Dive Traveler
A Pelagic Thresher Shark
signal then points insistently along the slope. Straining my eyes in that direction, I drop to the sand and try to look small and non-threatening. When the first thresher
materializes, there is nothing obviously predatorial about its demeanor. As it snakes past me, the 10-foot (3m) long animal seems confident and nervous in equal measures; an accomplished deep-water hunter forced out of its comfort zone by the need to rid itself of parasites. Thresher sharks spend much
of their lives in the open ocean hunting schooling fish. Over time, they accumulate copepods, sea leaches and various other parasitic organisms that irritate their skin, especially around their vulnerable gill openings and on the trailing edges of their fins. Cleaning stations
56 Magazine
like the ones at Monad Shoal are a critical part of their daily hygiene regimen. I continue to hunker down as the thresher approaches the cleaner fish. On its third pass, the shark stalls a few meters in front of me and drops its tail. It’s the signal for the cleaners to begin work. Right on cue, a variety of bannerfish, angels and various other parasite- eating teleosts swim toward the shark and get busy. The thresher remains motionless for half a minute and then sinks out of view. Back on board TSD’s roomy
banka, a thin, wooden-hulled boat with bamboo outriggers, I relive the encounter and wish that I could slip back in for a second dive. But by 8 a.m., the tropical sun burns down through the water column, and the threshers retreat to the safety of the deep.
Top left: Hermit crab with anemone accessories. Above left: Gato Island guard house and protective cliffs. Above: Chocolate Island is nudibranch central!
Gato Island In the afternoon manta rays visit the cleaning stations at Monad Shoal but I will have to skip that encounter this time around because our banka is headed to Gato Island. The locals say that divers come to Malapascua to see thresher sharks but they leave remembering Gato. Gato Island is so small that you
could easily swim around it on a single dive but no one does because there is simply too much to take in. The island is shaped vaguely like a pyramid and undercut from erosion along the waterline. A small guard’s shack clings to its coral foundations but there is no guard in residence. Tata explains that two provinces are disputing ownership of the island. With little government funding available, the dive shops on Malapascua pay the guards’ salaries
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