By Maggie Muurmans

Since its creation in 1980, Komodo National Park (KNP) has gone a long way.
In the early days, visitors were more akin to true adventurers (the man who discovered the infamous Komodo dragons, was a Dutch aviator who in 1910 crashed his plane on the main island of Komodo) than package tourists. The Park’s two thousand square kilometers were scarcely inhabited and fishermen would take just enough of the ocean’s riches to survive.

Then, in the early nineties, an explosive combination of rapid population growth and the advent of radical fishing methods -involving dynamite and cyanide- transformed many of Komodo’s fabled coral reefs into killing fields. The need for effective conservation was urgent, this even more so as Komodo was becoming a major tourist destination, with a weekly ferry stopping at the main island and a nascent dive industry.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) led the efforts to reorganize and help manage the Park. Its great achievement was the creation of a successful land and sea patrol system, with a 24/7 on-call “floating ranger station”. As a result, destructive fishing is nowadays marginal. The broken reefs are left to recover and marine life is teeming again. Recent surveys have found that the Park’s marine habitats harbour more than 1,000 species of fish, 250 species of reef-building corals and 70 species of sponges. In addition, dolphins, whales and sea turtles are also found. Coral cover, on formerly bombed reefs, has increased two-fold. The result of TNC’s work has been hailed by many as the only example of a successfully managed Indonesian National Park.

TNC eventually handed the management of KNP over to a private company, Putri Naga Komodo, who, associated with the Indonesian Park’s Authority, was left to face the next hurdles; one of which was the increasing number of boats sailing the Park’s waters. With over 20 “live-aboard” dive vessels operating in the area, and a predicted number of 40,000 visitors per year by 2014, the next threat had been identified: ship’s anchors.

Permanent mooring buoys offered the best solution. In 2001-2002 the Park’s first “manta ray” mooring systems were installed, consisting in three high-resistance anchors connected to 1-inch chains which are drilled deep into the sea bottom by means of a jack hammer. With a minimum holding capacity of 21,000 kg, each mooring is strong enough to hold even the biggest “live-aboards” into place. The locations for the buoys were determined by Komodo’s main stakeholders: the tourism operators and the park authorities. In February 2007, biologist Helen Newman and a team of international volunteer divers took up the challenge and returned to Komodo for a second mooring buoy campaign. Working with nitrox at 30 m depth and defying sometimes extreme tidal currents, she managed to complete the installation of 30 permanent moorings. Total cost of the operation: USD $83,000 funded by the tourism operators, Putri Naga Komodo and private donors.

Once more, Komodo National Park has shown its capacity to adapt to evolving threats.

For more information regarding this article:

Helen Newman: newman@pacific.net.sg
Maggie Muurmans: maggiemuurmans@gmail.com

www.komodonationalpark.org