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KOMODO MARINE RESERVE
Komodo is unique in the world in
having two distinct marine habitats - tropical and temperate - a few
nautical mile s
distant from each other. There is a constant flow of the warm
tropical waters of the Flores Sea to the north which mix with the
cold upwellings brought from the south by the Indian Ocean. The
upwellings are caused by deep ocean currents originating in
Antarctica which collide with the volcanic shelf of Komodo and
surface. The upwellings, combined with the oxygenation occasioned by
the fierce currents surrounding Komodo, provide an endless supply of
plankton and nutrients to the surrounding seas. This in turn,
supports an amazing and colourful profusion of temperate marine life
- invertebrate, mammal and fish. A few mile to the north lies an
even greater multitude of tropical fish life that are normally found
in equatorial waters. All in all, there are over 1000 species of
fish and marine mammals found in the waters surrounding Komodo.
Saving the Seas of
Komodo
Even WITHOUT a Dragon, Komodo and its surrounding islets would for
me still remain a powerful symbol of that vanishing Garden of Eden
deep within our collective memory . With its strange orchids, flying
lizards, forests of giant fan palms and scarcity of man, it seems
less like another Place than another Time. So remote is this tiny
island that it wasn't until l911 that Varanus Komodoensis, its
10-foot long, running swimming, tree-climbing lizard, was described
by science and revealed to the world as fact rather than myth.
Located at the edge-seam of the world, in no one continent and no
one sea, the dragon islands of Komodo National Park are also
surrounded by a furious moat For the Lesser Sunda archipelago, that
thin chain of islands stretching east from Bali towards New Guinea,
is also the grid which
divides the warm shallows of the South China seas, from the cool
deeps of the Indian ocean. The ebb and flow between these opposing
bodies of water produces not only the protective navigational hazard
of tidal races and whirlpools, but also an astounding mixture of
marine creatures of both warm and cold water, some species having no
business to be anywhere near here at all, others found no where
else, and many more constantly revealing themselves to be new to
science. No less than fifteen different varieties of whales and
dolphins have recently been observed here, from pods of shark-eating
tropical Orcas, to the two-foot long, exuberantly acrobatic spinner
dolphins.
Whereas the Dragon was only discovered in the first decade of this
century, it wasn't until the l960's that it was properly surveyed
and studied. In the 1970's it beg an
receiving is first trickle of tourists, and only the l980's did its
waters first begin being plumbed by SCUBA divers - and now, at the
turn of the Millennium, just when we have started to see how
mysteriously rich this region is, we find it under threat. The
burgeoning population of Indonesia, the hunger for fish and meat,
has brought dynamite and cyanide fisher bandits to Komodo's reefs,
and marauding armed poachers seeking the wild deer and pig of the
islands, which are the essential life support of the great lizard.
Our last dragon, and its moat of marine mysteries, should be passed
on, don't you think, to continue to remind future generations of our
earliest beginnings and of that dwindling Garden of Eden within us
all?
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