After three years of planning, two and a half years of fundraising, one lost (and found) bag and collaboration with partners around the world, we got stuck in with three weeks of fieldwork. We acoustically tagged 20 mantas and took genetic samples from 30.

The Project Aims To:

1. Investigate the spatial ecology of the reef manta rays around the Alphonse Group.
This will be done using the 68 underwater receivers situated around the outer reefs and inner lagoons of the atolls. The receivers will detect the high-frequency pings emitted by the tags on the mantas as they swim past.

2. Look at how the mantas are utilising the atolls on a fine spatial scale, the acoustic data will be overlaid with tidal and weather data to look at the conditions that affect the manta movements. 

3. Observe what factors influence their movement patterns and residency times around the atolls at different stages of life in male and female mantas, the critical habitat will be identified which will help influence local conservation management decisions. 

4. Track mantas tagged on Alphonse as they show up on the receiver array at D’Arros, St Josephs, and some other northern Amirante islands such as Poivre. This definitive data will reveal how often these mantas travel around the Amirante chain and utilise different habitats. This has been a main aim of the SMRP since 2016 but photo ID data can only be collected when you see mantas. What they are up to when surveyors are not in the water has always been a mystery until now!

5. Contribute genetic samples to an Indian Ocean-wide genetic study looking at connectivity throughout the region, again with major international conservation implications for mantas.

Expert tagger, Luke Gordon, who is head of Manta Trust Fiji, flew out to assist with the project and train the team on the ground in tagging and sampling techniques.

The tags we used are Vemco V16 acoustic tags which are about the size of a cigar and sit outside the manta; a tagging pole is used which injects a skin anchor into the muscle tissue of the manta and a strong thread connects that to the tag which sits outside.

Anyone swimming around with the Alphonse mantas for the next few months will see the tags straight away as they have been painted with bright blue anti-foul paint.

The genetic samples were collected using the same pole but instead of inserting a tag, the tip extracted a tiny piece of tissue. 23 mantas were sampled and to reduce stress, we tried to not sample and tag the same manta.

Thank You!

The project has been 100% funded by guest donations which is another metric we are very proud of and we cannot thank you all enough, without your kind donations this project would not be possible! We are still fundraising to keep the project going so if you would still like to contribute, we would be so grateful.

Contribute To Conservation

We are seeking around $6,000 to cover the three-year lifespan. If you would like to contribute to the project and make a donation to the Alphonse Foundation please email: eleanor@bluesafari.com OR alphonse@ics.com.

Any donation is greatly appreciated and helps to continue this amazing work. Click on the following link to the website to find out more about our conservation and sustainability projects.

The next download of the data from the receivers will be in February and we are SO excited to start getting stuck into preliminary analysis, at least looking at which tagged mantas have stuck around and what they are up to.

The project has a three-year timeline after which everything will be fully analysed, reports and papers written and conservation management implemented.

The results of this project have not just local implications but will also be highly useful for protecting remote, poorly studied manta populations in other small island states where pressures may be higher.