Honduras and Mexico banned the use of animals in circuses in 2015, and in 2017, Guatemala followed suit. A century and a half of circus performances that included horses, elephants and lions was gone.

Enter Mexico-based Rolce Productions. Circumventing the ban, they resurrected dinosaurs (albeit mechanical) and placed them in the shows visiting Honduras and Roatan. “Era of The Dinosaurs” was set up next to the Roatan airport from April 3 to 27.

The show is half circus, half variety show.

The show is half circus, half variety show, with performers having long dialogues while walking around the stage. There were several circus acts interspersed throughout the show: jugglers, balancers, acrobats and a clown act.

Children love the concept of dinosaurs. It is a rite of passage to be obsessed at the age of four or five with the animals who roamed the Earth millions of years ago. The show was interrupted four times for children to walk around figures of mechanical dinosaurs that were wheeled onto the stage while the lights were dimmed.

One curveball given by the organizers was adding a mammoth to the dinosaur lineup in the final credits section of the show. The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct elephant species, was not from the same era as the dinosaurs.

The Overlooked Beauty of South-Mid Shore of Roatan

There are vertical rock formations, chimney like cliffs and abundant forests stretching from the island’s top ridge to the shore.

The long established and loved resorts like Fantasy Island, Coco View and Media Luna are there. The last undeveloped bight, never stain Bight, is here as well. A few have tried; none have succeeded in developing this gorgeous bight surrounded by forests.

There are kilometers of iron shore, mangroves and half a dozen little beaches. The south side of Roatan does have beaches and they are like little jewels scattered on the lush green of the island’s tapestry.

The eastern current keeps the water clean, Sea life more abundant and visibility is better here than many other places around the island. Snails cling on to the jagged Iron shore rock, the flying fish jumping front of passing boats. There are visiting whale sharks in early spring, and regular patrols by tarpon and sunfish.

In the distance local fishermen in wooden dories drop their lines looking for snapper and barracuda. Snowy egrets rest over pools waiting at an opportunity to snatch passing fish. As the day ends, the sun sets over the hills of Roatan. Its mid island blues.

Diving to Reach the Summit Near Cayos Cochinos

Seamounts are extinct volcanoes that, when active, created piles of lava that sometimes break the ocean surface and come in a mixture of shapes and sizes which makes for beautiful abundant reefs.

Geologically speaking, the word ‘seamount’ has a narrow definition. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states a seamount is any underwater peak that rises more than 3,280 feet from the seafloor without breaking the water’s surface. Otherwise it would be an island if the top of the mountain broke above the sea level. Most scuba divers however define a seamount as any underwater mountain, pinnacle or reef.

A series of underwater mountains rise between Roatan and Cayos Cochinos forming separate mountains and peaks at around 60 ft in depth. The Seamounts are more suitable for advanced divers, as the currents can be strong.

The Cayos seamounts can even be dangerous. Weather there changes quickly, and sudden squalls can make it difficult for the boat captain to retrieve surfacing divers. Four years ago, Nicholas Bach of the Roatan Marine Park, who is in charge of the marine infrastructure around Roatan, ended up floating alone in the ocean for 11 hours. Bach and three other divers were rescued just before sunset.

While some of the bigger seamounts are miles round others are just a few dozen meters in diameter. The most visited ones are about seven kilometers from Cayo Cochino Grande and can be circumnavigated in one dive. These underwater mountains are perfect for less experienced divers because their tops are flat and at a depth of 40 feet. These guyots are made by repeated wave action eroding the summit of the underwater island eventually forming a flat surface.

With all the currents moving through the area, temperature fluctuation and the rich nourishing water that come from the depths, make the coral at the Cayos Cochinos seamount very healthy and active. There is also a great opportunity to see lots of different schools of Atlantic spade fish, blue tangs, horse eye jacks, hammerheads or pelagic fish and a battery of barracudas just hanging out off the reef as they feed. Most of the time the nurse sharks are swimming around with their curious eyes. There is plenty of marine life to be seen.

