Manta dance - diving and snorkeling with - manta rays

Sierra, Sept, 1999 by Sallie Tisdale

After an encounter with rays, nothing is quite the same

The Makai turns south along the Kona coast late on a January day. We've already done a quiet dive under glittering afternoon light, and a dozen people rest on the upper deck, watching the red disc of sun. When the sun sets in Hawaii, it slides into the ocean so fast you miss it if you turn around to sneeze. Out to sea, a humpback whale spouts against the pale sky. Dozens of spinner dolphins pace us, riding the bow wave and leaping out of the water in wild pirouettes, darting forward in sudden sprints, falling back again. The glowing sun disappears, the water turns from slate to violet to indigo, and the sky erupts with stars. It is a day to be glad of boats.

Those of us on the Makai are on our way to dive and snorkel with manta rays. Mantas are one of the largest fish in the sea, strange creatures rarely seen even by scuba divers, who usually catch only brief glimpses from a distance. For most people, they are little more than tantalizing shadows sliding away beneath a boat, a distant flutter of wide, dark wings underwater. Mantas frighten many people, who assume they have stingers or huge teeth, but they are something else entirely: harmless, benign monsters full of grace.

Manta rays are elasmobranchs, cartilaginous fish that are almost entirely flexible. Their nearest relatives are sharks, stingrays, devilrays, and skates. They are marked by mystery, a seductive sinuosity, a strangeness hard to penetrate.

What look like wings to us are the manta's pectoral fins. In spite of their size (mantas that live in the open ocean can be more than 20 feet across and weigh over 3,000 pounds), they are notoriously shy. But they are strong. If a manta gets entangled in an anchor line, it can pull a boat for miles.

Most rays live sliding along the sandy ocean floor, digging up mollusks. But mantas are planktivores; like the baleen whales, they are big creatures dining on tiny ones, eating almost 13 percent of their body weight in plankton every week. The fins on their heads have evolved to form flexible scoops around their enormous mouths, and they feed by swimming placidly with mouths wide open, sending great quantities of water through sets of branchial filters that collect the miniature sea life.

No one knows much about mantas; they are biological and taxonomic puzzles, and those who study them have far more questions than answers. They usually die in captivity, refusing to eat and seeming to experience tremendous stress when confined. Three mature mantas in an aquarium in Okinawa, Japan, are the only ones known to have survived any time in a tank--and those three are in a really big tank. "They do not fit easily into museum jars," is the laconic comment of one reference book.

The Makai reaches the dive site, just south of downtown Kona, in full darkness, not far from the shoreline and a line of hotel lights. These days, thousands of divers and snorkelers come to this one bit of coastline every year. When I did the same dive last year, four boats lined the shore and at least 50 people crowded the water. But on this beautiful night, the Makai, with its dozen divers and four snorkelers, is alone.

The manta dive, as it's routinely called in Kona, began more than 20 years ago, when the Kona Surf Hotel first hung underwater lights offshore. The lights attracted certain kinds of plankton and the manta rays followed, swooping and gliding in the light to entertain the Kona Surf's clientele. They came, and came again, night after night to the same brightly lit spot of coastline. Eventually divers began joining them, and eventually those divers realized their own dive lights could concentrate the plankton even further, luring the mantas in much closer to humans than mantas ordinarily came. One thing led to another--to 19,000 people a year.

Keller Laros, a talkative and infectiously enthusiastic divemaster and scuba instructor, first dove with the rays in 1985 and has continued once or twice a week ever since. In 1994, he started Manta Pacific, a business "devoted to the research and conservation of manta rays." At first, Laros began sketching the mantas, trying to distinguish individuals. Then he started taking videos, and is now able to use the mantas' skin markings for identification. He still tries to keep a ledger of every manta seen at the site.

"When I started identifying them, they stopped being just fish," he says, adding that he thinks the mantas who return regularly to the Kona Surf lights display distinct personality traits. "I've got a feeling for them. To be so close to a large ocean creature that's so docile, so beautiful, so graceful. It's thrilling!"

A few mantas have returned often enough to be identified and affectionately named by Laros and his wife, Wendy--"Shadow," "Taz," "Big Bertha," "Cousteau." Some have come for many years; the one known as "W" has been seen since 1979. "They all show up now and then," says Wendy Laros. "They'll feed for a while, then go on their way."