The Manta Rays
I spent an evening tonight, on April 13, 2021, in Hawaii, Hawaii, near Kona, with the Manta Rays.
One of them, Amanda, was recently gangbanged by a few days ago and is likely pregnant. To the instructor this is great news.
We dive underwater about 20-40 feet and and we go onto rocks in a circle of rocks. We sit down in the sand on our knees, holding onto a rock not to float back up if we haven’t been weighed down properly up on the boat (When you dive, you carry some rocks to control buoyancy). We hold flashlights and there is little buzzy plankton spewing from some sort of central faucet everywhere. It is like an immersive theater, except it is real life, and it is glowing colors and lights that I did not think I would ever experience. Then we wait.
The idea is the manta rays come around and eat the plankton. It’s a huge family reunion. A huge celebration. Thanksgiving for the manta rays! They swim over if they feel safe and they feast.
I think this was the most other-worldly thing I have ever seen in my life. It looks like a pagan ritual. It looks like an alien gathering. It’s completely not of this earth—and yet it is the most earthly, grounded thing too. These are real animals and they are having a real interaction with us, on their terms. They have not been captured. They are not our slaves. They are here because they wanted to be here, at the expense of doing something else.
Everything is glowing. There is a ring of flashlights from all of us sitting in the circle, and in the middle lights are set up so we can properly see our guests.
They’re friendly. They swim up, and they can sense your electricity and avoid you. They can swim around you.
Most of the time they choose to. But sometimes they bump into you. They have a coating on them that protects them from infection, and you shouldn’t touch them or it may rub off. If one of them gets sick from infection because somebody touched them, all of the friends would know and all of the manta rays would not come back to this spot.
They basically register as people, similar to how dolphins register as people. They know what they’re doing. They’re full adults. They have social dynamics, and they certainly seem to have thoughts. It’s their world, and we are the intrusion.
If these 14 rays didn’t show up, there would be no event. We’d just be dicking around underwater like losers, lose some money, go back up.
But they showed up. Sure, we lured them with some well-lit plankton, but they didn’t have to come. Sometimes they don’t.
There’s a deeper lesson here about sometimes you just have to show up.
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If you want to do this or something similar, you should get an open-water diving certification! It is not too difficult or too expensive, and I write about the process here. There are so many beautiful creatures, who live around the world in different places, that you can visit when you are traveling for family, friends, conferences, weddings…the manta rays basically only live in Hawaii, the whale sharks basically only live in Cancun…
