The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  It was published as the novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez; it is my favorite of all my books about the sea.

  Photos by Underwater Cinematographer Howard Hall of Peter Benchley Riding the Manta Ray in the Sea of Cortez

  In the early 1980s, Peter Benchley traveled with a crew from ABC’s American Sportsman to document the schooling of hundreds of hammerhead sharks in the Sea of Cortez. But a majestic manta ray that was injured ultimately became the center of their attention and affection. Michele Hall, wife of photographer Howard Hall, gently removed fishing line that was tearing the wing of the manta ray that hovered under their boat. After it was freed, the manta stayed with the boat for three days giving “rides” to Benchley and the rest of the crew before finally returning to the open sea.

  The following photos were taken by Howard Hall of Benchley riding the manta in the Sea of Cortez.

  Peter Benchley cruising the waters of the Sea of Cortez in 1980 on the back of a giant manta ray. The gentle beast, eighteen feet wide, accelerated so fast that Peter had to grip its lip with one hand and its wing with the other and lie flat against its back.

  Howard Hall/www.howardhall.com

  Framed by the manta’s unique “horns,” or cephalic fins, Peter flew to dangerous depths, banked around seamounts, then soared again toward the ocean surface. He described feeling like a passenger in an F-16 jet fighter who had no control over his thrilling, majestic craft.

  Howard Hall/www.howardhall.com

  Peter gently inspects the underside of a hovering, benign manta. The creatures are like floating islands, oasis sanctuaries that host a myriad of animals seeking shelter, protection, and sustenance. They are known to be very shy and only rarely permit human contact.

  Howard Hall/www.howardhall.com

  The article that follows was written by award-winning photojournalist Douglas David Seifert, and was originally published by Geographical magazine. Seifert serves as a contributing editor to Dive magazine (U.K.) and is on the board of directors of Shark Savers.

  In this article, Seifert sheds light on the harrowing circumstances that threaten the existence of manta rays, such as overfishing, which in recent years has caused their numbers to plummet.

  Following the article is a series of dramatic photos of manta rays in the wild that Seifert has documented up close while on his global travels.

  THE MILLION DOLLAR MANTAS

  Douglas Seifert

  Manta rays are always on the move. Unlike the other 500 or so species of layabouts in the ray and skate family—the stingrays, sawfishes and guitarfishes—for mantas, lying on the bottom, blending in with the environment or conserving energy isn’t an option. From the moment they’re born—released free-swimming and autonomous—to the moment they die, three to four decades later if they’re lucky, they must remain constantly, ceaselessly on the move.

  Mantas must swim in order to breathe, they must swim to find food and, as ram-jet filter-feeding specialists, they must swim to capture and engulf the small fish and microscopic plankton upon which they feed. They can swim only forward; they have no means to reverse course. Although they can ascend or descend, turn left or right, it’s always with, and as a result of, forward propulsion achieved by undulations of their pectoral fins in the same way that a bird achieves flight by flapping its wings.

  Scuba diving and snorkeling enthusiasts the world over actively seek out encounters with manta rays in destinations such as Hawaii, the Maldives, Micronesia, Mexico, the Galapagos and Papua New Guinea. For those fortunate enough to encounter a manta in its natural setting, the impression is almost universal: they are perceived to be majestic animals, graceful, benign, non-threatening, aware, sometimes curious, with the sparkle of intelligence in their wide, unblinking eyes. Indeed, mantas are considered to be among the most intelligent fish in the sea, with the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any member of the ray family.

  The most popular live-aboard dive boats tailor their cruise itineraries to locations where there is a good likelihood of seeing a manta. Similarly, land-based operations exploit known local manta haunts, getting as many paying tourists to the mantas as they can fit aboard their boats. In some places, such as the tiny Micronesian island of Yap, the allure of diving with manta rays is the lone attraction that sells the package, bringing millions of dollars into the local economy. Manta ray dives on Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia have overtaken whale shark tours as the big-draw money maker for local operators; Bali’s Manta Point at Nusa Penida brings in $3 million a year to local operators.

  Nice Little Earner

  The draw of the manta ray is an inestimable windfall for scuba diving and snorkeling tour operators. And there’s no better example of the financial value of manta encounters to a local economy than the success of Kona, Hawaii.

  There, the reef manta rays have been studied for more than a decade. Each individual within the resident population has been identified by its characteristic markings and coloration, and the population is known to number around 146.

  Kona’s dive and snorkel operators earn a combined $3.4 million a year directly from their manta encounters. Hence, each of the identified 146 mantas currently generates $23,288 a year. With a lifespan of forty-plus years, each of those mantas will, over the course of its lifetime, generate $1 million in direct revenue from the manta-encounter excursions alone. This amount doesn’t reflect the mantas’ additional value to the local tourism infrastructure by creating a revenue stream for airfares, hotels, rental cars, taxes, restaurants, employment and so on.

