Save Our Seas Blogs

Diving and Laje de Santos

They say good things come to those who are patient. I never really gave this saying too much thought until just recently…In the name of manta research I have spent six solid weeks (during the winter of 2009 and winter of 2010) diving a remote offshore rock called Laje de Santos in the south of Brazil looking for the elusive giant manta (Manta birostris). Until today, I have searched in vain. I was the one that actually chose this location for part of the worldwide study on this newly discovered species of ray, as this little spec of a rock is the largest documented aggregation site for this species in the southern Atlantic Ocean. But, to tell you the truth, despite my normal determined outlook when working in the field, I was really beginning to loose hope (and that’s pretty bad, since my current international research campaign is ironically named “Ray of Hope’).

Andrea in the field at Laje

But that’s the funny thing about marine field research and, I suppose, diving in general. It doesn’t matter what the ocean throws at you…countless hours of searching, dozens of dives in cold, green water, boat trip after boat trip on rough, windy seas…all of the excruciating effort and disappointment literally seems melt away the second the animal that you have been searching for appears. Your breath catches in your throat, time stands still and everything seems to make sense in the world. And this is why we divers torture ourselves by squeezing into unbearably uncomfortable wetsuits, why we swim around the sea covered in all kinds of tanks and hoses, and why we spend all of our money and time bobbing around in the middle of the ocean. It is precisely for this sensation and these encounters with special marine creatures. For the majority of us, the most precious encounters are with large, elusive megafauna like sharks, whales and dolphins. The object of my affection, of course, is the manta ray.
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