Sea of Cortez: the world's aquarium
Sea of Cortez: the world's aquarium
Jacques Cousteau once called Mexico's Sea of Cortez 'the world's aquarium', but is its marine life still flourishing?
By Tim Ecott
8:00AM BST 18 Jul 2015
The shark was swimming straight towards me. Its mouth was 4ft wide and its body a shadowy torpedo stretching into the hazy green water behind. Just inches below the surface, the velvety skin caught the light and showed off a pattern of thousands of white spots, as if it had been decorated by a crazed paintball fanatic. Barely seeming to flex its 3ft-high tail, the giant passed me without a flicker of acknowledgement. As I finned hard to keep up, I measured its size in arm spans – 26ft, more than four times my own body length. But this was a harmless behemoth – a whale shark, the largest fish in the ocean.
Whale sharks migrate vast distances and make seasonal appearances but here in the Sea of Cortez, off Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, they find it hard to leave. “Last year they stayed until late May and they were back again in July,” said James Curtiss, owner of the local Cortez Club diving centre. “They may even be year-round residents.”
The 60,000-square-mile gulf is divided between a temperate zone (north of La Paz, the state capital of Baja California Sur) and a warm-water “Panamic” zone (southward to Cabo San Lucas, a resort city on the peninsula’s tip). The confrontation and subtle mixing of these two ecosystems partly accounts for its richness: some 900 fish species and 32 types of marine mammal gather to feed and breed here. Massive blooms of plankton mean that even elusive blue whales are seen here, along with the gnarled humpbacks and grey whales that sound and breach in the bay, to the delight of whale-watching parties.
This rich sea is in stark contrast to the forbidding desert at its edge. Driving north from the tourist hub of Cabo San Lucas, you enter a new world: giant cardon cactuses stretch to the horizon where the mountains, the Cordillera del Pacifico, cast a great blue shadow in the midday heat.
More:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/centralamericaandcaribbean/mexico/11747126/Sea-of-Cortez-the-worlds-aquarium.html