Update 12/08/08

Hello Everyone, I know the Cocos Island Seamount Project is coming together slowly, but it is coming together. I have news, so I thought I'd update those who are interested in the project.

I'm in Costa Rica right now, and I met with the biologist that is going out to Cocos Island with me who is a Costa Rican himself. We have made some exciting plans to actually capture and tag hammerheads with tracking units which will be more reliable than the kind placed on the sharks from underwater with a spear. We will also be taking the French Ambassador to Costa Rica who is involved with the French Fund for the environment, and will be giving them a first hand experience of the issues that are taking place on Cocos Island, the tagging of the sharks, and the submarine exploration of the seamount. Once we get to the Island, my role will be just to get the photographs that will help tell the story, but I'm working hard to get everything set up before we go again in March.

In Other related news, a Tiger Shark and Silky Shark Rookery have been discovered about 40 miles off of Costa Rica near Gulfito, a major fishing port, I plan on working with Randal and his Non-Profit organization PRETOMA to protect these areas in the coming months.

Team Bios

Ben Horton - Expedition Leader - National Geographic Grantee

Awarded the National Geographic Society’s first Young Explorer Grant for research he completed on Cocos Island involving shark poachers, and was the photographer on a recently completed 2 month expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, Ben is an adventurer who is motivated by conservation and a desire to make a difference for his generation. He has recently been published in National Geographic Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, the New York Times and Outside magazine among many others. His previous work on Cocos Island has produced episodes on National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles, material for National Geographic Magazine, and is the subject of a series of lectures that Ben has given around the world.


Kifah Sasa - United Nations Development Program representative to Cocos Island

Environment and development sociologist, he coordinates the GEF/UNDP Project
for the Improved Management and Conservation Practices of Cocos Island
National Park. He has lead the negotiation between Costa Rica conservation
organizations, Ministry of Environment and the fishing sector, pertaining
the creation of a Marine Management Area around Cocos Island National Park.
This expedition will help build a case for the creation of such a Marine
Management Area. He has vast experience in regional project coordination
throughout Central America and is founding member of a non governmental
organization working for sustainable development through a popular education
approach.

Randal Arauz - Scientist

Randall Arauz is a Costa Rican biologist graduated from the University of
Costa Rica in 1987. He is a founding member and President of PRETOMA, a
Costa Rican NGO established to protect marine life in 1997, and is a member
of both the Sea Turtle Specialist Group and the Shark Specialist Group of
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature IUCN. His main field
of interest is incidental bycatch of sea turtles by commercial fisheries
operations, although more recently he has focused his attention on sharks.
Since 2001 he leads a national campaign against shark finning that has
turned into a regional initiative, and currently conducts studies related to
shark fisheries and migrations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. He has
received awards for his work from the Whitley Fund for Nature (UK), Shark
Project (Germany), and the IUCN (Costa Rica).


Kelly Hearn - Writer - National Geographic News correspondent

Kelly Hearn is an adventurer and journalist who has worked in Latin America since 2004. He is a correspondent to National Geographic News. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Times and other outlets. In 2007, he was nominated by National Geographic News for a reportage award from The American Association for the Advancement of Science. His investigative reporting has been funded by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and The North American Congress on Latin America. He is the host of National Geographic Channel’s television program “Lost Cities of the Amazon,” to air during National Geographic’s Expedition Week in November 2008.

Colin Hargraves - Producer

Colin Hargraves is a professional editor/director with a love for travel and adventure. Colin has worked professionally since 2004 for MTV, VH1, FX, Current, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Travel Channel, and has produced four films for the National Geographic Channel (The Real Roswell, Inside Carnaval, Tunnel to a Lost World) as well as a twelve part series called The Science of the Bible. He is presently involved in post-production for National Geographic Explorer’s Lost Cities of the Amazon, a documentary he also co-directed and produced. Colin has worked creatively to push the limits of the television documentary format, creating original products more similar to films than to television shows. He recently edited and co-directed a short film, which was accepted into the 2008 Cannes Film Festival called Laura. He has also written, directed, shot and cut a number of episodes for the popular web-based serial Lonely Girl 15. He has produced, directed and edited two projects for the X-Prize Foundation (Moon 2.0, Race For Our Future). Colin is a capable director of photography, camera operator and sound engineer allowing him to have a proper overview of all his productions. Colin is a stickler for production value and detail and strives to raise the bar for documentary television.

