We are coming up to the end of the trip now and today was our last day in the water. We spent another day at the rock islands, this time with the Palau Community College crew. We first went to Metukruikull, a protected rock island. Here we listened to Chris Kitalong give a talk. We learned that this island used to be inhabited but now stands barren. The rock islands used to be a good place for villages since the people would have easy access to the water, and thus their food. Some villages even caught fish and put them in the marine lakes as a back up food source. Chris also talked about some of the conservation efforts at this and other islands. A lot of these efforts were brought on by foreigners without much consultation from the Palauan people. One example of this is the protection of sea turtles, which sounds like a good thing but cut a lot of the cultural ties that the Palauans had with hunting turtles for food and currency made from the turtles shells. The turtles that were hunted by the Palauans had ample numbers in Palau and the practices from the Palauans were not endangering them. After learning from Chris we snorkeled off of the island, some students saw lion fish, pajama cardinal fish, butterfly fish, and more!
After leaving Metukruikull we went to Ngarmeaus, which provided a stark contrast since Ngarmeaus is not a protected island, and is a common spot for tourists. The island was beautiful and cleaner than Metukruikull since it is actively managed. It did have much more area cleared, however, for building summer houses. We sat in one of the summer houses and ate lunch, then snorkeled Ngarmeau’s luscious shores. Here we saw lots of cool critters, including many blacktip sharks! One boat was chumming the waters which brought many small fish and sharks to the surface. Whether this is legal or not I am not sure but it did make for a spectacular view for us.
We ended our snorkeling by going to the cemetery reef. The reef has a fitting name as most of the coral here is dead and breaking off. This has happened mostly due to a mass bleaching event and continual use. This reef is known as a “sacrifice” reef. Many tourists are brought here which kills the reef but keeps foot traffic out of some of the healthier reefs of Palau. Here we saw many large Napoleon wrasse which stayed at the surface due to people feeding them. This has contrasted our experiences snorkeling previous days where the wildlife was protected and had less contact with humans.
