Cocos Island Update

Cocos Island is as impressive a place as any. It is currently up for nomination as a possible "new" 7 natural wonders of the world member. The topside of the island is full of lush jungles with waterfalls generously spilling fresh water into the pacific ocean. Underwater the island boasts an even richer bounty of life that includes everything from giant whale sharks on the surface, to tiny shrimps that help start the food chain at 1000ft below the surface. This trip to the island was particularly eventful. We explored some new areas of the sea floor and found a new sea mount. We found another new species that is possibly unidentified that we are adding to the one from last trip. Paul Allens boat the Octopus showed up and we did a tandem dive with his Submarine Pagoo to one of our dive sites on the Northern part of the island. It was an impressive week and a half to have survived. Unfortunantly some of the memories are not all good. The islands main threat has hit home several times recently. Long lines continue to be a huge problem for the island. On the new sea mount we found unusually large amounts of tangled long line. Shmulik Blum also found an almost dead prickly shark at about 170m while diving in the submersible DeepSee, that appears to have been gutted for the purpose of retreaving the attached long line. The position where we found this shark was only one nautical mile offshore of the island, and about 11 nautical miles inside the parks outer limits. That means the shark was probably caught well inisde the parks boundries. These sharks are few and far between (we saw none this trip) and reside in the deeper depths around Cocos Island, swimming slowly and running from light. What was interesting about this encounter was that three hours later when the shark was revisited, it had been partially eaten by something large.... Partially means about 200lbs of flesh eaten in about four bites. What it was, we don't know. The dead shark is about 13ft long. What was nice to see this trip were the large schools of hammerheads which are currently visiting the island in huge numbers. Their numbers this trip were a nice beacon of hope for those concerned with the state of our oceans.