A few weeks ago I told you about a very special piece of research that was going to take place on Mantanani, so I’m pleased to be able to bring you an update on a successful first stage.

You may recall that Camp Borneo was joining friends from Borneo Dream and Scubazoo to support some reseach by Dr Nick Pilcher into the affects of blast fishing on marine ecosystems and turtle populations in particular with hope of being able to demonstrate the damage done and gain backing from State Authorities to clamp down on the practice.

I promissed more detail, so stand by your beds… here it comes. We all know that blast fishing is, well… bad. That much should be obvious. Dropping a bomb into the water to kill and stun fish for easy catching whilst killing countless more which sink to the bottom along with scaring away or killing every other living thing in the path of the blast and causing huge damage to coral speaks for itself, or should anyway. But in order to have this practice banned there needs to be concrete evidence so Dr Nick devised a plan to show in simple terms what happens to one sepcific species when they encounter blast fishing.

A turtle expert, Nick’s plan was to build a large enclosure near known blast fishing areas in which he would place a turtle. The turtle will be fitted with an accelerometer similar to the ones inside your phone that tells the screen when to rotate between landscape and portrate or that you use when playing games. Also, next to the enclosure will be a underwater microphone. Both these pieces of equipment will log data which can be retrieved and assessed at a later date. It’s the hoped that when a bomb goes off the sound will be logged by the mic and the time stamp on the data should coincide with some sort of action from the turtle which will be picked up by the sensors it’s wearing, which will also be time stamped. This experiment is aimed to be repeated over the coming months with different turtles until some useable data is produced either way.

So what will the data show? Well, for the time being we’re not sure. Dr Nick thinks that turtles who have lived in the area long enough will not actually be that bothered (and as Nick spends time off Mantanani tagging turtles he should know if they are long term residents) However newly arrived turtles are more likely to be put off by the blasts and could be scared away  or be over stressed which could affect their diets or other factors and consequently have an affect on the marine eo-system in which they live. As Mantanani is one of the few places known to have large quantities of juvenile turtles, any negative impact on their environment or growth is likely to be large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, in the past week a team from the mainland, helped by our gappers on the island have installed the enclosure, caught a turtle, fitted the equipment and after a bit of monitoring to make sure all is OK have now set the experiment going. I should say at this point that the turtles will not be harmed by this and will be monitored. It’s their reactions to the blasts which are key, reactions that happen in the wild, all this experiemnt is doing is capturing those reactions, so all the animals will be released unharmed at the end of the research and hopefully the data gathered will go a long way to putting a stop to this practice so future generations of turtles can peacefully mature in the waters of Mantanani.

 

In a few weeks I’ll let you know how the research is going and update on any data that has been gathered.

Thanks to Dr Nick, Borneo Dream, Scubazoo and all who helped out.

Photos care of Nick Pilcher, Aida Rahman, Borneo Dream and Gil Woolley of Scubazoo. You can find more pictures here

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 11:42 am and is filed under Borneo, Camp Mantanani, Project Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.