  From a financial perspective, the manta isn’t just another fish in Hawaiian waters; the ray is an economic benefactor that can legitimately, and accurately, be described as “The Million Dollar Manta.” As long as there are mantas, operators can run their boats, pay their staff, cover their overheads and collect their profits, but if the mantas go away, all the operators have left to sell is “coral gardens” and vacant seawater—and that doesn’t add up to much of a business plan.

  Caught in the Hunt

  Mobulids—mantas and their close relatives, the mobula rays—have a broad, thick disc of a body supporting a pair of wide, triangular-shaped, flexible pectoral-fin “wings” and a protuberant head horned by a pair of cephalic lobe fins. Because of this particular anatomy and the fact that they can’t swim backward, they are prone to entanglement in man-made apparatuses, such as fishing and mooring lines, gill nets and purse seine nets. Hence, they often turn up as incidental fishing bycatch. In the Indian Ocean alone, the reported mobulid bycatch by the tuna purse seine industry exceeds sixty tons per year.

  In Mexico, Peru and Indonesia, coastal communities have long hunted mantas and mobulas for their meat on a seasonal or subsistence level. The meat is of poor quality, but hungry bellies forgo gastronomy in favor of survival. Some manta wings are sold in Mexico as a scallop substitute or as a taco filling, but largely, it’s a poor man’s protein.

  In the villages of Lamalera and Lamakera, islands across the horizon from each other in Indonesia, the traditional whale-hunting fishermen take mantas and mobulas, as well as whale sharks and mola mola, when they’re unable to catch whales or dolphins. On Lamalera, these artisanal hunters seek out migrating mantas and mobulas from May to October—typically catching around three hundred each season.

  The meat is dried on bamboo racks, looking like nothing so much as shriveled, leathery black donuts, and smelling like low tide on a bad day. These dried meat chunks were originally bartered with the inhabitants of other islands for rice, vegetables, fabric and metal, but for some time, they’ve been sold for Indonesian rupiah.

  Dramatic Change

  By the late 1990s, the villagers of Lamakera, flush with rupiah from a few good manta harvests, were able to outfit themselves with outboard motors, eschewing the pandanus sails of their neighbors. With greater speed and the ability to hunt farther from land, they were able to kill many more mobulids than in the past. Indeed, during the 2000s, they caught an average 1,500 ma
ntas and mobulas per season.

  Mantas and mobulas aren’t designed to have a predator of such dogmatic persistence and unbounded greed. They grow relatively slowly; it takes females between eight and fifteen years to reach sexual maturity. A single offspring is produced after a nine-month gestation and females sometimes have punctuated pregnancies, leaving two or three years between offspring.

  Unsurprisingly, the boats are now returning with fewer mantas and mobulas than they did in the past, and the manta harvest requires more and more effort and expense. But the Lamakerans continue their hunt, for not so long ago, Chinese traders from Jakarta and Surabaya began paying them a great deal more money than they were used to receiving for dried manta meat. The traders paid them more than five times as much—not for the mantas’ flesh, but for their gill rakers.

  Updating the Menu

  The Chinese dried seafood market drives the fishing industries of many developing countries. These fisheries can’t compete with the developed-world fishing fleets for top-price markets that demand fresh and flash-frozen seafood. Instead, slow, marginally seaworthy subsistence boats, manned by illiterate and unskilled laborers, go on long-duration voyages, dehydrating the prized parts of their catch on wooden decks under the tropical sun.

  One segment of the dried-seafood business is devoted to fulfilling gourmet ingredients for Chinese gastronomy, such as sea cucumber for sauces and shark fins for soup; the other segment is the traditional Chinese medicine market, where dried seafood joins other desiccated plunder from the natural world—rhino horn, tiger penis and the like.

  Traditional Chinese medicine has a 2,000-year history, but manta ray gill rakers have only appeared as an ingredient in the past decade, as a new generation of entrepreneurs has pushed them as a miraculous ingredient of a cleansing tonic or soup. Vendors spin a tale of the gills’ incredible properties, drawing analogies between the filtering of seawater and the filtering out of pollutants. The gill rakers are said to offer benefits to the blood and liver, removing toxins and bolstering the immune system.

  So new are the manta ray gill rakers to the traditional Chinese medicine market that many traders don’t even label them as such. Often, they are referred to simply as peng yu sai, or “fish gills.”

  A Question of Economics

  The epicenter of the manta gill raker industry is Guangzhou, China. It’s here that 99 percent of manta ray gill rakers come to be sold at their highest wholesale market price—roughly $250 per kilogram for large gill rakers, and $133 per kilogram for small ones. Based on the average estimate of around 60,000 kilograms of gill rakers traded annually, the total retail market for gill rakers is projected to be worth $11 million per year.

  This commercial fishery specifically targeting manta and mobula rays has rapidly come into existence, flourished and expanded with alarming efficiency. In the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean off India and Sri Lanka, fishermen land more than 79,000 mobulas per year, while in the Indo-Pacific off Indonesia and the Philippines, tens of thousands more mantas and mobulas will find their way to fish markets, and eventually their gill rakers will make their way to China.

