughout Southeast Asia. The Japanese cut the large pectoral fins into discs to sell as fake scallops. In the Philippines, you can buy "wing" as we buy fish-and-chips, and in parts of Europe, what is sold as fish-and-chips is really skate-and-chips. Skate is on the menu in good restaurants in the Caribbean. All the elasmobranchs are slow to reproduce and long-lived--"just not the kind of animal that can support a fishery," says Clark. With so little known, the possibility of overfishing and even extinction seems quite real.

"No wild animal is benefited by human attention," says Rick Martin, director of shark research at ReefQuest Centre for Marine Research, Education and Conservation in Vancouver, British Columbia. Undoubtedly, the mantas who have made a habit of dining at the Kona Surf show behavior not seen before in rays. They seem remarkably willing to interact with humans, especially given they could easily eat elsewhere, and do, in fact, feed all night long up and down the Kona coast, divers or not. "We can hold our heads up," says Wendy Laros. "If everyone goes by the rules, it's not going to affect the manta rays, except that they're getting a good meal." Even so, there are problems. Offshore snorkelers and divers on private boats often don't know the rules and try to touch the rays. Others swim through their feeding column, disrupting the plankton and increasing the chances of a collision. At least one local photographer sells a video called Ride the Ray, showing divers "riding" the backs of manta rays. There are still divers, admits Keller Laros, stuck in "that old muscle-head mentality, Sea Hunt and all that. But nature is not a thrill ride."

Recently a ray got tangled in a dive boat anchor line at the dive site and injured its fin. The shops haven't placed a permanent mooring there partly because it would be a constant obstacle to the rays. But anchors--and thousands of divers--have battered the sea floor for hundreds of feet in every direction. "The bottom topography there, the reef, has been totally trashed," notes Tim Clark. "The same dive shops that have been doing this would raise an alarm if this happened to a reef anywhere else."

Chris Lowe appreciates what he sees as "a perfect opportunity to combine science and education." But he also sees "a trap"--the idea that humans can simply observe and not affect our environment. Part of what humans want from the ocean is to know the strange creatures we halfway fear--to imagine their lives, which seem simpler and more profound than our own crowded, chattering days. The global coastline abounds with "planned" encounters designed to meet this need--opportunities to watch, swim, and dive with humpback whales and dolphins, whale sharks and hammerheads. Some are captive, some are trained, a few are simply willing. We like to believe that these animals are just as thrilled by meeting us as we are by meeting them. We believe this, I think, because such a belief offers easy answers to the harder questions such contact has to raise.

We want to believe that our relationship with wild animals is a spiritual question, a matter of philosophy. And one on one, it often is. But globally the human relationship to animals is always an economic one. All around the world, concerned people are trying to get fisherman to switch to a tourist economy, give up their hooks for tanks, and take people to dive and swim with mantas instead of eating them. This is happening in the Philippines, in Mexico, in Yap. But the question remains one of money and hard daily choices about what we eat, how we live, where we travel, and what we do there. And maybe, sometimes what we choose not to do.

Earlier this week, I was on a smaller boat when the captain spotted a huge convocation of spinner dolphins--over a hundred animals together, resting and playing in an empty cove. We quietly slipped into the water with our snorkels and fins, and swam with the dolphins for a while. They tolerated us, coming nearer, drifting away, diving below, returning. Unplanned encounters with wild dolphins are rare, and it was a day to be glad of fins. But when I told people about it, everyone just wanted to know one thing: "Did you touch them?" Simply to see them, to be with them, was not enough.

Lowe points out that even lights aren't neutral. Nocturnal creatures are evolved for and attuned to darkness. The entire ecosystem is based in a natural cycle of day and night. "Sure, they're great for attracting mantas, but they're screwing up the whole environment for other animals with those lights. Who's to say how many people is too many people?"

WE SLOWLY DESCEND TOGETHER, LITTLE GLOBES OF light leading us to the scrabbled bottom. The surge is strong; our circle turns into a wavering horseshoe as we are flung hard from side to side, grabbing guiltily at coral and rocks and rolling against each other with every wave set.

Plankton is Greek for "drifting"; what we call plankton is a gigantic ecosystem of tiny plants, algae, protozoans, and the newborn and larval forms of fish and other animals, like sponges. Plankton rises and falls in the ocean, some avoiding, some moving toward light. One of the remarkable equations of the sea is that many of the largest animals live on the smallest. Blue whales eat krill. Manta rays eat things like single coral polyps, water fleas, and nematodes.

Moment by moment, the plankton thickens. All our lights combine in a fuzzy column of light, and in the column flies a blizzard of starbursts, snowflakes, spirals, wheels, and worms, white and orange and wiggling and shooting hither and yon--finally growing so thick I can feel them clattering like minuscule gravel against my mask, the impacts of their bodies like grit in a dust storm on my skin. A fecund blossoming of alien life flows relentlessly around me.

Two mantas swim above us. They swoop and barrel-roll and somersault in ponderous, elastic turns, floating up to roll beneath the snorkelers, gliding down in a kind of slow majesty through the glowing storm of plankton, mouths gaping wide. They are big and heavy, light and airy at once, seeming to have almost no mass at all, to be made of paper-thin outlines, to be open space. I lie on my back in the push of the surge, watching my transparent silver bubbles rising into space and breaking against the soft, creamy-white underbelly of a flying beast.

Yellowfin goatfish dart to the center of the light column, boldly stealing bits of plankton with walleyed glances at the humans inches away. When rays swim toward me, I look straight down into their mouths, my light shining almost through the entire length of their bodies. When they come from behind, they slide by me with the grand mass of the starship Enterprise, so close I have to duck to avoid bumping them. I look up at the great body passing over me, and through the gill slits, and I can see Rudy's dive light shining on the other side.

And finally it is just a phantasm, a hallucinatory rapture: the tumble of bubbling air, the chaotic hurricane of tiny life, the bouncing surge like a giant's playful toss, the soft darkness and the wavering lights, the silly little goatfish, and dragons in the sky of a new planet, an incongruous world filled with the odd elements of a dream. I relax in the swinging hammock of waves, in the invisible palm of the ocean holding me near and safe.

We've changed the behavior of these manta rays. And they've changed ours. "We humans are an ecologically myopic species," says shark researcher Martin. "We tend to care about only those things we can see." This dive, he agrees, is "a wonderful, strangely intimate experience, one that perhaps will teach people that the sea is full of fragile gifts we don't often see." Keller and Wendy Laros like to invite their divers to do a "manta ray dance" on the returning boat, to undulate and waver in the air with a goofy, lightened heart. "People get out of the water and they are so psyched, so pumped," says Keller. "Everyone will remember it for their whole life."

After 50 minutes, Rudy begins signaling divers to return to the boat. Some, chilled and tired, lead the way. A few of us hold back, reluctant to leave. When we all climb back into the weight of the world, stumbling across the deck in our heavy equipment, the mantas come up too. They somersault again and again around the happy snorkelers, breaking the surface in the bright glare of the stern lights. We watch, point, laugh, snap worthless film--cold, hungry, with lightened hearts.

SALLIE TISDALE is a contributing editor at Harper's and Tricycle and the author of six books, most recently one about Americans' problematic relationship with food, This Is the Best Thing I Ever Tasted

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