The female lay her eggs wedged into a special hard coral. white pointy balls, like a round tear drops.
The fisherman know the season as well and has been spearing a few. But the female had a chance to lay.
i saw 6 of them on one dive.
The cuttlefish are coming in to mate and lay their eggs on the reef. The visibility is unfortunately not good, less than a meter, due to the strong Northeast monsoon blowing hard. The female lay her eggs wedged into a special hard coral. white pointy balls, like a round tear drops. The fisherman know the season as well and has been spearing a few. But the female had a chance to lay. i saw 6 of them on one dive.
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nets are getting caught by the reef, many fisherman actually are too careless, and not really experienced. so we end up with a mess, and we try to clean it up. apart from the nets, there is also bubu, or fishing traps that are left unattended, resulting in many fish being caught but never harvested. tar and oil has been an issue and at times horrible to clean up. it took many dedicated staff to clean it up. we have a bounty or 5 millions Rupiah on any fisherman that can witness and report a name of one of the tankers dumping oil overboard. this is usually done in rough weather or at night. on a brighter note, many fish are spawning right now, and since the kelong are still iddle on Bintan, it is a good oportunity to see a reef recovering. As the weather finally gave us a break, I took the opportunity to do a dive on the last rock outcrop on the south side of the island.
It started with a magic moment with a congregation of black and white nudibranch, mating and laying eggs. They lay their eggs in a spiral, and more than 20 gathered on that one wall. How they find each other is a mystery. It looks like they liked a particular blue sponge. I went down deeper, taking the opportunity of the very mild current that usually makes this spot hard to dive. I reached 20 meters to find that most of the seafans and seawhips where bleaching. Although temperature rises are usually what is blamed for the phenomenon, it can also come from various stresses, including viruses and coral disease. I will monitor the process to find out more about it and if it is spreading. There is nothing that we can do to prevent it, but we can monitor it’s evolution. Another observation was the predation of oysters by another shell. I always wondered who on the reef is capable of opening those oysters. There was on a good note a mini school of about 20 batfish, taking shelter under a pass that one can swim through. Usually closed and hidden from view due to bad visibility and current, this was a nice discovery when I though I combed the whole area by now. On a scouting dive to Mapur, we came across a massive net that encircled an entire dive site. many crabs, batfish, angel fish, bamboo shark were caught left to die. we came across a nurse shark, still alive that darto carefully untangled, and we manage to release it. we tried to get the net out to discover that it completly encircled the rock/island. we balled what we could, but it will take a serious team to clear that one. we immediately informed coremap, but so far nothing has been done about it. we might try when the time is right but the windy weather has been steady since about two month now. The north coast of the island has opened for diving, rarely dived during the north east season. what we found was many spawning sites, but unfortunatly a lack of big fishes. Although the govermental agency of Coremap is trying again to look into more enforcement of the protected status the reality of the situation is other. The local provincial goverment is giving fisherman more gear, including the sponsoring of fish traps. it is directly reflected on our reef, where traps are placed around the reef.
we cannot stop them, unless starting a full on war with the local community. The basic fact is that everyone is trying to make a living, and being since the beginning of time a fishing community, what to do? We have nonetheless come to the agreement to stop net fishing whenever we see it, and try to discourage spearfisheman, specially recreational one from taking the fish stock. Student from the maritime university of Bintan is now conducting a study on the reef, mangrove and sea grass area, including coral coverage around Nikoi. The student are mostly from Bintan and will hopefully get the word going in the community. Below you can find two photographs (one wide angle and one close up) of a Cuttlefish we spotted imitating floating seaweed. What is interesting is that the Cuttlefish will choose to imitate one type of seaweed floating around rather than imitating the entire underwater composition. Unfortunately we didn't have the insight at the time to get a close up of the seaweed.
In addition to the Cuttlefish, there were many other small fish floating around. Their presence is a good sign despite the increase in fishing traps used on the reef. Step by step, we are trying to stop all netting activity and recreational spear fishing. We have finally finished clearing up all the debris and pillings that had broken off our North jetty during the unusual strong storms that occurred last Christmas. We can now install the extension on the end of our new jetty. Very big amounts of cement have also been removed from the bottom of the sea.
The pilings have all been recycled into an artificial offshore reef. Hopefully this will enable new corals to grow in order to shelter and become new habitats for fish. The long hours spent underwater have finally paid off! During this dive, we found ten live Cowry shells, Trochus shells and a few Sea Anemones that were living under the pilings. We also managed to put small broken pieces of coral back in place. Cuttlefish are now appearing regularly on our reefs. We spotted six of them in only one afternoon which is a good sign for our reefs. Unfortunately spear the fishermen seem to be aware of this..
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AuthorMichel Lippitsch, oceanauts on spaceship earth. Archives
September 2016
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