It has been a while since the last blog, mostly since we’ve spent the last week in places with very limited internet access. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

We left Lembeh last week.  Having done 5 weeks worth of research in a muck divers’ paradise, it was to move on. During our time in Lembeh we spent more than 100 hours under water, collected nearly 100 sediment samples, did 70 transects, built a coral nursery, wrote a small fish-ID guide, took well over 2000 photos, collected dozens of surveys, talked to divers and diveguides and had an ab-so-lutely amazing time! You would think that after all of that diving over sand we might have been ready for a break. So the first thing we did when we left Critters@Lembeh, was head straight to another island for some more diving.

As it happens, good friends of Luke (Sophie and Simon) own Nomad Divers, a small dive resort on Bangka Island. Bangka is a 3 hour boatride away from Lembeh, and is a relatively un-explored dive destination. It is close to both Lembeh Strait and Bunaken, two of the world’s most renowned dive destinations, but it can hold its own between those bigshots. With loads of pygmy seahorses, great reefs, access to muck dive sites and even the occasional dugong, it’s not a bad place to dive 😉

You might have heard about Bangka recently, as it has been in dive and conservation-news a fair bit. A tin mine had been built illegally on the island a few years ago, and multiple NGO’s and divecentres have been fighting a long legal battle to close it down. With success, as last week the mining company lost the court case, effectively shutting down further mining. Which made our dives there even more enjoyable. Besides pygmy seahorses, we obviously had to check out the muck dives Bangka had to offer. We weren’t disappointed, as we found some beautiful little critters, some of which we hadn’t even seen in Lembeh.

We said goodbye to Sophie, Simon and their (very cute) 3-months old son Max yesterday. Since we can’t dive before flying, we made decided to make the most of our forced terrestrial time, by visiting the Tangkoko National Park. The park is home to Crested macaques (endemic to Sulawesi!), Tarsiers and apparently a lot of birds as well. Which we only noticed by the swarms of bird watchers in the guesthouse where we were staying. If you think I am going overboard in my passion for marine critters, I invite you to come to Tangkoko and have a look at these bird-people, it’s rather entertaining really (and something of a terrestrial mirror for me as well). In any case, I guess we were not sophisticated enough for the bird watchers, but Luke and me did have a great time watching a large troop of macaques and 4 tiny little tarsiers.

The next stop is Bali, where more critters are waiting to be surveyed. We will also be deploying SMURFs in the water, more about them in a next blog!