It seems curious to place the importance of somewhere in cosmic terms. Physicist Professor Brian Cox believes that, while microbial life might be common throughout the universe, intelligent, complex ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More are likely extremely rare or unique to Earth. Raja Ampat and its surrounding seas aren’t just significant on a global scale. They may be the only representation of life at its absolute maximum, anywhere in the known or even unknown Universe.
What follows is a draft introductory chapter to a book I’m slowly putting together. It will be titled ‘Ocean Wildlife from Raja Ampat to Komodo and Surrounding Seas’. If you’d like to join me in Raja Ampat, we are departing on the 6 April for two weeks. It’s likely to be the last trip I’ll be leading to the heart of central Raja Ampat for some while. Details here.
Visiting Raja Ampat was the inspiration for my first book:
You begin to feel miniscule after you dip into the otherworldly mysteries of Raja Ampat. It’s like diving inside a gigantic living organism; navigating through its nervous system, riding the rush of currents passing down networks of ancient channels, highways for cells and planktonA soup of micro-organisms. Usually refers to all the zooplankton and algae in the ocean but can also be used to describe tiny insects in the atmosphere (see aerial plankton). More that feed its organs: reefs and ocean fronts where miniature forces combine on a massive scale, giving and supporting life. Immersed in the ocean here, you begin to appreciate a new sensory landscape and acknowledge an entire realm that exists mostly beyond our imagining. To float among this melee of life, disconnected from technology and simply at one with it all, is both intoxicating and incredibly emotional.
Wildlife in the Balance, Simon Mustoe.
So why is Raja Ampat so important? The story begins here …
Rivers of ocean from space
Molecules of water first reached Earth on icy comets that bombarded our planet four billion years ago. If the Earth’s crust was perfectly spherical and covered entirely in a layer of ocean, these molecules would have moved in a neat circuit around the equator. Just to the north and south, currents would have spun off to create patterns of motion in ever decreasing circles towards the poles (see below). This is because of what we call CoriolisAs the Earth spins west to east a phenomenon known as Coriolis creates a generalised movement of currents and winds. If Earth was a perfect sphere covered by a uniform layer of water, this would manifest into currents and winds moving east to west and a series of interlocking eddies north and south of the equator, of diminishing size from More force.
But the Earth’s crust isn’t perfectly spherical. Land emerged from the oceans to impede water flow. Meanwhile, the sea dissolved substances like sulphur, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. These formed salts that, along with rising and falling temperatures, altered the sea’s density so it not only flowed sideways but would also rise and fall.
The Great Ocean Conveyor
Millions of years of continental drift shaped this flow into what we now call the Great Ocean Conveyor. It’s a vast river of seawater that constantly moves around our planet at the rate of 15,000 Niagara Falls, or the volume of all the world’s rivers combined. Every thousand years, a single water molecule will pass from the Pacific Ocean into the Indian Ocean.
During this passage it must navigate between several thousand islands that make up eastern Indonesia, including Raja Ampat and surrounding seas.
This the only place on Earth where this happens. Elsewhere, the current flows around continents, not through them.
Stripped bare of nutrients and devoid of life
Migrating birds and whales gather seasonally in polar upwellings. It’s in the Arctic where this current originates. The food chainA single thread in a food web illustrating the chain of animals that eat each other. At the base of the food chain are small high-energy (fast metabolism) animals and at the other end large low metabolism animals. An example would be whales eating krill that eat plankton that eat algae. Or lions that eat gazelles that eat grass. More there flourishes in the annual productivityThe power of an ecosystem to process energy. The most productive ecosystems have reached a steady stable-state with maximum entropy production. That’s to say, the number of species has reached an optimum and the functions they fulfil, have translated free surplus energy into nutrients that is either stored inside plants and animals, or is entrained within the biological cycles that More and warmth. But as winter darkness approaches, the surface has been stripped bare and the system shuts down. Animals migrate away and the current, now barren and warm, journeys across the Pacific Ocean from east to west.
Look at Earth from the Pacific side and land is scarce to be seen. This half of our planet’s surface is all water. Here the current is relatively unimpeded by continents, so a vast eddy induced by Coriolis forces pushes it south then west. When it reaches the equator it’s caught in the equatorial stream and forced on a direct path towards southeast Asia.
By the time it hits Indonesia, the surface is crystal clear, blue and almost entirely devoid of life.
Strong currents and thousands of islands
The Great Ocean Conveyor, the largest surface current on Earth strikes Indonesia’s thousands of islands and is swept through ocean basins some of which are, on average, deeper than the Pacific Ocean.
Diverse topography and bathymetry create complex currents and patterns of ecological richness and ecological poverty. It’s this complexity that begins to breathe new life into the surface current. It twists and turns, spinning offshoots in all directions. The majority passes through Raja Ampat before going north through the Molucca Sea.
Ironically, the richest area on the planet for marine biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More happens, because the ocean surface here begins largely warm and nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More poor.
Animals restart systems to enable life
As in the north Pacific, there is an uplift in food chain activity. Silty sediments susceptible to being wafted into the water column by physical forces like currents and tides, bring minute traces of minerals and nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More nearer the surface. The quantity released must be just enough but not too much. Or else the ecosystem would become overwhelmed by nutrients and die.
Small amounts though, are all it takes to kickstart animal-driven systems that take over. Wildlife gathers, layer upon layer, predator after predator. It starts with the algae (plants), then the copepods (plankton), followed by flying fish (planktivores) and then the predators: the seabirds, tuna, dolphins, whales and sharks.
There are few places left on Earth where you can literally see this happening.
