![]() ![]() The trust has logged more than 5,100 individuals around the islands, each identified by unique spot patterns on their ventral side. Thanks to conservation efforts, fishing for mantas in the Maldives is banned and populations are steady. In some parts of the world, mantas are prized for their gill plates, which some quacks believe have medicinal value. Stevens had said I wouldn’t “get it” until I’d seen a manta in the flesh. One of the team freedives to the sea floor with a camera and snaps his belly. This time, it seems he’s content to go slow and we follow him for half an hour, face down in the water, full-screen as he flaps his wings, bird-like, and opens his mouth to feed. And only a few kicks later, there he is, a 2.5-metre juvenile male, gliding 10, maybe 15 metres beneath us. Mask back on, snorkel back in mouth, jump back in. On the boat again, lungs tight, word comes quickly that our manta has turned around and is heading back towards us. Cue furious kicking of fins: but this is man versus manta. We can’t get too close for fear the chug of the boat’s diesel engine will scare the manta away, and so we jump in a couple of hundred yards from where we think it is. ![]() The boat changes course and I’m invited to mask up. The heartbeat accelerates as one of the drone pilots confirms a sighting. Down south, we would have had a much higher chance of seeing something like a cyclonic feeding event (where mantas, typically solitary animals, collaborate to round up plankton like a pack of underwater sheepdogs), but up here, we’re relying on luck. Stevens, matter-of-fact, tells me this isn’t surprising. By the end of day two of the three I’m on the boat, I still haven’t seen a manta. The team – around 15-strong and made up of scientists, marine biologists, educators, local environment agency representatives and underwater filmmakers – has gathered from all over the world: Canada, Colombia, Florida, the Maldives, Bristol.Īt first, our search yields little. I come aboard with the team on mission day zero, off the coast of Hanimaadhoo, 300km and a noisy domestic flight north of the crowded capital Malé. The trust has heard tell through the islands’ network of conservationists, tour operators and fishermen of a number of cleaning stations and areas where mantas feed in these parts, but by Stevens’ own estimation, this is a voyage into the unknown. Of the 80,000 manta sightings logged in the Manta Trust’s database, only 1,000 were in this area. But up in the north, where few tourists or indeed scientists ever tread, there’s still much to explore. The Manta Trust’s Maldivian operations are focussed around the central islands and they know the waters there well. Rising never more than 2.5 metres above sea level off the south-west tip of India, the country known first as a honeymooner’s paradise is made up of around 1,200 islands across 26 atolls that stretch 750km top to bottom. The region Stevens is referring to is the northernmost tip of the Maldives. ![]()
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