Published in Island Life
Volume 2 No. 5 2001

DRAGONS OCCUPY THE PARCHED EARTH, MOTHER NATURE, IN HER DALIESQUE BEST, IS QUEEN OF THE SEA

by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski © 2001

KOMODO NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia

I sat on the shallow seabed, holding on to a rock to keep my balance in the choppy current. I was looking for manta rays, but the water was murky and my thoughts turned to lunch.

Then out of the gloom a black and white apparition appeared, heading straight towards me. It was a four-meter manta, sweeping its huge fins like a slow motion flattened pterodactyl in flight. The manta was dark on its back and white on the belly. It reminded me of an extraterrestrial butterfly as it swooped and fed.

We were to see dozens of mantas during our week-long diving expedition in Komodo National Park, located in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago some 500 kilometers east of Bali. We dived with mantas, snorkeled with them, and spoke admiringly of their elegance while we sipped our sunset cocktails and enjoyed family-style dinners on our week-long, live-aboard diving trip.

Komodo is one of the best places in the world to scuba dive. Indonesian coral reefs are the most biologically diverse in the world -- by comparison, even the healthiest Caribbean reef has just 10% - 20% of the species diversity of a rich Indonesian reef. And with an estimated 18,585 islands, only 6,000 of which are named and just 1,000 inhabited, divers could spend years drifting from one wondrous reef to another.

Our floating home for our trip in Komodo was the Evening Star II, a 30-meter, square-rigged sailing ship captained by Mark Heighes, 36, a nephew of Valerie Taylor, one of the world's leading marine photographers. It's a relaxed boat, not as spacious or luxurious as some of the other tourist schooners cruising these rich waters, but efficient and congenial, especially with a group of like-minded divers aboard.

"Okay, can we get together for a few minutes?" Jos Pet said. Pet was trying to put some Dutch order into our group of conservationists on a working holiday. "Time to decide what you want to do tomorrow."

We were moored off Rinca Island, and at Pet's request we reluctantly left our perches on the roof where we had been watching a Komodo dragon and a family of wild pigs stroll along the white sand beach. Beers firmly in hand we had executive decisions to make.

"We have the two speedboats and the dinghy," Pet, a technical adviser with The Nature Conservancy's marine conservation program, advised. "Tomorrow morning we've got two different dive sites, or you can snorkel, explore the mangroves, go to the fruit bat island, or take a hike on Rinca and look for dragons."

I decided to shift from examining fingernail-sized pygmy seahorses in Komodo's exceptional coral reefs to going ashore to confront the stuff of myth and legend -- Komodo dragons. Most of the 30,000 annual tourists to Komodo come to see these giant lizards, which can reach up to three meters in length. The animals are found only in Komodo National Park and parts of neighboring western Flores; approximately 2,500 dragons remain.

Although park officials have stopped the practice of hanging recently slaughtered goats at a dried riverbed to provide easy viewing of the reptilian omnivores, Komodo dragons are still easy to spot.

We saw our first dragon, a juvenile about a meter long, soon after we alighted at the National Park's dock.

We saw a bunch of adults, lazy, nasty looking brutes, hanging around the staff quarters of the National Park station, attracted to the smells of lunch being cooked. "Don't get too close," Abdurrahman, the park ranger, said. "They look slow but they can move quickly."

On the trail we crept up on a female dragon guarding her eggs

"Don't startle her," Abdurrahman cautioned as we snuck past the dragon, just a meter away. She flicked her forked tongue; one of the Komodo dragon's several snake-like characteristics. Abdurrahman stood guard with a flimsy stick, ostensibly so that we wouldn't learn more about her other snake-like attribute - the ability to disjoint her lower and upper jaws in order to swallow large chunks of prey - the dragon's prehistoric prey were pygmy elephants as short as a child called stegedon; today the dragon thrives on invasive species like deer and goats.

