Indonesia

The coral reefs of Indonesia are some of the most breathtaking natural sights you will ever see. This immense beauty and biodiversity persists across huge depth ranges, yet little is known of the true biodiversity that thrives here. What we do know is that dramatic geological processes over the milenia interacting with ocean currents provide habitat and transportation for biodiversity to settle and thrive.

The Wakatobi Marine National Park (WMNP)  is the largest barrier reef in Indonesia, second only to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. The WMNP is where I ‘cut my teeth’ on tropical marine biology, conducting both my undergraduate and Ph.D field research.

This is where the gorgonian corals are their most diverse and abundant, persisting to extreme depths. After 12 years, I returned in 2023 with Wasage Divers to determine the possibility of exploration to mesophotic depths throughout the region. This was an enormous success (Patreon: Wakatobi 2023).

Working with Wasage Divers, we will return to run Methods in Mesophotic: Primer (MMP), and Methods in Mesophotic Exploration (MME) and learn mesophotic exploration skills. We will explore the far reaches of the Wakatobi where no one has dived before, where exploration has never been conducted, and sleeping under the stars on uninhabited atolls is the norm. On islands where local communities reside, we will see how they have taken conservation matters into their own hands using traditional subsistence and reef resource protection techniques.