The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of Cortez (cont'd)

There is a possibility is that the jumping is nothing more than an accident. Karey Kumli is of the opinion that the breaching behavior isn't done purposefully. Rather, exiting the water is just one of the liabilities of those wild undulations, the kind that Keller Laros described to me over the phone.

“Think about it,” she tells me. “We wonder why they go through that plane between water and air, and I ask why would they avoid it. They'd have to be pretty careful to avoid being airborne.” She goes on: “Remember, when they are in the air, there's so little resistance compared to that offered by water that a slight bend of a fin would send them tumbling.” In short, mobulas spin out in the absence of the resistance provided by water.

That this is all a feeding behavior appeals to me in some fundamental way. When I first saw the jumping and the flapping that accompanied it, I simply assumed that these were creatures struggling to become more airborne, because being airborne served some kind of purpose. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was all an accident.

Then again, it's hard not to believe this behavior is not some manner of play—it certainly looks that way. Among fish, mobula rays have disproportionately large and complex brains. In fact, the weight of their brains relative to their body weight is comparable to many mammals.

Some mobulids, manta rays in particular, are known to exhibit un-fishlike playful behavior amongst themselves and with human divers. Some of these creatures will seek out human contact and will approach divers to solicit attention, a scratch, or just apparently, to feel a diver's bubbles against their skin.

But the mobulas that I paddle among seem to be indifferent to my presence, caught up perhaps in their own little form of rapture. Sometimes they land so close to my kayak that I scramble more than once to put my lens under a shirt before the splash hits me. Other times I can feel them thump against the bottom of my kayak. I have to wonder if they even know I am here just as I wonder if they will be here in the coming seasons.

Lucio Almaraz standing on the bow of his panga looking for mobula.

The first thing you notice about Lucio Almaraz is that he is missing some teeth, pretty much all of the front ones. Still, Lucio carries himself with a certain presence. To talk to him is to like him. He is often smiling, and when he does, it's with his entire face. In sharing his company for a few days, I hoped to get some sense of small-scale fishing in the Sea of Cortez and how the fortunes of those whose livelihood depends on the sea are tied to that of the mobula.

Lucio has been spearing cubanas since he was a boy. When he was younger, many more lived in the small town of San Juan de la Costa, but then a hurricane hit, destroying the sulfur mine. The wells went brackish. 500 people uprooted and left. Now, all that remain are five families, one which is headed by Lucio. Every week, a government truck brings in water, and every couple of weeks, a priest visits to receive confession.

His tools are basic: a rusty harpoon of iron, an air compressor, a tired wetsuit very much unlike the modern get-ups for sale in American dive shops, and a sliver of a knife, a couple strokes away from being sharpened into nonexistence.

Lucio is prone to understatement. I suppose that sharing the company of the sea for your whole life can do that to a man. Late one January evening, after most in the casa Almaraz had made their way to bed, I joined him outside. It had been a hard day: I watched Lucio make one long dive for chocolate clams, his brother manning the air compressor which piped down air to him some 40 feet below. When he finally came up for good, he was shivering, almost hypothermic. Over the lapping of waves against the shore, we heard a distant rumble. Lucio didn't even wince. “This is bad,” he said. The noise, he explained, was that of a shrimp trawler. Having spent a summer on a salmon boat, I wondered out loud why this boat had its lights off. “That is what you call… against the law,” he said. Shrimp trawlers work by scraping the bottom, extracting the shrimp from the mix, and with that which remains, unceremoniously shoveling it overboard. Agent Orange for the sea.

The next morning I followed him down to his fiberglass panga, its 150 horsepower outboard motor attached. “Today is a good day for cubanas ,” said his brother, giving us a push. Not halfway before our intended destination, we came upon the remnants of the shrimp trawler. There they were laying belly up: puffers and snappers, cabrilla and sculpins, wrasses and rockfish. Some of them were a couple of inches, others more than a foot. Around us sat seagulls, eerily quiet—not so much because this was for them a solemn moment. These were birds that, in all likelihood, had recently gorged themselves on dead fish.

Harpooning a mobula is near impossible on all but the sunniest and calmest of days. Those are the days when mobulas come to the surface to sun themselves. Sometimes you can see both wingtips protruding. Other times, they announce their presence with tremendous belly flops. These were a different variety of mobulas then the ones I had first seen in Cabo Pulmo, larger, some six feet wide and less prone to schooling. While I worked the motor, putt-putting the panga up to a place where a Mobula japanica had breached with a perfectly arched back flip not thirty seconds before. He whispered, “Cubana!” in urgent but muted tones. Lucio gripped his harpoon, his yellowed eyes focusing on the water in front of him. A neat coil of line trailed the weapon on to the deck of the boat.

It's not like we didn't see any mobulas—we saw five different mobulas breach—just that at least for this morning, the cubanas had grown wise to the man standing over the bow with his barrel chest and shocks of gray hair. A couple hours later, we returned to shore, nothing to show for the morning. “Sometimes,” he told me, pausing to raise a single eyebrow and glance sideways, “my spear misses its mark.”

You can smell them from a block away. The streets of La Paz are crowded with taquerías selling fish tacos. For the equivalent of a dollar, you have the choice of snapper, smoked marlin, shrimp, or “manta” in your taco. The lines on the sidewalk move briskly. While you wait, shredded cubana meat is fried on the griddle with peppers and onions and then served in a tortilla with lime juice and tomatoes. It's a tasty combination. I found cubana meat to be not unlike that of halibut, slightly chewier and with a slight tanginess to it.

They may call the fish meat manta, but it is really mobula of the japanica variety. Mobula japanica is the only type of cubana meat that has white meat and the only kind that is sold fresh. A fisherman like Lucio who catches and filets a japanica — some of which yield up to 80 pounds of fresh meat— each can make three pesos (the equivalent of 30 cents) a pound. That's only $24, a modest sum by anyone's standard. As for the other varieties of mobulid: the larger Pacific Manta Ray, Mobula thurstoni, Mobula munkiana, they must first be salted and dried, after which they can be sold as jerky for the going of rate of about nine pesos a pound. That meat is a deep shade of gray, almost black.

It's not like Lucio particularly wants to pursue cubanas. “It isn't worth it,” he says. If Lucio had his way, he would rather fish for species that pay him enough to fix up his boat, maybe even buy a truck. Lucio and fishermen like him must fish for what is available at the time—that is, if it's available. “There's a season for everything,” he tells me. Lucio harpoons sharks in late winter, and in the spring, he and his brothers travel to the Pacific where they fish for shrimp with hand nets. Other times throughout the year, they also fish for snapper, octopus, dorado, and chocolate clams.

It is one of those truisms of marine biology: fishermen are always the first to know. Though Lucio speaks of the past reluctantly if at all, he does say that there used to be a lot more sharks ten to fifteen years ago. By all accounts, things have changed. Exactly how much is hard to tell. The scientific studies looking at catch rates have been as infrequent as they have been inconclusive.

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