SAVING THE WHALE SHARKS
Inspiration from Indonesian waters
Balanced precariously on wooden struts that jolt upward with every passing wave, three fishermen lean over the sea to lower buckets of baitfish into the waters of Cenderawasih Bay. Beneath them, the metre-wide gasping maw of a whale shark breaks the surface, then sinks below. Its fin throws up an arc of spray as it turns away to resume a slow patrol around the bagan, a traditional fishing platform composed of a floating scaffold fixed to a central boat hull and strung with lines and nets.
It takes half an hour to entice the animal — a juvenile male, but already more than five metres long — into the net. As the fishermen on the platform haul it close, a team of divers, waiting on two speedboats tied to the bagan, move in.
Almost daily, whale sharks turn up at the bagans at Cenderawasih Bay, attracted by the baitfish that accumulate in the nets. Once trapped, they are constrained enough that researchers can take blood samples and fit them with satellite tags, making this remote area off the coast of West Papua a valuable place for researchers into this enigmatic and poorly understood animal.
“What we experienced here is just completely, mind-blowingly unique, the chance to sit still with a whale shark. Everywhere else it’s completely impossible,” said Al Dove, vice-president of research and conservation at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.
In late July and early August, Dove and Mark Erdmann, vice-president of Asia-Pacific marine programmes at Conservation International, led a nine-day, 10-person expedition to the bay, collecting unprecedented amounts of data about the behaviour, biology and health of whale sharks, information they hope will inform conservation efforts in an area that Erdmann called the “epicentre of global marine biodiversity”.
A wide-mouthed bay ringed by mistshrouded hills thick with jungle, Cenderawasih has so far been protected by its isolation. Air links are poor, with most of the routes serving the mines that form the bulk of West Papua’s economy. Visitors have to fly from Jakarta via Bali and Timika, then onward to pick up a boat in the coastal cities of Nabire or Manokwari.
However, the area — nominally a national park — is not insulated from the economic forces that have led to the destruction of large swathes of Indonesia’s natural capital onshore and off. The maritime economy is worth 11% of the country’s US$930-billion economy; fisheries account for nearly three-quarters of that total. The Jakarta government wants to double that contribution over the next decade by dramatically expanding the fishing and tourism sectors, putting even greater pressure on the ecosystem.
ANCHOR RESEARCH
As development starts to encroach on Cenderawasih, scientists hope that by building a database on the health of wild whale sharks, they can help conservationists and the government to better understand the impact of human activities on the ecosystem.
Even armed with that information, they could be swimming against a strong tide. Cenderawasih is a microcosm of the political, social and economic challenges facing maritime ecosystems in Southeast Asia.
The bagans themselves are imported from South Sulawesi, taking advantage of legal gaps created by the complex devolution of some powers from Jakarta to the provinces. The bagan fleet owners are licensed by the regional government in Nabire, while the national park that covers the bay is administered by a body from Jakarta. The former, apparently, trumps the latter.
“In reality, it’s a national park, and they really shouldn’t be issuing fishing licences,” Erdmann said. “But that’s the chaos that is Indonesian decentralisation.”
To further complicate matters, local communities claim traditional rights over the reefs and fish in the bay. West Papua, with its Melanesian communities, is culturally and ethnically distinct from most of Indonesia, and highly sensitive to anything that could be interpreted as a threat to or dilution of traditional rights and culture.
“The very notion of a national park in West Papua is problematic to the people here ... especially into the marine realm because the people here feel they own the resources,” said Erdmann.
Local communities have taken matters into their own hands, and extract rent from bagan owners.e
The presence of the fishing platforms, while useful in the short term for research, is a concern in the long run. Stripping out the baitfish at the bottom of the food chain would directly affect the sharks that feed on them, and could ultimately lead to the hollowing out of the entire ecosystem.
“There’s no one actually monitoring that, there’s no one regulating that. That’s scary to me,” said Abraham Sianipar, a shark and ray expert with Conservation International.
LURE OF TOURISM
These days, the fishermen have a side business. Tourism is growing, albeit slowly. A few “live-aboard” dive boats moor in the bay each month, offering the opportunity to swim with the whale sharks. Onshore, a single resort offers a couple of mouldy shacks for rent.
Three days before the expedition boat, the Putiraja, set sail out of the bay, three motorboats of tourists arrived at a bagan being used for the study. While the research team worked inside the net, a dozen people were in the water, crowding around a pair of free-swimming animals, brandishing GoPro cameras as a drone whined overhead. The fishermen — who can earn 4 million rupiah (US$300) per day to host tourists — flung buckets of baitfish into the churning water.
While the fishing industry is a threat to the sharks’ food supply, tourism — if well-managed — could be a way to tie the economic future of the area to its charismatic megafauna, and by extension the preservation of the wider ecosystem. Conservation tends to be most effective when it is driven from the bottom up, and where local communities have a meaningful stake in it.
That isn’t happening yet, although Erdman did broker a deal whereby tourists on boats visiting the bay pay the community a voluntary 300,000 rupiah per person. In Kwatisore, a village of 200 people that is the largest settlement in the inner bay, a few small handicraft stalls sell wooden sharks for a few dollars each.
The Georgia Aquarium’s Dove, who has advised governments in the region on how to balance conservation and tourism centred on whale sharks, said it was vital to set a high market value for the animals and their habitat.
The fear is that the diving business in Cenderawasih Bay will become a race to the bottom, like some resorts in Mexico and the Indian Ocean, where sustainability has taken a back seat to market forces.
“I would hate to come back in 10 years’ time to see dozens of ‘live-aboards’ and people crashing into the water,” he said.
“If you can get people to care enough about whale sharks to do something about their plight, then a lot of other species get proxy protection because they’re part of the whale sharks’ world.
“It’s the ideal species to represent its ecosystem. It’s large, it’s harmless, it’s peaceful and beautiful, it’s covered in polka dots. What’s not to love? It’s a beautiful,
“I would hate to come back in 10 years’ time to see dozens of ‘liveaboards’ and people crashing into the water” AL DOVE Georgia Aquarium