Two trips in to the season and our next trip sees the comeback of Wicked Diving’s Manta Ray Education trips. Last year, throughout July and August, we provided Manta Ray educational trips which allowed our guests the chance to learn a little bit more about these graceful giants and hopefully to get up close and personal with them.
This year we have taken it a step further. We now offer unique 5 day Manta Education trips to the Komodo National Park and we’re really excited to let you know that we’ve teamed up with The Manta Trust for their support and to ensure we are making a valuable and tangible contribution to the research being undertaken in Indonesia.
The Manta Trust is a UK based charity, which works globally to help protect manta rays by completing research, raising awareness with local public and community stakeholders, campaigning governments and decision makers and providing education around conservation issues. One very important part of this process is data collection which is time consuming and costly, yet crucial in providing an accurate picture of manta ray behaviour, territory, population numbers and reproduction.
Wicked Diving’s dive crew and guests who join the Manta Ray Education trips will be armed with tools to monitor Komodo’s manta rays and will gather information about environmental conditions, sightings and photographs to help identify individual manta rays in The Manta Trust’s existing database. If we’re very lucky, we hope to identify some new individuals too.
It comes as a surprise to many that these graceful and important megafauna are currently facing a number of threats from unsustainable fishing practices and the Chinese medicine trade. It’s hard to imagine an underwater world without these creatures and we look forward to working with our guests and The Manta Trust to protect their future.
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