Today is one of the days I have been looking most forward to! SNORKELING DAY WAHOO!!! After a quick breakfast at the hotel we headed on the bus to the marina where we hopped on the boat. We dropped off our stuff on the lower deck and headed onto the second level where we had the wide open view of the water with all of the lush green islands poking out of the turquoise waters. Even after a few minutes I could feel the sun just baking my skin. We approached Manukan island and anchored the boat. Once we got our fins I immediately jumped in the water and started swimming around. The first thing I saw was a sea anemone and some feisty clown fish poked their heads out at me since they are very territorial. Though there were so many amazing fish you could very easily see the devastating damage that has been done by pollution and ocean acidification. In groups of 3 we did timed swims at both Salug and Manukan islands. My group decided to focus on terminal stage parrot fish since they are relatively easy to identify. We found a much larger population of parrot fish at Manukan island but it was most likely because at Salug we were near a drop off with a lot of Elkhorn coral and from my research project in Belize studying the preferred diet of parrot fish, we found they feed much more on convex shape coral like brain coral and very rarely ate off of elkhorn or fan coral.We then got to sit on the boat and get a lecture from Dr. Nick Pilcher a sea turtle conservationist.
Dr. Pilcher had a large part in getting Malaysia to require fishermen to use turtle excluder devices (TEDs), which is a flap in the fishing net to allow turtles to escape if they get caught as bycatch. He spoke about the difficulties to convince fisheries to use the TEDs since they thought everything would go through the flap. He got creative and used Gopros in the nets to show how it worked. He also explained that he was able to take the director of the wildlife department to the United States and show how we use TEDs and still make good catches/profit which is what caused the law requiring the use of TEDs in Malaysia to be passed. Dr. Pilcher had a point of view which I had rarely heard which was saying we should not care how the animals died but simply focus on the numbers of animals dying. Giving people a certain amount of turtle eggs they are allowed to harvest will make them more likely to care to conserve them. He explained how they allowed villages to harvest the first two waves of turtle eggs since after the first wave layed their eggs the second wave of turtles would unbury the original eggs to lay their own. So once they allowed the villages to harvest the first two waves of eggs the very people that took the eggs would watch the third waves of turtles all night with machine guns to ensure no one would harm the turtles or their eggs. Since they were given eggs they had incentive to protect the turtles and keep their populations high. It is difficult for me to not care about animals at an individual level but I understand you need to look at the bigger picture. Next, we went to an island for a fried noodle lunch and it was very interesting since most of the women in the water were swimming around in full burka dress. It was interesting to see women covered from head to toe then all of us in bikinis with so much skin showing. Next we went off to Salug to do a beach clean-up and oh my god, there was so much garbage covering the islands - mostly water bottles - so it was nice to be able to clean it up. There was also a sassy rooster roaming around whom I loved! Then we took turns jumping off the boat which was super fun though it really hurt my ears to hit the water that hard. It started storming so we went up to the upper deck of the boat and sang songs in the rain with Mike! When we got back to the hotel I look with horror at my horribly burnt back. Mike told me I looked like a lobster which he couldn’t stop laughing about.
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