Let’s Respect Our Seas

Slipping on my snorkel and mask, I leaned over the edge of the fast-moving rubber dinghy, ducked my head under the crystal waters of the tropical Nicobar Sea and peered down into wonderland. There, 
before me, were over 200 spinner dolphins, vital, alive, fast and exuberant. One particularly young spinner calf caught my attention as it swam circles around its larger, two-metre-long mother. The little one seemed even more curious about us than we were about it and easily kept pace with our boat and its own pod, as it chased down its fast-food buffet … a shoal of fish.

I was in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in March 1998 with diver-conservationists Mitali Kakar, Sumer Verma and Sarang Kulkarni as part of an Indian Coast Guard-Sanctuary Asia-ReefWatch scuba diving survey to assess the impact of El Niño (actually, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a variation in the eastern 
Pacific Ocean atmosphere system that’s known to trigger weather changes around the world). We had already dived at Tarmugli in the Mahatma Gandhi National Park in Wandoor, where we saw graveyards of bleached staghorn coral littering the coralline sands seabed. But that, we concluded, was a result of deforestation-related 
sedimentation. Subsequently, six of us undertook 14 more dives at 
Wandoor, Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Trinket and Campbell Bay. Here we discovered gardens of mangroves, mudflats and corals all throbbing with marine life including crabs, sea fans, sponges, anemones, and shoals of yellowback fusiliers, snappers, jacks, sea snakes and marine turtles.

Man bites shark
Earlier, the legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau had nicknamed the waters of Car Nicobar ‘The Sea of Sharks’. But worryingly, on none of our 14 dives, punctuated by even more snorkelling surveys, did we ever see even a single shark. 
El Niño, we concluded after our survey, seemed to have spared the coral formations of these islands, but sharkfin hunters from Indonesia and Thailand had meanwhile taken virtually every last shark out of these azure waters to feed insatiable Far Eastern markets.

I freely admit to being smitten by the sheer beauty and extravagance of the Andamans’ tropical forests, living corals and golden sands, but my real reason for wanting to defend this marine biodiversity asylum