Mark Combellick - DP- Camera Operator

Mark Combellick has been working in the television industry for over 12 years, pursuing his taste for adventure through the lens of his camera. As either a director of photography leading a team or a camera operator on a team, Mark’s style and professionalism are imprinted on the finished product. Over the past seven years, his focus has been on projects that mirror his own passions. Discovery Channel’s “American Choppers,” “Monster Nation,” and one of America’s favorite’s “Deadliest Catch,” History’s Channel’s “Ax Men,” and an untitled series on the famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race are just a few of his series projects.

Expedition Description

In my previous expeditions to Cocos Island National Park I’ve seen the hardships and the obstacles that the park rangers have to overcome on a daily basis in order to protect the area. It seems an impossible task with what little resources they have available, especially with so many illegal fishermen working against them. Day by day, the battle continues, and little by little the fishermen wear away at the parks fragile ecosystem. It won’t be long now until the fishermen have fished beyond the sustainable limit, and the marine sanctuary will collapse. This is not an endless pot of gold, and there is a limit to how much we can take out before it cannot refill itself. The species that the Marine Reserve was established to protect are mostly of the Pelagic kind, and their time on Cocos Island is limited to only brief visits. As soon as the great schools of hammerhead shark, bluefin and yellowfin tuna, and swordfish depart for their feeding grounds they can no longer be protected, and as you can imagine, fishermen descend on their schools like flocks of gulls on a forgotten lunch. There are a myriad of unknowns about the pelagic species and we still can’t follow their open ocean migrations because they travel to deep and too far, making protecting them next to impossible. No amount of money can solve this problem, because the technology simply doesn’t exist.

What we do have however is a few key pieces of knowledge that we can use until our knowledge of the ocean improves. Recently it has come to light that there is a sea mount just 40 miles off the coast of Cocos Island that the pelagic species and fishermen alike use on a daily basis. This seamount has never before been seen by human eyes, and it’s depth is known only by the fishermen who drop their lines approximately 300 feet to hunt for the gigantic grouper that also call this place home. One of these fishermen has provided us with the approximate GPS coordinates to find the seamount.

As the location of the seamount is as yet only an approximation, and it’s existence only a rumor until recently, it was not included in the original boundaries of Cocos Island. It hasn’t been considered even by agencies such as the French Fund for the Environment and the UNDP when they have been researching Cocos Island in an effort to expand the borders of Cocos Island National Park, this work has been led by Kifah Sasa, and Kifah is also going to be a part of this expedition so he can have a first hand view of the events as they unfold.
Nobody has had the equipment, the knowhow, or the ability to pull together a team capable of exploring the seamount to make it’s vital role in the Cocos Island Ecosystem anything more than speculation. We now have the capability, we have the team, and we are readying to dive into a sea of unknowns with one inspiration, to gain ground on the illegal fishermen. The question is how.

How will visiting the seamount do all this? While exploring the seamount we will be placing a receiving unit that will ping every time a tagged animal passes through the region. With the Unit in place over the next year or so, information will be gathered from years of tagging work that scientist Randall Arauz has been doing on Cocos Island. Every tagged animal that passes will have come from Cocos Island at some point in the past, because every animal was tagged on Cocos Island. Once Randall processes the information, he will know what animal it was that has passed the seamount, how long it stayed, and wether or not the animal makes frequent visits. We can make a strong hypotheses that we will not be disappointed with our findings. That hard data will then be provided to the agencies that are making the petition to expand the park boundaries and will be used to show that the seamount is not separated from Cocos Island, but is a major portion of the Cocos Island ecosystem.

