Here’s something I recorded a few weeks ago at Rinja island, next to the more widely know Komodo.
We went diving at a place called Cannibal Rock, in Horseshoe Bay on the southern tip of Rinja, on the way back to the boat we found this show going on:
Oceanic Manta Rays (they used to be called Devil Rays) feeding, Komodo Dragons prowling the beach and eagles fishing around us, there was also a group of smaller Mobula Rays racing around, though I didn’t get those in the video, plus of course the landscape and the setting Sun.
It was nuts, the only thing missing was David Attenborough narrating the whole thing.
I swam with the mantas for a while and then went back to the boat to get my multicopter ready and shoot some video of the action. The next morning (the second half of the video) there was only one large manta ray in sight and the dragons were gone, but I got a very nice shot of one of the eagles.
The camera, on the other hand, was mounted on a radio controlled tricopter with FPV gear (First Person View), the video from the camera is transmitted live to a pair of goggles, so I see what the camera sees. I’m the one all in blue with the goggles on and the R/C transmitter in my hands just before landing the tricopter on the boat.
Beautiful stuff. Thanks for sharing it…but now I have a bad case of toy envy. I’m not even into cameras and RC aircraft, and I still want a rig like yours. (Even though I’d probably only get a short, but highly detailed, video of the ground rushing up and dirt flying around :D)
They were the biggest I’ve seen so far, up to five meters “wingspan”. The ones I’ve seen before were reef Manta Rays, closely related but a bit smaller; these were oceanic Manta Rays, the very rarely get so close to the coast, in fact the people from the dive shop had never seen them there so it was a very rare event.
No, they don’t bite, they are in fact very gentle and curious, they couldn’t bite even if they wanted to anyway, they have no teeth.
In any case I was swimming among them half an hour or so before I shot the video, perhaps I’ll show a video of that later.
Some multicopters literally fly themselves, as in you set way points in Google Earth, press a button and off it goes. They have GPS, geomagnetic, barometric, sonar, accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors, the ultimate gadget.
But there’s not fun in that!, I prefer to fly manually with a simple gyroscopic stabilized flight controller.
I was wondering about that. I’ve only encountered stingrays, who are far friendlier than cats. But they had their stingers removed. I don’t know if I’d ever swim with them in the wild.
Sitngrays with their stings removed? Wha’???
In an aquarium I suppose?
Last year I had a wonderful encounter with Manta Rays at Koh Bon, a tiny island in the Andaman Sea, you can see how close they can get to a diver, as I said they are very gentle and curious.
IIRC they have extraordinarily large brains for a fish, close to the body/brain size ratio of mammals. It’s just outrageous that they are killed to sell their fin tips as fake shark fins for soup and their gills to be used in traditional Chinese medicine.
(On a quick note, were the photographers of the dragons being friendly with their waving, trying to warn you away from the dragons, or angry at you for messing up their shot?)
