Maldives Oceanic Manta Ray Project Update

April 2021

Last month Manta Trust Media Manager and Maldives Oceanic Manta Ray Project Leader Simon Hilbourne, flew out to the Maldives to kickstart 2021’s research into the mysterious annual aggregation of oceanic manta rays in Fuvahmulah…

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In mid-March of 2020, I was floating 300m off the coast of Fuvahmulah on a Manta Expeditions Maldives trip. As COVID-19 started sweeping across the globe I was tantalisingly close to my favourite Maldivian island, but I was forced to return home to the UK just days before the start of the oceanic manta research season.

Having missed out on a season of data collect, I was motivated to maximise the 2021 research season. This year we partnered up with the Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme (MWSRP) to share boat hire and accommodation costs and arrived on the island with a team of five marine conservationists eager to get back in the water after a year of limited field time.

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After ten days of quarantine, we started heading out in search of the illusive oceanic manta rays (and whale sharks to keep the MWSRP team happy). We struck gold on day one with a sighting of a juvenile whale shark along the reef, but it was just out of our free diving range for an ID shot. After that, the ocean went quiet. We saw very little for over the following three weeks! There were two or three sightings of manta rays from dive centres, but they seemed to be avoiding us.

Then, around a week ago, the mantas showed up in force! Around six manta rays on a single day! Considering we have only recorded 12-15 oceanic manta sightings ever in other popular atolls like Ari and Baa, half a dozen in a single day is very special! So far, we have recorded about 50 oceanic manta rays this season with only one individual being previously known in our database. We are seeing oceanic mantas every day currently and it is only raising more questions about why the show up at this single island for just a few weeks a year.

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One sighting has stuck out above the rest, we found this manta using the drone over the shallow reef, and after jumping in, collecting photo IDs, accurate measurements with the stereo-video-photogrammetry unit, and a mucus swab sample we headed back to the boat. When we climbed out, we realised the manta had followed us over to the boat and was slowly circling around us. Without a second thought, Kaitlyn (Baa Atoll Assistant Project Manager) slipped back into the water and we all followed. This oceanic manta continued to swim circles around and around the boat for a good 20-30 minutes. We even had time to convince Abla our boat captain to jump in and swim with the manta! Being a fisherman, he had seen plenty of mantas before, but this was the first time he’d seen one face to face in the water.

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This year, we have been deploying a new version of our Eyes On The Reef cameras. They are programmed to take an image every minute from sunrise to sunset with a battery lasting around five days. The idea of these is to give a better sense of what is happening on the reefs over the course of the day, as with diving we are limited to short 45-minute snapshots of life under the waves. Taking a photo every 60 seconds means you never quite no what you are going to get. I knew we were going to have a lot of photos of blue water, I also hoped we would capture a few images of manta wings or shark tails, but I certainly did not expect the quality of images we got with this deployment! The deeper reefs around Fuvahmulah are known to have several thresher sharks that regularly visit, so it wasn’t too surprising to capture one on camera, but the lucky composition puts me to shame as an underwater photographer!