C
ocos Island National Park, a
United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) World
Heritage Site, sits a day-and-
a-half boat ride off the Pacific
coast of Costa Rica. In the
waters that surround the island, hundreds of scalloped
hammerhead sharks wait their turns at cleaning stations
around the reefs. Groups of whitetip reef sharks glide
through the water alongside individual blacktip, silky
and Galapagos sharks, while the occasional massive
whale shark plows to the surface. Meanwhile, dozens of
marbled and eagle rays — along with pods of bottlenose
dolphins, enormous schools of jacks and endemic fish
found nowhere else on the planet — join the shark fest.
“It’s the most incredible underwater place I’ve ever
been,” says Todd Steiner, executive director of the
California-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project. “It’s
a superhighway of giant animals — like the plains of
Africa, only underwater.”
Steiner explains that, for hammerheads, being cleaned
is akin to receiving a massage. Human observation
does not appear to affect the behavior at all: “The
hammerheads are calm and just slowly cruising, and
they’ll look right at you.” Even human behavior can
change in the Cocos: “In most places, when you see a
shark you call everybody over to look, but here you see
so many sharks and rays that you stop noticing them,”
Steiner says. “The schools of fish go 60 feet up and down
and as far as you can see — tens of thousands or even
hundreds of thousands. For me, it’s like seeing what the
oceans must have been like hundreds of years ago.”
Because Cocos Island is both remote and protected, it
can be difficult to visit, and only the most serious marine
wildlife enthusiasts make it there. When divers travel to
Cocos, they’re often visiting for something more than
simply viewing the spectacular marine life — many of
them are volunteering to participate in research aimed to
protect the organisms that live in those waters.
Most Cocos Island research seeks to determine
whether the underwater park is large enough to protect
the endangered species there. Preliminary data suggest
that most of the animals are residents rather than just
transiting through. Even though they
spend the majority of their time within
the no-take zone, however, they also
occasionally wander out of it. A larger area
would provide more protection. “It’s great
for sharks and sea turtles to be protected
at Cocos,” Steiner explains, “but as soon
as they leave, they fall victim to longline
fishing. We see sharks and sea turtles with
hooks in them all of the time.” And these
are only the ones who make it back to the
island’s protected waters.
Because the animals regularly move
outside of the protected areas, a related
research question regards how species
at Cocos are connected to those in the
surrounding Eastern Tropical Pacific
islands. Steiner’s work indicates, for
example, that hammerheads tagged at
Cocos routinely swim to the Galapagos
and to another island off the coast of
Colombia. Tissue samples from the
animals also provide genetic information
that helps determine the relationships between different
organisms. This genetic research demonstrates that
green sea turtles migrate to Cocos from the Galapagos,
mainland Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica and the Western
Pacific. “Even though Cocos is a foraging area for
animals from around the world,” Steiner says, “and
green sea turtles spend their teenage years here because
it has good food resources to help them grow to sexual
maturity, the question remains whether the marine
reserve is big enough.”
In the case that the reserve is not big enough to
protect all of the species that find either temporary or
permanent homes in the protected area, Steiner also
wants to document the need for designated pathways
that will allow marine life to safely move between
marine protected areas. Data showing the connection
between Cocos and the Galapagos, for example, bolsters
the argument in favor of a protected swimway between
these ocean hotspots.
Brad Nahill, director and cofounder of SEEtheWILD,
one of the nonprofit organizations that connects
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FALL 2014
Voluntourism
A Good Dive, a Good Deed
B Y ME L I S S A G A S K I L L