Bach marked six mounts on Roatan Marine Park’s google map. “A lot more dive shops offer these trips. Ten years ago, you felt like a pioneer if you took a dive group there. Now there are almost ten moorings,” said Bach.

Several Roatan dive shops offer a day trip to the seamounts with a two-tank dive. Between dives you can explore the rustic Cayos Cochinos. Honduras has been ranked in the top three diving destinations in the Caribbean Sea for biodiversity and Cayos Cochinos is the leader in biodiversity in Honduras.

The two small main islands of Cayos Cochinos in the chain offer a variety of surrounding coral reef structures. One of the two is called ‘Chachahuate, a small Garifuna fishing village.

The chain of 13 cays to the south are coral islands, with shallow coral reefs to the north and sloping walls to the south. These little pure, deserted cays are perfect to go for snorkeling.

A diver cuts off the lionfish’s 18 venomous spines. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Invasion of the Lionfish has Damaged the Roatan Ecosystem

“The lionfish has a voracious appetite, eating everything in the Caribbean except the conch. We found lobsters, shrimp, crab, fish and octopus within their stomachs,” said Nic Bach who runs the Lionfish Invasive Species Containment Program at the Roatan Marine Park (RMP). The diverse life on the island’s reef isn’t equipped to fight back and lionfish have been known to target shrimp cleaning stations, leaving a few small fish to keep the algae growth in check and subjecting entire sections of vibrant coral vulnerable to other stresses. Bach calls it the “largest, widespread invasion since man.”

“Lionfish are aliens here and predators such as a groupers and snappers that would eat them [in areas where they are native] do not identify them as prey,” said Chris Willey, a PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer who helps educate divers to responsibly aid in lionfish containment through spearfishing.

Lionfish most likely entered the Atlantic through a release of aquarium individuals beginning in the mid-80s in Florida. Although there is also a theory that the fish may have traveled in the bilge pumps of large tankers making their way from Asia through the Panama Canal to ports in South Florida. They spread through the warm coastal waters at a geometric rate, reaching Roatan in 2009. By 2012 they made it all the way to the eastern edge of the Caribbean. Now they can be found all the way down the coast of Brazil, covering almost the entire Atlantic coast of South America. Lionfish have succeeded here on Roatan like they have everywhere else.

Lionfish have been proliferating, killing everything on the reef

Answering the challenge posed by these invasive predators, the Roatan Marine Park first partnered up with the National Fisheries Department in 2009 to issue spearing licenses to professional diver instructors and dive masters. Today, these licenses can be obtained by anyone after completing a training course through the RMP so even the general public is on the lionfish snorkel patrol.

Thus far in 2018 the Roatan Marine Park has issued more than 200 lionfish permits, a number Bach sees increasing to something like 350 for the whole year, which would be on par with last year’s total and slightly lower than the high of 400 in 2014.

Willey, creator of the PADI Lionfish Hunter distinctive specialty program, which builds on the Roatan Marine Park invasive species containment course, stresses that divers need to ensure that they do not feed lionfish to other marine life. “If we are acting as predators we must act like predators and must remove lionfish for consumption,” Willey said. Otherwise the divers affect fish behavior, teaching groupers, eels and other large predators that “divers give out free food,” which isn’t a smart, safe or sustainable practice.

Roatan recreational divers spear a lionfish. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Another key component to successful lionfish containment on Roatan is in doing no harm to the reef. Often it is those trying to do the best for the reef, photographers looking to document new behaviors, spear fishers desperate to bag the biggest catch, and other distracted divers who end up doing the most damage, often exceeding whatever good they hoped to accomplish.“By you hitting a piece of reef that took two years to just grow one inch is doing a lot more damage than that lionfish will ever do,” Bach said.

Some have come up with more creative ways of fighting lionfish. “I was thinking about building some little castles and palaces around the reef, see if we could attract lionfish. You can spear that all you want, you aint gonna hurt anything,” said Jack Mitchell, the longtime chef who has been a passionate advocate for consuming lionfish since being asked to serve them for a marine biologist’s wedding back in 2012.