We examined the mounds of dirt and leaves, nests abandoned by ground-dwelling megapode birds in which dragons lay their three-dozen eggs. The decomposing detritus provides the heat to incubate the dragon eggs, but the female has to keep guard to ward off other predatory dragons. We had to retreat past the female dragon in order to resume our trek. While she seemed more intent on her nap than breakfast, I was reminded of the perhaps apocryphal Swiss baron who strayed behind his group in Komodo and was eaten by a dragon. He made the ultimate contribution to nature conservation - he fed himself to an endangered species.

Komodo is one of the driest and hottest parts of Indonesia, and it was a relief to return to the blue water. Diver and writer Kal Muller described an Indonesian coral reef as a "time machine, ten million years out of synch with land, a reminder of the time when all the life on earth existed in shallow tropical seas, soup of creation." Corals first appeared on earth some 240 million years ago, roughly about the same time as the ancestors of Komodo dragons. I had just come from Bali, and remembered the Hindu mythology of that wondrous land -- the earth was formed when the Naga, the cosmic dragon, churned the sea of milk. It seemed appropriate that the Komodo World Heritage site combines these yin-yang archetypes - coral and dragons, ocean and earth, wet and dry, sea of milk and Nagas.

Our group, composed of people who had been diving in the best dive sites in the world, never grew weary of tugging on damp wetsuits and heading down, sometimes for three or four dives a day (and night).

A few meters below the surface we saw fish, coral and nudibranches that took on the undisciplined colors of a child's paint box. There was little subtlety here, just nature designed by God during Her Salvador Dali phase. We saw meter-tall vertically-ridged barrel sponges, pink-gray like ancient amphoras, with technicolor feathered crinoids on the sponges' edges, waving in the current like tiny underwater prayer flags. We saw dozens of hard and soft corals, sea snakes and turtles. Even the names evoked exotic extravagance: damselfish and anemones, clownfish and fire urchins, zebra crabs, nudibranches and fan corals.

We exchanged glances with a stocky, green and blue striped Napoleon wrasse, a valuable reef fish much prized by diners in Hong Kong. The wrasse, with its distinctive hump on its dark blue head, gave us what appeared to be a whimsical, questioning look. The fish had somehow, for the moment, eluded fishermen.

The Napoleon wrasse was emblematic of the conservation problems that beset Komodo.

All of us on board had just spent a week at an international coral reef conference in Bali where one of the major subjects was how Indonesia's coral reefs are being dynamited out of existence.
More than a quarter of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and most of the remaining reefs may be dead in 20 years.
Indonesia boasts some 16% of the world's coral reefs, yet over 80% of those reefs are considered to be highly or moderately degraded.

Only 5% of Indonesia's coral reefs are in good condition, according to Ketut Sarjna Putra, of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The biggest immediate threat is bombing to obtain commercially valuable fish. Bob Johannes, an Australia-based environmental consultant, estimates that the worldwide live-reef fish trade is worth US$1/2 to $1 billion for food, and several hundred million dollars to provide fish to service the aquarium hobbyist industry.

The blast from a homemade fishing bomb damages the swim bladders of nearby fish, which either float to the surface or sink to the coral rubble. Blast fishing can kill up to 80% of the coral in the blast zone. The scene of a bombed coral reef is similar in emotional impact to a clear-felled rainforest. Desolate. Naked. Hopeless.

Just weeks after the conference ended, Komodo National Park rangers and police aboard a "floating ranger station" arrested 24 fishermen caught in the act of bombing coral reefs in the area. Conservationists credit the increased surveillance as having reduced fish bombing in the park by 80 percent.

"There's still bombing going on," Jos Pet acknowledges. "But it is considerably less than a few years ago, and probably much less than you'll see in other parts of Indonesia."

Komodo still faces plenty of problems, including figuring out how to provide cash to the 3,300 people who live in the park. Nevertheless the Napoleon wrasse was an admittedly small omen of hope.

We went for a last manta dive and saw dozens of the harmless but impressive fish glide past. Just when it seemed that we were going to overdose on manta rays the Darth Vader of mantas soared through the water. This fish was not only significantly larger than the others, with a wingspan of perhaps five meters, but was completely black. This Stealth bomber-manta swam past, again and again. Was it oblivious to our presence? Or was it showing off, reminding us that there are alien and majestic forces in this world which remind us that we are all visitors?