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 it was even harder to leave…
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.
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 it was even harder to leave…
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.
