Baby Manta Rays at the King Kam Hotel. Or not.

    Its late September and Kailua Kona should be in the grip of Ironman Fever.  There should be Germans biking on the highway, Austrians and Czechs swimming at the pier and Frenchmen running up and down Alii Drive.  Sadly, the only thing currently on Alii Drive is a brace of trucks dedicated to fixing the sewer.  That just about says it for our little beach community...we're in the sewer.  

   Both Palani and Alii Drive, which together form the boundary of the village,  have been closed to through traffic Monday through Friday.  The Fish Hopper, across the street from the malecon was open, against all odds until two weeks ago, but it, too, is currently shuttered.  The King Kam Hotel, the yearly heart of the Ironman, hasn't seen a guest in five months.  One has to assume, were he to break in, one would not see the Flags of the Nations hanging from the rafters of the lobby.

Acqua alta and itinerant ablutions.  But where are all the Ironmen?

   It was into this ghost town that I descended yesterday morning.  Sandra dropped me off in the parking lot above the shuttered shops and I walked down the mostly deserted Alii Drive to the pier.  On the Paul Allen side, on the beach in front of the hotel, it was acqua alta; just like a flood in Venezia, the water was ankle deep at the foot of sea wall.  While I changed into my swim shirt and put defogger in my mask, I was able to take in the sight of a local gentleman enjoying a sudsy shampoo under the single spigot that the authorities now provide for after swim showering.  I suppose its a good thing that all those Germans and Australians aren't here...where would they shower?Suitably attired, I turned in the ankle deep water and waded into the Inner Harbour.  There was a single gentleman standing waist deep in the cool, cloudy water.  He quietly greeted me with a howsit? and then said, "Its too bad you weren't here two minutes ago.  There were four small manta rays swimming around the bay."  I pointed towards the heiau and asked, "You mean right out there?"  He pointed to the water by his feet and said, "No. Right here!"  

    Or to put it another way, if I hadn't spent so much time admiring the itinerant's ablutions, I could have seen baby manta rays."  Bummer.

     My reporter then turned to a couple sitting on the parking barrier by the seawall, about forty feet away, and asked, "Are they still there?"  Perhaps the couple didn't hear him , but they stood up and walked away, which I took as a negative.

     On that curious note, I headed out.  I didn't see any small mantas as I swam out, stopping now and then to look for fin tips poking out of the water.  Out in the bay beyond the breakwater, things were about as I remembered it, with lots of coral just hanging on to life and lots more having gone to the great reef in the sky. 

    Soon enough I made it to the entrance to Paul Allen's lagoon  (perhaps at that moment, Paul was enjoying a performance of Madame Butterfly with the Notorious RBG) and identified the cauliflower coral where we have been tracking the eponymous croucher.  Part of that morning's program involved obtaining videos for youse guys and I attempted a couple, catching among others, a yellow spotted guard crab.  Now, you may think that is a pretty rotten video, and I agree with you, but when I compare this result with my attempts at still photography of this furtive crustacean, hunkered down between the coral leaves, it really isn't all that bad. 

   On my third dive I found the coral croucher.  He was nose down, deep between two leaves, but it was a firm identification.  The legend lives on.

   I progressed around the point where I attempted another video.  The water was cloudy and the video sucks. (Did I say that?) There were a few reasonable fish which I failed to capture in my video, including a pair of Teardrop Butterflies and a female Whitley's Boxfish.  I wanted to give myself a few extra minutes searching for the mantas in the lagoon, so at this point I headed back. 

Wjitley's Boxfish, Kailua Pier 2015

    I swam around the lagoon for ten minutes, not seeing much.  As I was getting out, standing in the shallows with my fins in hand, I noticed that the couple had returned to their perch.  I called to them and the fellow, who looked like a smaller and weasleier version of Adam Sandler, said that a manta was there right then.  I inquired as to its size and he held up his hands indicating roughly 16 inches.  

    I swam over but by the time i got there the ray was gone.  

   Once ashore, I wandered over to where the couple sat.  They were feeding crumbs of bread to a diverse group of fish including a large female ember parrotfish.  I watched for a few minutes, my hosts wandered off and then, so did I.

   So what was in the lagoon?  There is some disagreement among sources as to the size of a manta at birth.  Manta Ray Advocates says Coastal Mantas, Mobula alfredi. have pups in the 2 to 3 foot range. Animaldiversity.org says 1.1 to 1.4 meters, substantially larger.  No one is suggesting a manta, even at birth, is less than two feet from tip to tip.  Furthermore, manta rays are far from prolific breeders.  A manta may live up to 40 years and does not reach maturity, breeding age, until 10 years.  A female manta has a gestation period of 10 months and produces a single pup once every other year under the best of circumstances.  In this way they are sort of like elephants and some humans. 

Eagle Rays, Bob Hillis 2015

   Yesterday we ran this scenario by John Hoover, who was very patient and asked lots of questions.  The Great Oz would like to believe that it might have been four very small mantas.   Although manta rays are very distinctive animals, I'm going to bet that these people were not knowledgeable observers and may not have been aware of eagle rays.  One might reasonably ask, "Is it possible to live in Kona and not be aware of eagle rays?"     But perhaps in this instance we need to refer to that noted ichthyologist P.T. Barnum who said, "One never went broke under estimating the intelligence of the American public."

    So I'm voting for a school of juvenile eagle rays.  Eagle rays give birth to 2 to 4 pups at a time.  And the pups are, indeed, as small as 16 inches. And really, it seems incredible that there was a school of four mantas at the extreme lower end of the size for the species.

   As I emerged from the lagoon I struck up a conversation with a 50 something lady enjoying a smoke.  It was her opinion that anything is possible.  In these days of Donald Trump and the pandemic, those are words to live by.

jeff