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Fortunately, major technological advances over the past two decades have meant that I don’t need to start looking at getting a gill transplant just yet! Instead, to answer my question the SOSF-DRC team and I decided that we would use satellite tags to record and monitor remotely the movement patterns of the manta rays from D’Arros Island. Unlike animals that live on land and move through a two-dimensional landscape, manta rays move through a three-dimensional environment, and if I were to track their movements at first hand I would need to grow gills. Standing in front of the Save Our Seas Foundation D’Arros Research Centre (SOSF-DRC, the home of the Seychelles Manta Ray Project) and looking out over the shoreline towards the seemingly endless horizon, I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘With so much room to move, where do the manta rays go when they aren’t here?’

These same manta rays would soon become the focus of my PhD and while to this very day we are still monitoring their presence at D’Arros Island by means of photo-ID, our efforts were leaving a major question unanswered. Work soon began to photograph the unique spot patterns on the bellies of these animals so that individuals could be identified and counted.

As the leader of the Save Our Seas Foundation and the Manta Trust’s Seychelles Manta Ray Project, I hope to change this by determining not only how many manta rays live in this part of the Western Indian Ocean, but also how frequently they visit the shores of the 115 islands comprising the archipelago.Īs recently as six years ago, divers noted that manta rays aggregate almost year-round at D’Arros Island, a small coralline island on the Seychelles’ Amirantes Bank. Researchers have spent more than 10 years studying the manta ray populations in other parts of the world, but next to nothing is known about this one. But that is all I think of: the ocean and the incredible marine life in it – and the little-studied manta ray population that lives beneath the turquoise waves of the Seychelles. When people think of the Seychelles they often imagine white sandy beaches and bright green palm fronds on small islands, not the millions of square kilometres of Indian Ocean that surround the island nation.