It won’t be a simple task to place the receiving unit on the Seamount, at a depth of 300 feet and 30 miles from Cocos Islands protected bays, a whole new realm of difficulties present themselves. The main reason that the seamount hasn’t already been dove by the Seahunter group, a dive company that operates a deep water submarine on Cocos Island is that until now they haven’t had the ability to launch the sub in the rough pacific swells that rhythmically crash into the rock walls of Cocos Island. A new boat, specially outfitted to launch the sub in the open ocean has been outfitted to handle these stresses. The depth of the seamount is easily reachable by the three person submarine once it has passed below the surface, but is beyond the normal limits of even an advanced deep water diver. The normal limits of a deep water diver are at 135 feet, I’ve dove to nearly 200, and very few people have passed 200 feet without very specialized equipment. It’s unlikely that we will attempt a subless dive to the seamount, but if the opportunity presents itself and all safety measures are taken, we are specially outfitted with Rebreather units that recycle the air that has already passed through our bodies, enabling us to breath our own air again. With these units, it may be possible to reach the seamount and install the Receiver unit ourselves. If not, we will rely on the arm of the submarine to do the work.

There are inherent difficulties when it comes to tagging a pelagic species as well. William Bebe was one of the first naturalists to visit cocos island, and in his book the Arcturus Adventure, he wrote of the difficulties of observing the fish. Hooked fish were found to die following their struggles, and even the great bluefin tuna are timid creatures. Bebe did however have plenty of encounters with shark while diving with his primitive compressor and helmet. The shark, though timid, can be curious. Species such as the hammerhead shark are frightened easily by the bubbles that the commonly used scuba regulator makes. The bubbles are thought to register as a impenetrable wall to the senses of a hammerhead. Marine biologist Peter Klimley writes in his book the Secret Lives of Sharks about suddenly realizing that the sharks all but ignored him while he freedove among the vast schools, sans tank and regulator. It was Peter Klimley who began tagging and tracking the sharks with great success, and scientists like Randall Arauz followed suit. The personality of the hammerhead shark has made it the most viable option for our expedition, and once the receiver has successfully been placed on the Seamount, we will move on to dive Cocos Island with the goal of tagging three more sharks. With three recently tagged sharks, and numerous sharks having been tagged over the last number of years, we will have an exceptionally detailed view of the role that the seamount plays on Cocos Island. The data will also be referenced to other receiver units that Randall already has stationed inside the park boundaries on known hammerhead cleaning stations and schooling areas. What’s more the tags are harmless to the shark, and will optimally be placed in the cartilaginous dorsal fin to minimize harm to the animal. Equal in difficulty to tagging the shark is covering the story.

I’ve teamed up with my brother Jesse Horton to capture the events as they take place, Jesse is a superb underwater videographer and has extensive experience on Cocos Island due to the fact that he has been working on Cocos as a the pilot of Deepsee, the submarine that we will be using. Jesse has also had footage included in a National Geographic special on Sharks along with the work of world renowned underwater videographers like Howard Hall.

For literary coverage, Kelly Hearn has agreed to join the expedition. Kelly is a National Geographic correspondent and has been working as an independent journalist in Latin America since 2004. Kelly wrote the National Geographic News Article for my first Cocos Island expedition and has done extensive research on the problem of Shark Poaching in Cocos Island.

Besides putting this expedition together, and aiding in gathering the scientific data, my role will be to take photographs that will be used to tell the story visually. Photography has been of great importance on other expeditions with goals such as ours like Micheal Fay’s legendary Mega Transect. It was the photography of Nick Nichols that put what science had found into perspective. Once the boat has left port, the photography will be my primary job, and I’ll be working to capture the value of the seamount through images.

The Urgency of the expedition cannot be stressed enough. Already over 90 percent of the pelagic species have been lost (appendix 1) and fisheries are advancing technology to make up for the difficulties of having less fish to catch. That they can maintain their quotas even with so few fish just goes to show that marine sanctuaries like Cocos Island are more precious than we think. Soon, they may be all that we have left.