Paradise

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Selamat pagi (Good morning)!

I’ll start by saying that I have added pics to the last entry so it should be a little more interesting now…

I left off as we were about to embark on the last part of the field portion of the course, Pulau Redang. An hour boat ride across azure seas took us to what can only be described as paradise. Paradise might even be cutting it short. We pulled up to a diminutive sandy beach skirted on one side by coral reef and on the other by dense jungle. The beach was covered in short sticks coming out of the sand (more on that later) and there was a small hut for cooking, lectures, and where the couple of employees stay. It is called Pasir Mak Kepit, which roughly translates to ‘sand mother squeeze’ and is on the west coast of the island. We quickly set up our tents just in from the beach and got right in the water for some snorkeling, which I will describe later.

Even though we all just wanted to stay there and snorkel we took a boat ride to the inhabited part of the island. Only 5 years ago the lagoon was covered in stilt houses inhabited by a couple of thousand people. The Malaysian government decided to move the people inland as Pulau Redang is a marine reserve. We visited the reserve’s small museum that outlined its history and some of the laws including a fishing ban within the reserve. After being back in civilization briefly we all wanted to return to spend more time “by ourselves” on the island back at Mak Kepit.

The “infrastructure” at Mak Kepit exists solely for one purpose, sea turtle monitoring. That night we got our first taste of these massive creatures. At dusk everyone on the beach must turn off their lights and keep their voices down so as to not scare the prospective turtle mothers from coming up on the beach. Once the turtles have started digging and then laying their eggs they go into a sort of trance and can be approached without scaring them off. On the first night a couple of green sea turtles came up to nest. The whole process of coming up the beach, digging, laying the eggs, covering up the eggs, and returning to the ocean can take anywhere from 1.5-3 hours. We were allowed to get right up close and watch as she used her back flippers as a scoop to dig a hole about 65 cm deep. Their flippers are surprisingly dexterous and they alternate digging and flipping the excess sand away. As majestic as they are in the sea is about how clumsy and awkward they are on land. Unfortunately my experience watching the turtle was cut short by a massive wind storm that picked up and blew away our tent. My tentmate Kyle and I frantically rushed to grab everything and try to fix it, but the broken tent pole that we had discovered earlier and thought would hold was not cooperating so we put our things in the hut and shared a tent with two of our other gracious classmates.

The next two days were spent on a similar routine. Wake up…snorkel…eat….relax…do a school activity usually involving snorkeling…eat…snorkel…lecture…watch turtles…sleep. Not a bad life at all. One school activity was a coral transect survey to determine how much of the substrate was live or dead coral and to count giant clams, sea cucumbers, and crown of thorns seastars along the way. The other activity was a crown of thorns seastar collection and burial. Crown of thorns are native to the area but their numbers around the world have exploded recently. These spiny seastars eat corals and therefore can cause a lot of damage to the reefs. There are a couple of theories as to why their populations have grown so rapidly in recent years mostly involving over extraction of their prey species or terrestrial runoff causing algal blooms that feed their larvae and allow a better survival rate. Whatever the reason for their population jump we were out to catch them and take them back to shore. We used hooks on long poles and dove down to remove them from the coral before placing them in a small boat to take them to the beach. We caught 17 in total (compared to 28 last year and over 100 the year before which may be a positive sign) and buried them on the beach to kill them. Later snorkeling trips revealed that we certainly did not grab all of them so we certainly weren’t eradicating a species or anything.

Now is probably a good time to describe the snorkeling that was just outside our doorstep. It would be tough to describe the diversity of creatures that I saw so I’ll just point out some of the more charismatic. Amongst the fish included wrasses, parrotfish, butterflyfish, and angelfish of all shapes and colours. The occasional massive moray eel would peak out from a crevice, sometimes being cleaned by small neon blue cleaner wrasses. A blacktip reef shark (small one) swam quickly past me once. Another impressive sight was a school of 16 huge and appropriately named bumphead parrotfish (look them up) that swam underneath us. There were 30 cm long porcupinefish (like a pufferfish) and giant clams. I found many a nemo poking out of an anemone as well. Bright christmas tree worms in every colour of blue, green, yellow, white, black, and orange poked out of giant boulder corals. They are tube worms that will dart back into their tubes when provoked. There was also a multitude of branching corals, table corals, mushroom corals, brain corals (my favourite) and well you get the point.

At nights we would wait again for the ok from the rangers to go see the turtles on the beach. One of the nests was being dug too far under a tree on a slope near the jungle where the eggs were vulnerable in a storm so we helped relocate them to a new man-made nest down the beach. The eggs are incredibly soft and if placed the wrong way the umbilical chord can break killing the babies inside so we took due care in placing them in their new home. The nest is marked by the sticks that I had mentioned earlier. The second night we also waited up for some babies to hatch. Eventually a little head and flipper poked out of the sand followed by dozens of its diminutive brothers and sisters. Despite sand in their eyes and a tiring dig out of the burrow they head straight for the ocean (mostly). They run over your feet and hands and seem oblivious to anything but their final goal of making it to the sea. To say they are cute is to cut them short. We would follow them to the edge of the water and watch them swim out a ways into the darkness (and some blacktip reef sharks). Only about 1 in every 1000 make it to adulthood, but some will grow up to return to Mak Kepit to lay their own eggs.

On our last full day we took a boat ride to a resort on the east coast of the island to go scuba diving. Two boat dives cost only 140 ringits (less than $50 Canadian which is incredibly cheap by our standards). There were 5 in our group that had our dive certifications and we had time for two dives. The first dive was at a site called “stingray city”. We did see some blue-spotted ribbontail rays as well as many of the other fish that we had seen snorkeling. Bright anemones were filled with different species of anemonefish (nemos) and the coral life was all around. The second dive was even more spectacular. The site was at the southern tip of a small island called Pulau Lima. There was a strong current which promoted a wide array of life that we hadn’t seen snorkeling. Sea fans, sea whips, featherstars, soft corals, and a school of small barracudas were just some of the sights. The best part was definitely the sea turtles that were swimming around us. A hawksbill turtle (smaller than the green sea turtles we were seeing on the beach) even came and fed within 10 feet of us.

Leaving Pulau Redang was certainly difficult. The last night I slept on the beach under the stars after watching a turtle from laying until she returned to the ocean (about 3 hours). We left on the boat in the morning and hopped back on the bus to go back to Penang. We stopped a couple of places along the way and went to some more local markets but nothing too exciting. We are now back in Penang at our comfortable hotel writing our papers and preparing presentations. My project is on Malayan Tapirs, an awkward creature that kind of looks like an elephant, rhinoceros, and horse mated. Should be interesting. After our reports and a short exam we are heading to Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days where we say goodbye to many classmates who are heading home. I am staying here for another month after that traveling around with a couple of people and then potentially on my own. The only place we have planned so far is Borneo but I’m sure I’ll write more on that when it comes.

Until next time.

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Photos

Blue-spotted ribbontail ray
All underwater photos courtesy of Alex Bolton

Scuba diving
Notice the lack of wetsuit

Christmas tree tubeworms on a boulder coral
This is just a few of the colours they come in