  A manta in a fish market sells for $40–500, depending on the size of the animal and the weight of its gill rakers. If that same animal, swimming off the coast of Hawaii, Bali or the Maldives, isn’t killed, it could provide a livelihood that’s potentially worth millions of dollars for local people, as well as a legacy for future generations.

  Greater Protection

  The two species of manta ray are listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as vulnerable globally. At present, they’re only formally protected in New Zealand, Ecuador, the USA, Guam, Maldives, Yap, Indonesia, the Philippines and Mexico.

  In November 2011, the oceanic manta ray became the first ray to be listed on the Convention on Migratory Species, which obligates signatories (currently numbering 116) to strictly protect the animals, conserve and restore their habitats, mitigate obstacles to their migration, and control other factors that might endanger them. But mantas can migrate across large distances, so they’re still vulnerable to being fished as they roam. And the reef manta is still unprotected.

  Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador have now submitted a proposal to include the genus Manta in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The proposal will be considered in March 2013 at the sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties.

  It’s clear from recent assessments that populations are severely depleted and that international trade is driving the declines. Over the past seven years, the number of mantas caught has increased nearly fourfold, with an estimated 30 percent drop in global populations. An Appendix II listing would regulate international trade to ensure that it’s sustainable and legal, and would thus help populations to recover from decline. Without that protection, the future of this graceful, restless ocean denizen looks very bleak indeed.

  To learn more and to get involved, visit www.mantatrust.org and www.sharksavers.org.

  Fishing for manta rays increased significantly during the 1990s. In some cases, modern equipment has enabled a fivefold increase in the number of fish caught.

  Shawn Heinrichs

  Once on land, mantas are cut into pieces before their meat and gill rakers are sold.

  Paul Hilton

  Chinese medicine has a 2,000-year history, but manta ray gill rakers have only recently appeared on menus. They are said to offer benefits to the blood and liver, to remove toxins and bolster the immune system.

  Paul Hilton

  Dried gill rakers can fetch up to $250 per kilogram in traditional medicine shops in China.

  Paul Hilton

  Photos of Manta Rays in the Wild

  by Douglas David Seifert (www.douglasseifert.com)

  An oceanic ray, with a pair of large remora suckerfish attached to both sides of its head, patrols the open ocean in search of plankton. The dark color and prominent cephalic fins, which look like horns, have led to its unfortunate nickname, “devilfish.” (Photographed in the Revillagigedo Islands, eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.)

  © Douglas David Seifert

  A female oceanic manta ray is cleaned by small wrasses that remove parasites from her skin. Manta rays hover near coral reefs where wrasses congregate in “cleaning stations.”

  (Photographed in the Misool Eco Resort Marine Protected Area, Raja Ampat, Indonesia.)

  © Douglas David Seifert

  A reef manta ray pushes through the water with its mouth wide open to capture microscopic plankton suspended in a shallow lagoon in the Maldives. The plankton are funneled into the mouth by the cephalic fins and caught upon the gill rakers as water flows out through the gills. This type of feeding is called ramjet filter feeding.

  (Photographed in the Maldives.)

  © Douglas David Seifert

  Reef manta rays gather at a shallow water cleaning station, where wrasses remove parasites from their skin.

  (Photographed in the Maldives.)

  © Douglas David Seifert

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to ABC’s “The American Sportsman” and its producer, John Wilcox, under whose aegis I was introduced to the Sea of Cortez; to Stanton A. Waterman, for taking me along on the voyage and for his sage counsel and fine company; and to Susannah Waterman Becker whose inspired graphic eye captured the look of the Sea of Cortez.

  P.B.

  This edition was made possible with generous contributions from two exceptionally talented marine activists:

  Douglas David Seifert, journalist and underwater photographer, who supplied the article “The Million Dollar Mantas,” photographs of mantas in the wild, and the brilliant manta photo used in the cover artwork that captures the spirit and majesty underlying the novel.

  And, marine life artist Wyland, who is known worldwide for powerful marine murals on city buildings, for vibrant paintings, and for lovely line drawings such as the one that opens each chapter of The Girl of the S
ea of Cortez.

  For Kate Medina

  BY PETER BENCHLEY

  FICTION

  Jaws

  The Deep

  The Island

  The Girl of the Sea of Cortez

  Q Clearance

  Rummies

  Beast

  White Shark

  Creature

  NONFICTION

  Time and a Ticket

  Ocean Planet

  Shark Trouble

  Shark Life

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETER BENCHLEY (1940–2006) belonged to one of America’s most celebrated literary families: his grandfather was the humorist Robert Benchley and his father the novelist Nathaniel Benchley. After graduating from Harvard, Benchley worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek and a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. Jaws was his first novel. It was followed by The Deep and The Island, which were also made into motion pictures. Other works include the novels The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, Q Clearance, and Rummies, the nonfiction Shark Trouble, and dozens of magazine articles and television documentaries about the sea. For more than thirty years, Benchley was a powerful voice for shark and ocean conservation issues through film, speeches, and alliances with scientists, universities, and nongovernmental groups.