About This Project

The Manta Bowl is a seamount located within the second largest protected seascape in the Philippines. Due to the area's characteristics, the area is a critical habitat for manta rays, whale sharks and other marine life. The project aims to explore the deeper areas (100-400m) around the seamount, describe its biodiversity and identify priority areas for conservation while enhancing deep sea exploration technologies and accessibility locally.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Due to their physical and environmental properties, seamounts have been known to act as biodiversity hotspots and can host numerous vulnerable marine ecosystem (VME) indicator species. Despite their abundance and ecological roles, less than 0.1 % of the world's seamounts have been explored. These vital ecosystems are under threats from human activities including unsustainable forms of fishing and deep-sea mining.

We will be developing low-cost deep sea drop cameras using off-the-shelf resources in order to assess the status and biodiversity of the deep-sea areas of the Manta Bowl seamount, contribute to deep-sea AI, and provide more insights to these ecosystems. Comparison studies with existing low-cost camera system, Maka Niu, will also be conducted.

What is the significance of this project?

Despite the area being situated inside a protected area, the current zoning allows for potentially damaging activities to occur, including oil and gas shipping and unloading, seismic exploration and fishing.

By identifying critical habitats and collecting baseline information on the current status of biodiversity, unsustainable activities can be managed and regulated to ensure the conservation of these important deep-sea waters.

The low-cost, open-source technology will also make deep sea research more accessible to students, early-career researchers and deep sea enthusiasts worldwide, subsequently increasing our knowledge of the deep sea and contributing to the Global Sustainable Development Goals.

What are the goals of the project?

The goals of the project are to

1.) Assess the deep-sea biodiversity and identify critical habitats in the waters of the Ticao-Buris Pass Protected Seascape (Philippines) with particular focus on the Manta Bowl seamount;

2.) Develop an efficient and easy-to-use, low-cost, deep-sea camera system, to increase accessibility to deep water exploration and research for local communities and research groups regionally and globally;

3.) Provide images from a poorly explored region of the world, to enhance AI and machine learning and support automated data management for the development of large scale deep sea citizen science projects.