WOW -- it's big!

On day two, we headed back over to the same general spot offshore to Ta'u. Our boat captain, Andy, noticed a blip on his depth finder so Paul and Doug grabbed their masks and snorkels and jumped in to investigate. Meredith and I soon followed and we were all hovering over a very big coral. It was immediately apparent that we had in fact located the giant coral. It was 2-3 times bigger than any of the other large corals we had seen previously. We proceeded to get on our dive gear and head under.

The coral looks like a small mountain underwater. Unfortunately, light and color are absorbed the deeper you go underwater. Our point and shoot camera is better at taking close-ups underwater than wide-angle shots so you'll have to use your imagination a bit with the pictures. However, if some blogger whiz out there could tell me how to post video, we have some great quality film clips I could post on the blog. Anyways, the top of the coral is located in 25 feet of water and the bottom at 50 feet. Our work as research assistants quickly set in, as Meredith and I began measuring this and adjacent Porites corals while Paul was filming. The circumference of the coral is 41 meters. This really is big, as it took a minute to swim all the way around it. It measures over 34 x 22 meters in width and length.

Given the size of a coral, its age can be estimated. This giant coral is over 1,000 years old! That could make it one of the oldest living animals on Earth!

The Search for the Giant Coral

For the 81-mile trip to the Manu'a Islands, I decided to try a different motion sickness drug, which turned out to be a big mistake (Bonine for any of you looking for a drug review). For over 3 hours, I had my head in a bucket and was begging Paul to put me out of my misery. I didn't want to suffer the day-long drowsiness associated with Dramamine, as we were going to be making a couple dives right when we arrived in Ta'u. Despite the hours of torture, I sucked it up and donned my dive gear as we approached the island. I could barely stand, but I wanted off that boat more than anything.

One of the main goals of this trip was to gather data and film one of the world's largest corals. We were given some GPS coordinates for the location of the giant coral so we jumped off the boat and proceeded to look around. Given that it is a giant coral and we had a location, we thought we wouldn't be able to miss it. We dropped down and started swimming. We immediately passed several large corals of the same species (Porites spp.), and although they were big, we did not see the so-called giant. It was still a great dive... we saw a humphead wrasse, a blacktip reef shark, guineafowl puffers, and a school of about 200 3-foot long barracuda. I was convinced right then that the scuba diving was going to be far better than the typical dives on our island, Tutuila.

We made a second dive and found several more Porites corals. Again, a single giant did not stand out, but they were huge with 20 meter circumferences. Paul has adopted the name a fellow researcher on the trip, Doug Fenner, gave to the dive site, "The Valley of Giants." We ended the day thinking our GPS coordinates were either wrong or we just had to accept that the giant coral wasn't as large as we anticipated. We called it a day and headed off to the lodge on Ofu.