The Islands of West Waigeo

Just having returned from another trip aboard the Kalabia education vessel, I really feel like I’m getting to know Raja Ampat… or better said, to know how much I don’t know!  Each region we visit is quite distinct, each group of students, and each community very different, not only in the language they speak (there are about 10 different languages, with some of them having several different dialects depending on the region around the islands), but also in their manner, attitudes, behaviours, etc.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a little bit about the area we visited, apart from the Kalabia program itself (which I have written about in my reports, and the Kalabia blog – hope to be published soon!).

Our Route:

Our route took us from Sorong to the small villages of Waisilip, Meosmanggara (and Manyaifun), Gag, Fam (and Saukabu).

The single dive we got the chance to do was at a site called Melissa’s Garden… one of the most famous sites in Raja Ampat… quite lovely, and within 2 kms of a village we did a program in.  So we got up extra early and did one dive before the program even got started.  Even thought it was first-light, and it felt like the reef was ‘still sleeping’…. we encountered a few interesting things… flatworms, a wobbie (wobbegong shark)...

... and lots of crinoid shrimp commensals (you can see some pics in my previous blog - my camera fogged up, unfortunately, so I didn’t any great shots).  I was disappointed that the only thing left of the giant clams I’d heard about were their empty shells...

When we were in the village of Fam/Saukabu on the Kalabia, the biggest news was a story of a diver who had been lost last month (mid-May?), thought to have been eaten by a giant octopus... Just one dive-site away from Melissa's Garden.  The villagers said there were four liveaboards all gathered attempting to 'free her'....  Their story was somewhat fantasical (included rescue efforts botched by giant octopus ink sprays, diver-to-surface tele-communications (where the victim was able to communicate that she was trapped inside the cave by the giant octopus, and running low on air), body nor any gear ever seen again...).  They are also now terrified of this giant octopus and the diver's ghost, that they think must now be haunting this particular area... I am attempting to corroborate the story, and hopefully get them a more accurate version!?  We saw an octopus while snorkeling in Waisilip, but he was not of a proportion to be in any position to devour a human... and he was much more intimidated by us, than we needed be of him, changing colour and texture several times as I tried to snap an in-focus shot of him... check out this sequence:

Snorkeling with the students was a lot of fun, as usual, and we usually saw both relatively healthy reefs, alongside evidence of destruction.  Martin found an unexploded bomb in one spot, and a potassium poison spray bottle on another!

Anyway, although the program was as full as always, we tried to find a little time for a little exercise (volleyball, whatever you call what Martin is doing here, and even yoga – which the entire village came out to watch!?!)

The head of Gag village was the most incredible man - obviously open-minded, and much more ‘worldly’ than many of his counterparts I have met on previous occasions.  Even though Gag is targeted for serious nickel mining exploitation, he is set upon doing everything possible to minimize the impact of those activities on the local environment.  Whether that's possible or not is another question?  When it rained, the bays flooded murky with red mud, and the mouth of the river has quite a build-up of silt... and they haven't even opened up the uplands yet.  You can see the red hues of the nickel in the hills even in the Google Earth map above!

As we were docking at the village, he saw me, and said, in flawless English… Welcome to Gag Island… Small, but nice!  Then after his closing remarks at the program closure, he proceded to serenade us with a song of remembrance - in English!

The head of the village from Saukabu village was just as charismatic, but in a much more local Papuan way… he’s the first village leader that has come snorkeling with us and the kids, and in fact participated in almost the entire program... he even dressed up in our Kalabia mascot costume!  There were lots of other interesting characters in this village as well, including this old fisherman who regaled me with stories of 'the old days'!

Mostly in these villages, the favourite (if only) pass-time is fishing (young and old)... In most of these communities they are still able to catch decent-sized fish right from their jetties...

There are a few more individual posts from this trip yet to come...

HAPPY DAY!

Wouldn't even know it's Canada Day here... bummer!  Oh well, I hope you're all enjoying festive celebrations!

HAPPY CANADA DAY EVERYONE!

And more importantly...

Happy 38th Anniversary, Mom and Dad!!!

Bugzzzz!

The bug – I think it’s possible I've found the cause of my swollen face/head etc from last month’s trip to Misool… this little guy.  Who’s not so little, by the way, at about 12 cm!

As far as bugs - beetles, moths, butterflies, etc - I swear I have never seen the same one twice in Raja Ampat…. I usually see a few that at first glance appear to be the same, however upone closer inspection there is some colour or structural variation….  Amazing… Especially attracted to the ship's lights at night, all shapes and sizes flutter about - I’m sure if we had a ‘bug geek’ aboard the Kalabia, they would go wild!

I guess I figured since I'd been blogging about all the wondrous critters in the sea I'd better put something up from the 'top side' as well!

