mauritius snorkeling

Here's my FDP from Marine Bio on my snorkeling experience in Mauritius.  If you're interested. South Africa's entry will be posted in segments as I write them, because I'm sick of all-in-one posts. Plus, as I understand, they are hard to read.


While the ship was docked in Mauritius, I decided to take a trip to Flic-en-Flac to go snorkeling.  A Mauritian friend, Asraf, suggested the beach as well as a friend of his, Dan, who runs a dive shop nearby.  After meeting up with Dan and renting our gear, my friends and I boarded his little speedboat and drove to a nearby lagoon.

The lagoon was entirely secluded; we were the only people there.  It was quite different from my first snorkeling adventure on this trip to the overcrowded Hakauma Bay.  The water was warm and you could see the seafloor from the boat, a feat considering it was 15 feet deep!  We snorkeled for about an hour and a half.  Over the course of that time, we saw an uncountable amount of tropical fish, as well as a number of different creatures I have never seen while snorkeling before!  One of the more interesting things I saw was a gigantic moray eel – it’s head had to be at least a foot wide, with its mouth opening and closing.  We also managed to see dozens of sea snakes curled into the nooks and crannies of the coral, another smaller eel, hundreds of purple sea urchins, and surprisingly, a small octopus hiding in between two massive/lobed pieces of coral.  Otherwise, we saw a number of parrotfish, clown fish, angelfish, and butterfly fish.  However, despite the wildlife, I only saw a few big fish.  This worried me, as I realize that they are an essential part of a healthy reef ecosystem.

Aside from the abundance of wildlife, I was shocked to see how healthy the general environment looked.  Although there was a great deal of dead coral on the beach, the coral within the water looked relatively healthy.  There was a large amount of electric blue encrusting coral on top of the massive/lobed coral and there was certainly a lot of fauna around.  However, I have never been to a very healthy reef, so I am only comparing this environment to Hakauma Bay.  It is also interesting to note that there were not many soft corals or sea sponges; fortunately in some spots we were able to see some foliaceous coral, but not as much as I would have thought.  I think the quality of the reef can be attributed to changes in water temperature, pollution, or speedboat damage.  Once again, however, the coral was in better condition than other places I have snorkeled.

After lunch, we went to another dive spot that was very shallow.  In that area, we saw many black sea cucumbers, starfish, three stripe damselfish, blue striped snappers, beautiful branching coral, and a conspicuous sea cucumber, a strange snake-like creature with feelers coming out of its mouth to feed.  One such creature was about four feet long!  The reef itself was far less healthy than the previous place we had gone, something I attribute to the shallowness of the waters.  In this area, only a mile or so from the lagoon, the coral was bleached in various places and the fauna were spread out.  Overall, I believe that I was very fortunate to be able to snorkel in a relatively healthy environment.  The visibility in both places was very clear, the coral was healthier than most I had seen before, and I was able to see a number of interesting creatures.