By Alexandra
Sleek, majestic, powerful. These are some of the words that come to mind when I think about the large animals you see on dives. I remember first learning to dive and feeling a mix of excitement and nervous about seeing sharks and turtles. This immediately translated to pure, unadulterated fascination when seeing them for the first time in the wild. Every dive from then onwards, I was anxious (in a good way) to spot these magnificent creatures. I found myself rolling my eyes when the dive master would point out nudibranchs and call the entire dive group over to have a look.
Then I arrived at Gili Shark Conservation. All of a sudden, I was forced to look at the little things. From doing coral restoration to conducting health surveys on the reef, I suddenly saw the beauty in the small, the way the reef interacts with itself on the most minuscule level. Little worlds completely hidden from view unless you urge yourself to actively look for them. This introduced a new excitement that was so opposite to what I had for the big animals. Instead of waiting the whole dive for a shark to swim past, searching in the blue in the hopes that it would appear out of nowhere (which I did consistently for my first week here), I began to swim closer to the substrate, peering into crevices or the folds in the coral, entering into a world that so many choose to ignore in search of greater things.
My work doing coral restoration meant that on my dives, I would notice tunicates, drupella and encrusting sponge on every dive I did. I began to actively keep an eye out for nudibranchs and mantis shrimp, and when I spotted them, I would be in absolute awe of their beauty and behaviour.
My diving became more appreciative. I wouldn’t be disappointed at seeing no big things on a dive because I would be proud of how much better I had become in seeing the little things (though I would still get very excited every time I saw an unexpected shark swimming around).
By the end of my stay, I found as much excitement doing muck and macro dives as I I did doing shark and turtle dives.
In some ways, I think that this not only allowed me to appreciate my dives more but also my life as a whole. In life, we often get completely focused on the big milestones; the birthdays, anniversaries, promotions. We forget to appreciate the music of the rain and the rolling of the thunder. We forget to truly see the beauty in the flowers and feel the softness of the grass underneath our feet. We forget to see how interconnected everything we experience is, how it’s all part of a beautiful environmental machine that spans the globe but also allows you to hold entire universes in the palm of your hand.
