Manta Madness: Predator and Prey

The Wikipedia entry for Manta Rays makes the following observation:

“Historically, mantas were feared for their size and power. Sailors believed that they ate fish and could sink boats by pulling on the anchors. This attitude changed around 1978 when divers around the Gulf of California found them to be placid and that they could interact with the animals.”

The mid-20^th century popular culture played to these fears among scuba and fanned the imagination of the pulp-magazine reading public, much in the same way giant octopuses had for an earlier generation of hard had divers.  The manta and devil fish seem dark and foreboding, triggering all kinds of primal fears and exaggerated consequences from an encounter.  As shown in the pulp cover original I call “Double Trouble,” the diver faces an oncoming manta with only a knife while the giant clam keeps him from moving.  Successfully “counting coup” with the manta will make for a tale of courage and bravery around the bar of the campfire.  If unsuccessful in facing the manta or escaping the death grip of the giant clam, his friends will wonder why he never came back from the dive. 

Double Trouble

The Rugged Action cover conjures visions of single warrior combat, man versus nature, where the outcome determines life and death for the protagonist of the antagonist (diver and manta, respectively, at least from the illustrator’s point of view).  In other aspects, as shown in the cover story “we speared the giant manta” authors portrayed the encounter as a sporting hunt against a large and worthy opponent.  The great white hunter transported under water.

Rugged Action

We Speared the Giant Manta

The poster and book cover for Hans Hass’ 1951 movie, Under the Red Sea, shows aspects of the dangerous encounter narrative.  A camera replaces the knife or spear, but the elements of the dangerous encounter, the diminutive size of the human, outnumbered 2 to 1, in the gaze of the manta’s friendly malevolent eyes, kind of a desert after a fish dinner.   Hass used these images for dramatic effect.  As his New York Times obituary of July 3, 2013 noted,

"Hans Hass, a marine biologist and underwater filmmaker from landlocked Austria who was among the first to introduce worldwide audiences to the beauties of coral reefs, stingrays, octopuses and sharks — especially sharks, which he considered the most beautiful and most maligned ocean creatures…For dramatic effect, the climax of many of the films involved a close encounter…" 

Hass often cast sharks in the climactic role.  For others, mantas played the part exceptionally well.

The first time I went spearfishing at Anacapa Island, shortly after being certified in 1984, with my dive buddy Mark, we each carried a six-foot yellow fiberglass "Hawaiian sling" pole spear with three-prong paralyzer tip.  On our second dive, we encountered a flight of bay rays.  These much smaller cousins of mantas swam by and turned back toward us.  We both instinctively raised our pole spears defensively, despite knowing that the bat ray favored small crustaceans and mollusks, not large neoprene wrapped humans.  Earlier in the dive we encountered the cloud of debris and depressions left by the bat rays as they trenched the seafloor in search of food.  The rays passed by without nary a glance and swam away unimpressed with our defensive display of lethal weaponry. They did not attack, we did not pursue.  No pulp fiction was spawned by the encounter.

Bat ray preparing to excavate a small trench is search of food.  (NOAA photo)

In my encounters with rays of all types since that day, I have been fascinated, not afraid, of the creatures. 

My Life As a Volunteer Exhibits Diver--First Version

What kids think I do.
What my friends think I do.
What I think I do.
What the public thinks I do.
What the fish think I do.
What I really do.

 

Treasure of the Great Basses Wreck

Mike Wilson and two teenagers, Bobby Kriegel and Mark Smith cruise the reef to photograph three big but friendly groupers, when they discover two small cannon—an exciting find.  Wrecks have sparked the imagination of divers and non-divers alike.  On the next dive, they discover a scattering of silver coins.  The exploration of an old wreck transformed into a treasure hunt.  The find started the story of what came to be called the Great Basses Reef wreck or the Taj Mahal wreck. At that point, I am hooked into the story.

Every summer, I select a few books to read while sitting in the late evening Alaska sunshine.  My selected themes are pretty narrow, shipwrecks, nautical adventures and finding sunken treasure.  The Treasure of the Great Reef by Arthur C. Clarke, author of countless science and science fiction books, tops the list this year.  The book, written in 1964, hid in plain sight for a couple of years on the “to be read” shelf one of the several bookcases that populate my home.  I loved Clarke’s science fiction as a kid.  I did a rather elaborate book report on his one of his first novels, A Fall of Moondust, in my ninth grade English class.  I made a scale model of the transport Clarke described and simulated a "breaking news" format for the oral presentation to the class.  I earned an “A” for that effort.  You may not recognize the name, but many will know his most famous novel, 2001:  A Space Odyssey. I can only imagine what a report would have been like had I been reporting on this current selection.

Wrecks and sunken treasure fascinates many of us.  So it is with me since the discovery of the mother load of the Atocha in 1985, the first treasure-laden wrecks to snag my interest.  I learned that investors in that enterprise receive treasure, not cash, when the annual division is made.  I recall bulk treasure from the Atocha being sold on early variants of the cable home shopping channel shortly after the division of treasure found in 1985.  I own a small piece of the Atocha, in the form of a replica coin stamped from the melted down from one of the thousands of silver bars discovered in the wreck.   A book about the Atocha is also on my summer reading shelf.

The coins were instrumental in identifying the wreck.  Not only were the coins minted in the same year, Clarke describes another unusual feature, 

“when we weighed the cemented coin masses and calculated how many coins they contained the answer came out to be almost exactly 1,000.    It was obvious what had happened; the coins had been packed in bags of 1,000 which had been sealed after counting…When the ship had gone down, the bags lasted long enough for the outer layers of rupees to become cemented together by the action of the sea.  Thus, those inside the lump were perfectly preserved while the whole mass retained the shape of the original bag.”

The Wikipedia article on the wreck features the above image of one of the coin-bundles-in-the-shape-of-bag, showing exactly what Clarke described.  Looking at the image I can imagine bags of silver coins on the bottom, fused into a mass over time by the peculiar chemistry of seawater and silver.  Searching further, I found that the some of the coins are now being sold online for prices ranging from $399 to $549.