April 26, 2012
If you took a quick look on Google Earth at the northern San Andres Archipelago, specifically at the three banks the team visited on this latest mission, you’d think they looked pretty similar. But we found instead that each has its own unique, and important character.
Golden Shadow at sunset
April 22, 2012
Happily, some minds were in fact blown on today’s first dive. The groundtruthing team had promised they found an incredible reef and they did not lie.
We were on the farthest side of the bank from where the Golden Shadow is anchored, the more eastern of two main lagoons. From where we hit the water we had our best view yet of a rusty old cargo ship that ran aground here sometime in the 1990s.
Sonia Bejarano running a transect through the star coral mounds
On the bottom we found a classic reef rising up from a sandy bottom about 12 meters down almost to the surface. We kicked past mound after mound of large star coral colonies. The fish were plentiful and of more species than any but the fish experts among us could count.
April 20, 2012
Each day, as the bulk of the team’s divers head out to the reefs aboard the Calcutta, a group of four divers from Colombia hops in a smaller boat to go looking for queen conch. It’s a continuation of work that’s been underway since 2003 to study conch populations in the archipelago here.
Heins Best getting a heading for a survey site
That was when the Colombian government first closed their conch fishery, except for limited collections by those with special licenses for subsistence fishing. They took this drastic step because the conch populations had plummeted, especially around the archipelago’s inhabited islands, San Andres, Old Providence, and Santa Catalina, about 250 kilometers south of us.
You can find queen conch in at least 36 countries, and they’ve been so overfished in many places that the species is now listed as a threatened fishery on Appendix II for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
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