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05/09/2006: "BATT REEF .......... Stingrays - worse than sharks? "
above Calm day at Batt Reef centre and bottom Tiger shark feeds on large stingray underwater at the same reef.
Batt Reef 27 km offshore from North Queensland’s Port Douglas is a huge, shallow and sandy reef with small patches of coral.
It’s not a live coral reef like that at Low Isles which is closer inshore and visited by thousands of day trippers every week.
Batt Reef is a submerged and shallow reef where you’d be lucky to find a depth greater two meters covering much of the top mass as shown on a nautical chart.
This shallow, sandy water is a haven for stingrays, mostly adults about 1.5 meters or more in width which seek plentiful mollusks (or sea shells) hidden under the sand.
In turn tiger sharks follow unsuspecting and sleeping stingrays for their main source of food.
Snorkeling for movie-making in these shallow conditions makes it more difficult to avoid an injury from a stingray (as compared with scuba diving in deeper conditions) as there is less room to move away from them.
Visibility out there is never brilliant which means getting in close to your subjects. Not such a good idea at all but necessary to work with cameras there.
Snorkeling over a large stingray would be a mistake - it may suddenly raise it’s tail - (with the 20 cm long dagger-like barb located where the tail is attached to the body, not at the tip of the tail) to inflicted a defensive injury. It would happen in a split-second then the ray would be gone.
In the Bahamas where a stingrays colony is fed for tourist divers, an unnatural situation has been created. Is this a good or a bad thing? To think all stingrays are the same would be a serious error of judgement.
Similarly in aquariums, sharks, rays and large fish are more docile to those in the wild.
At Batt Reef no inadvertent regular offerings with food to sharks and rays has been happening, apart from irregular shark filming. That may change.
This is not an attractive underwater destination for masses of people wanting a beautiful hard coral reef. Batt Reef is a place of solitude and quiet natural beauty without crowds that crawl all over nearby islands for a few hours, but every day.
Question: Will this new high profile, fatal accident (yesterday) suddenly put Batt Reef on a commercial tour chart?
Anthony Newley (founder of Scuba Diver magazine) was killed by a stingray when it severed his femoral artery. This happened in Fiji after Anthony had left the magazine in the mid 1980’s.
One of the world experts with sharks and stingrays is Frank J. Schwartz (Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina USA) who said privately to me on 16 May 2002 in Taipei, Taiwan (on the subject of stingrays):
“I was appalled by a major magazine, and wrote and told them so”.
He was referring to a published Stingray City picture story, showing the first diving and feeding of large stingrays with close-up pictures in the shallows of the Bahamas. “These creatures can kill a person”, he reminded me.
People expect all stingrays to be as placid as these that are fed daily by divers, such as in the Bahamas which was not the case at Batt Reef yesterday.
To assume these wild rays would be as docile as those in aquariums or at daily feeding sites is a fatal mistake, to state the least.
Many are saying “.....at least Steve Irwin died doing what he enjoyed”.
Not as good as it may seem. The pain inflicted by the mucus on a stingray spine is (said to be) the most agonizing of any marine sting.
Morphine injections have little numbing effect, people have said after two or even more injections.
The sheath covering the spine breaks into sections and remains in the wound to later cause severe infection if not scrubbed away.
Whatever way you look at it, all stingrays are best studied from a distance.
(Any previous) promoting of stingrays as docile and gentle .....is a little like allowing a child to play with a very sharp knife. A serious mistake.
You can bet the previously neglected stingray has just acquired a new high profile status within the global footprint of documentary TV.