Ecosystems are regulated by animals from the top down throughout. Each layer is held intact by the one above it. Remove top predators like sharks and it collapses like a house of cards. When all the layers are in balance, surplus is consumed and the system stabilises around the activities of everything combined. This is the very definition of biodiversity. It’s so much more than just the number of species. How everything interplays matters more: the processes, structures and functions of all life that enables life.
Raja Ampat reveals this smorgasbord where animals aren’t just taking food but also recycling, amplifying, transferring and concentrating nutrients of their own accord. Wildlife enables other wildlife. The ability for animals to survive in these hotspots deepens and persists for entire seasons not because of ocean-borne nutrients; not even because of physical factors, but because of animals.
The nutrient paradox
You’d think a lack of nutrients might mean a lower density of animals overall but the opposite is true.
Animals use their knowledge to find food where it is the most convenient and predictable. When nutrients are abundant, food becomes too thinly spread out to find efficiently.
If nutrients are scarce, the whole community turns up to the very places where there are islands, currents and upwellings. They begin to eas each other, as these are the only places where there is any concentration of food. Visiting eastern Indonesia, this is what you’re hoping to witness. Scarcity goes hand in hand with reliability of where to find food. It drives the whole ecosystem.
Where to find food is a matter of intelligence. The most likely to surviveDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More are those animals who have stored vast amounts of cultural knowledge, passed down through generations. It’s a collective consciousness of shared information and cooperation between species that enables this.
This is where eastern Indonesia’s diverse geography comes into play. Wherever there are seamounts, ocean canyons, steep rises and islands, currents crack through the boundary layer, or it bulges nearer the surface. You might know this when snorkelling or diving over certain reef drop-offs, as you can feel cooler water welling up. Elsewhere you might spot the tell-tail change in the surface colour from blue to green or see the glassy patterns where rising currents smooth the waves. These places are where you can also spot abundant marine life.
As much diversity as it’s physically possible to achieve anywhere
In the last couple of hundred million years, the tropics have enjoyed long periods uninterrupted by ice ages. This is why the tropics are more species richThe number of species within a given area. Note, this is often confused with biodiversity but is very different. Species richness is not equal in all areas. Desert species richness is lower but the scale and intensity of species function can still be significant as biodiversity is not about number of species, it's about ecosystem processes. More than the poles. Speciation (the evolution of new species) happens faster in colder climes, but diversity keeps getting frozen to death. The magic number of years for ecosystems to become fully saturated by animals is about 30 million and Raja Ampat settled geologically about 25 million years ago. Since then, nature has evolved almost uninterrupted.
Animals consume exactly the right amount of surplus, on average, to have stabilised the ecosystem and climate for millions of years. And because of eastern Indonesia’s long history, this is witnessed better than almost anywhere else on Earth.
Which makes this one of the only places left on Earth where you can see an assemblage of wildlife that’s close to the maximum possible in terms of numbers and diversity that any planet can create.
This is the reason why eastern Indonesia’s Coral Triangle contains 75 per cent of the world’s hard coral species. Kri Corner near Sorong has a dive site where field guide author Gerry Allen recorded 374 types of fish in a 60-minute dive, about 7.5 per cent of all marine fish known in the world.
This unbroken period of speciation, with hardly any human interaction until recently, was enough time to saturate the region with species from the microscopic to the largest, filling every available niche. On top of that, it is primed with some of the most powerful physical processes on the planet.
Perhaps any planet.
The narrowest margins for life
Life like ours can only really exist in a narrow range of cosmic and planetary variables and we are remarkably similar in need to all animals on Earth. Indeed, we share a common ancestor. Inside our cells is the DNA blueprint from one of two bacteria that formed a union in the ocean over a billion years ago. When you do an ancestry test, you are looking at this DNA. It’s passed down only on the mother’s side and the same blueprint exists in every single cell, in every animal on Earth, storing the same basic pattern. This is the DNA that enables us to breathe oxygen. To transform food into energy. It’s literally what connects us to ecosystems.
The ‘goldilocks zone’ which predicts the possibility of life anywhere in the universe, is determined by factors such as concentration of oxygen, temperature and whether water can exist on a planet. It’s a rare combination but still not enough for animals to climb out of a primordial soup.
For eternity, life on Earth was merely algae and plankton. To build the biodiversity needed to support the type of complex land animal we are, meant nurturing Earth through its chaotic teenage years and into its more prosaic middle-age. On a cosmic scale, what we take for granted today – and on which a habitable Earth depends – is a miniscule enhancement.
But in the context of our lives, this is everything. And it is all the result of animals working together.
It’s what you see when you look into Raja Ampat’s ecosystems.
Don’t be disappointed
Despite all this, I’ve heard some people express disappointment after visiting Raja Ampat. One might wonder what they experienced? How did they managed to miss its cosmic significance?
Increasingly, visits to Raja Ampat are becoming a ‘bucket list’ item but there is nothing that compares this place to any traditional tourism destination. There are few who fully comprehend its significance either. It’s too easy to drift past and not see animals for what they are. Or seek an experience without acknowledging something far more significant than oneself. Each animal is a living being and the essence for life in this place and far beyond.
Most people don’t get the chance to see the place properly. Visiting can offer a rare chance to understand your own place in the Universe and marvel at both the significance and insignificance of ourselves, and all the planet’s creatures, at the same time.
The diversity and abundance of animal life we see in Raja Ampat isn’t the icing on the cake. It’s the reason life exists here … or maybe anywhere. This is the end point of a remarkable period in Earth’s history that enabled the rise of humanity and everything we take for granted today.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the Universe.
