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Saturday, September 12, 2009 / 10:09pm Posted by Enric Sala

I just got out of the water, a night dive. It’s 10 o’clock, and we were diving with 100 white tip sharks. They were swimming all along the bottom and trying to catch fish, getting their noses inside the rocks—a really amazing spectacle.

It’s really, really difficult to find the concentrations of predators that we have here anywhere else. This national park is truly one of the treasures of the Pacific Ocean.

Photographs by Enric Sala and Octavio Aburto


In the photos above:

Top image: White tip reef sharks hunt at night.
Second image: If a small fish, darting or hiding, catches one shark’s attention…
Third image: … they all swarm after it.
Fourth image: There was no escape for this goldrim surgeonfish, consumed an instant after this photo was taken.
Fifth image: During the day, white tip reef sharks often lie dormant, their flat bellies (such as this one) resting on the seafloor.
Sixth image: Fishing is prohibited within the Cocos Island Marine Conservation Area, which extends 12 miles from the island.