Commensals

Commensals have to be my favourite dive finds… and it seems that with my eyes and instinct, I never come up empty-handed!  The real challenge for me isn't finding them... but getting the camera to see the same thing my eyes do...

(Mantis shrimp - a creature with eyes hundreds of times more potent than my 'eagle eyes', and the most sophisticated eye in the animal kingdom!  They have 16 different photoreceptor classes, compared to the human 3, which allows them to see in 3D, including UV and polarized light! )

Anyway, back to the commensals...  none of these critters is more than about 2cm long...

(Coral shrimp on an acropora branching coral)

Even the jetty at Meosmanggara village, which at first glance didn’t look too promising except for the presence of absolutely insane amounts of bait fish (the circles of dark clouds around the wooden jetty pilings below), there were little critters to be found!

Anenomes and bubble coral are guaranteed places to find symbiotic relationships:

The clown fish are the most conspicuous residents of anenomes, but they often share their tentakely home with many other residents...  all variety of shrimps (sometimes almost completely transparent!), porcelain crabs, etc...

One of my favourite reef residents is the feather star... although they look like plants with dye-happy hairstylists, they're actually animals (cousins of seastars and seacucumbers, in silhouette here)...

Their colourful waving arms often become home to commensals as well, providing shelter and protection for ghost pipe fish, squat lobsters, crinoid shrimp, cling fish, etc, which perfectly mimic their hosts' colour for camouflage...

crinoid shrimp (hiding his face behind a feather star arm)  (sorry about the foggy picture... but even more sorry about my fogging camera housing... i haven't been able to find a fix for it... so by the end of every dive/snorkel session, my pics all look like this...)

 (ornate ghost pipefish - not my pic (source: nevillecoleman.com.ar) - but shows how perfectly cammo'd he is!)

(these crinoid cling fish were squiggling away around a feather star on Gag island)

These are a few previous finds... a hairy fairy crab peering out from the outer folds on a purple barrel sponge...

...an teeny tiny emperor shrimp on a sea cucumber...

and the classic...  pygmy seahorse!

Monkey Fish?

Ahhh… and another fabulous mystery solved for me… I found a very very very strange critter while diving in Lembeh Strait (only a few dives, and my fist in this ‘critter haven’)… Nobody I showed it to on the dive, nor to whom I described it afterward was able to tell me what it might be.  It was almost indistinguishable from the silty bottom on which I found it… and if it hadn’t been for a slight movement that I caught out of the corner of my eye, I might have overlooked it altogether… It was an oddly round shape, almost like a head with no body to speak of… kinda of fuzzy/furry, like it was wearing a coat of the seafloor.  And it waddled… I’m not kidding… it was sort-of walking/struggling along on it’s rounded pectoral fins.  I wrote it off to an anomaly, possibly a deformation of a scorpionfish or something… BUT, have just found out that it has a name:  Monkey fish!  How appropriate… and apparently it’s quite rare to encounter, so now I feel even more lucky!  Of course, I didn’t have my camera on that dive, but have found a few pics since to add here to give you an idea… apparently I saw it at the height of it’s camouflaged state… when it sheds its ‘coat’ it looks more like this!

Sailor's Eyeball

An entity on the reef that remained a mystery to me for quite a long time (mostly because whenever I saw one I was alone) is the Sailor's Eyeball.  So, unable to point it out and later ask a dive mate for an explanation, I went on wondering (and assuming) whenever I saw this strange metallic phenomenon... 

Indeed, this out-of-place, medicine-ball-looking, reef being is the largest single-celled algae one encounters below the waves... it's known as a Sailor's Eyeball!

Sea Rabbits

"Sea Rabbits"!?!  Sometimes you really have to love the Indonesian translation for things… In English, they are the difficult to pronounce and remember, Nudibranchs, or affectionately called Nudi’s (actually a little bit of a double-entendre, since these sea slugs are without a shell)!

Anyway, I just found out that the Indonesians refer to them as Kelincin Laut (or Sea Rabbits)… take a look for yourself and see how appropriate this is!  With their rabbit-ear-like rhinopores, and their fluffy cotton tails (actually their lungs)...

I found this nudi 2 feet from the Kalabia under the jetty at the village of Meos Manggara in Raja Ampat:

And this one in the process of laying its eggs on a cement piling at the jetty at the village of Fam.  I'd seen these beautiful floral arrangement-like egg deposits before, but never actually encountered a nudi in the process of laying them - so special!  It was a split moment in time as well, since several hours later when I went in to check on the progress, the 'mama' was nowhere to be found!

There are hundreds (thousands?) of species of nudis, if you can imagine!? 

I generally prefer the above 'soft and fluffy' type to the more-common (at least in my experience), 'hard and knobbly' ones like the one below.

Oh, and to give you an idea of the size of these little guys - there are only a few species that get much bigger than this...