Day 6: Meeting the Mantas of South Komodo

It has been a full and action packed first week of Manta Month.

The interns and I have had plenty of time to get to know each other, both above and below the water. From our very first meeting I knew that we had a great selection of keen, enthusiastic and hard-working individuals, excited to meet their first manta and keen to play a leading role in conserving their nation’s marine wildlife.

Komodo National Park is a world-famous diving and tourism destination–known in part for its challenging underwater conditions. What better way to prepare this year’s interns for diving safely when conducting manta surveys and during their future diving careers than via a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course, with peak performance buoyancy, underwater photography and drift dives, coupled with a PADI Manta Conservation Diver course to prepare for safe underwater data collection.

The sea greeted us this morning upon The Tatawa, Dive Komodo’s Live aboard. With our two dedicated guests, Kari and Joe, our manta research safari is well underway and a promising second day awaits us in South Komodo’s famous manta aggregation site, Manta Alley.

We were not disappointed. We found manta rays on all three of our survey dives, with over 15 mantas sighted and more than 10 unique manta ID photos collected. The most exciting thing for me was witnessing the manta mating behavior and meeting for the first time a very young melanistic (black) manta ray. All great news for Komodo’s manta population!

With such a good start to our research safari I was hesitant to leave South Komodo and set course for South Rinca’s horse shoe bay, but with any luck we will have a chance encounter with the elusive Oceanic manta rays like I did around this time of year last year. But first, seeing the famous Komodo Dragons wild on the beaches of South Rinca and our first Night dive!