November 10, 2002

Pindito anchored at Waigama (01° 47' 45" S, 129° 46' 95" E)

This morning the Pindito sailed at 03.00 to arrive in front of Waigama town before 07.00. The bay here is generally shallow, with a ring of islands fronting the beach.

As usual, the vegetation and social economy teams were first off the boat, the social economy team for interviews in Waigama community, and the vegetation team to explore the Kasim River by speedboat. At the river mouth a 3-meter salt-water crocodile slipped from a mudbank into the murky water. The river is spectacular, with thick vegetation on both banks, egrets, herons, sea-eagles, and hornbills all flew over the boat. In the higher reaches the river gets shallower - we had to pole the WWF speedboat over rocks and fallen trees. The channel narrows, flowing between limestone banks, in fact the bed is also weathered limestone. Archer fish were visible in the river. Heavy rain threatened, so the team returned early, to avoid any chance of a flash flood in the narrow channel.

Waigama bay today had many small groups of dolphin, following larger fish (probably cakalang), which in turn are chasing smaller fish. These frenzies can be seen from afar by the birds wheeling and diving overhead, a man raced his dug-out to the feeding frenzy only to have it finish as he arrived.

Today the divers focused on shallow channels between mangroves on the offshore islands. This was a surprising habitat, unlike the usual murk, there was clear water and strong currents, with plenty of unusual fish, and many deep-water corals growing in shallow waters. As at all the other previous sites there were indications of coral bleaching - particularly evident now after very low tides and very hot, dry, weather.

Coral bleaching is caused by many stresses, including disease, pollution, cold or hot temperatures, major concern is climate related bleaching (global warming issues). Under stress, the coral expels the symbiotic algae that live inside its issues. Algae can re-establish in tissues if conditions improve, if not then the coral animals will die, and the physical structure of the coral will collapse. The Raja Ampat islands seem to be relatively undisturbed by bleaching, perhaps some of the reasons for this are shading, but strong currents, and vertical mixing of deeper, cooler waters lowers the temperature of the hot surface waters, thus removing heat stress. In the mangrove channels today, divers saw that shading also helped coral withstand heat stress -corals under overhanging mangroves were healthy, whilst nearby, exposed, corals were experiencing bleaching.

Divers had a worrying moment, when one of the film team swam off alone, and there were nervous minutes before finding her again - as the vegetation team saw, this area certainly contains large crocodiles.

Rod saw hawksbill very close - "face to facemask" - but couldn't photograph it as his camera was focussed at 1.5 meters: the turtle was too close! Rod was able to push the turtle into range using his hand.