November 20, 2002

Pindito anchored at Pulau Boni (00° 02' 435" S, 131° 03' 578" E)

The social economy and vegetation teams visited Kabare village, administrative centre for the kecamatan (sub-district) of Waigeo Utara. While the social-economy group carried out interviews and discussions, the vegetation team and documentary crew used the speedboat to travel up the Wasisik river. This river is tidal, and passed through mangroves all the way up. Coming back to the bay itself, the team looked at different substrates on either side of the bay : there was very little in flower, but a clearly a different plant community here than on the western ultrabasic rocks. Johannes found 5 palm species in less than half-an-hour here.

A storm broke out in the afternoon, and the ride to Boni covered around 10 kilometers through some strong waves. Only 20 minutes after the team arrived at Boni, the steering cable broke - something that could have been disastrous for the speedboat in the earlier waves.

The divers traveled further east to Boni bay, where Rod saw another manta ray from 15 meters, in extremely clear water. He looked up from the bottom just as the manta swooped down from the surface to check him out. This was an exposed site, together with the two other sites - on deep, sheltered, sandy or muddy bottoms - the variety of habitats yielded a good diversity of fish. It was also diverse in corals - Emre and Jemmy found more than 150 species here.

At the evening briefing, Gerry gave a run down on the ichthyological work to date. On the trip so far he has met with 820 different fish species, 90 of which are new records for the area. With figures from previous surveys to the area, notably with CI in 2000, Gerry has now listed 1,040 species from the area, and estimates that there should be around 1,180 species. Two new species found include a sand-wrasse and a goby, unspectacular, like most of the species new to science. Of all the islands visited, Kofiau was the most exciting, and averaged more than 250 fish per dive. On one dive Gerry saw 284 species, a new world record for a single dive.

Regarding threats to the area, its clear that there are few large fish (for instance no sharks and few large groupers), something seen in the heavily exploited Indonesian western waters, but surprising in this area of low population. Even so the Raja Ampats are still in better condition than other areas of the marine biodiversity triangle (from the Solomons, to Sunda, to the Philippines), and Napoleon Wrasse are three times more common than in the Togean Islands. A major upcoming threat is likely to be the aquarium fish trade, which harvests fish using cyanide and reef-wrecking techniques, and which is unlikely to be regulated, based on present indicators here.

On the whole, communities are concerned about damage to reefs and marine resources, but have little capacity to control actions of people with power and/or money. But there are areas of promise : at Kofiau we have seen communities organised for nature conservation, and schools actually have teachers. For conservation, it's not necessary to protect every inch of the sea - conservation of strategic areas is more effective and easier to achieve.