Tournaments like the first ever Roatan International Lionfish Tournament being held from October 12-14, organized by Buck Beasley, hope to expand recognition of the problems that lionfish present to the vital heart of the tourism industry on Roatan. Beasley decided to put on the tournament “to help locals gain awareness. The goal is to put the lionfish front and center for the local population.” With a top prize of $1,000 for the most lionfish caught from a 4-person team using spear-poles, the derby style tournament hopes to attract attention from crews throughout the Bay Islands and the Caribbean. The tournament also hopes to raise enough funds to help some local free divers get certified and outfitted as professional divers. “We hope to raise funds that will allow us to train and certify local watermen on SCUBA. We want to give these guys opportunities for better livelihoods,” said Beasley, who is licensed by Roatan Marine Park to issue lionfish hunting certifications and has lost count of the number he has issued over the years.

“If you are what you eat, then I’m a lionfish,” said Mitchell, who runs Lionfish Louie’s, which will be hosting a big lionfish cookout the day after the tournament when cash prizes will be awarded in several categories.

Zoe Kunzelman, an eleven-year old girl from Utah, who was recently certified by Beasley and issued a spear-pole, knows she’s doing something good for the reef when she hunts for lionfish. She proudly cuts off the spines and fillets the lionfish before she gets to the surface, but her favorite part of hunting lionfish is when she brings her catch back to the kitchen where they prepare the yummy tasting flaky white fish anyway she likes. Her favorites ways are grilled with barbeque, then mango butter.

There is no limit to how many lionfish a diver can skewer. Even if every last one would end up on a Roatan plate more will drift in on the currents from farther east. “We are never going to eradicate them. We’re simply educating people and creating a demand for the lionfish,” said Bach. Willey notes that spearing a lionfish is one of the most rewarding, exhilarating, adrenaline-producing moments of diving because when “we remove lionfish we are helping the ecosystem and saving a lot of juvenile native fish.”

Two lionfish display their colorful spines. (photo by Robert Herb)

If programs like the one being run by the Roatan Marine Park are ultimately going to be successful, it’s through systematic cooperation between disparate groups among the many nations in the Caribbean. It’s only by working together, pooling resources, data, and best practices that anything resembling fundamental change will ever be fully realized.

“Below recreational [SCUBA diving depth] limits the reef is still filthy with lionfish,” Beasley said, speaking of his concern for what lionfish are doing at depth. He notes that they have been seen by subs at depths of one-thousand feet. “What are they eating at depth that will affect future fisheries? Are they eating the juvenile snapper, grouper, or even the tuna stocks?” Beasley asks before concluding that we cannot imagine the ecological disasters that await from the actions of the lionfish at depth.

There have been some ingenious and exciting trap systems, like the one designed by Dr. Steve Gittings, Chief Scientist of NOAA’s Marine Sanctuary System, made to use technology and behavior to target lionfish in deep water specifically while minimizing by-catch,. Having the commercial fleet on Roatan utilizing these kind of deep water traps “would be a natural fit between lobster seasons and keep those boats and fishermen busy year round,” said Beasley, who hopes to have one of Gittings’ traps on display at the Roatan International Lionfish Tournament in October to help educate locals on how the traps function.

“I dream of the day a local can spend a day hunting lionfish for a return of $6-$10 per pound,” Beasley said. He sees the tipping point coming “when the nutritional value is realized and we can provide a steady supply to market.”

Diver inspects the corral tree in Sandy Bay Area (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

Island Divers Plant Underwater Trees to Give Coral a Chance

Thankfully there are a group of passionate environmental scientists leading the charge to preserve, protect and defend the coral reefs of the Bay Islands. As Tripp Funderburk, who runs the coral restoration program at Subway Watersports in Turquoise Bay explains, “we had the worst bleaching event in the history of Roatan last year.” Jennifer Keck, who works as the Education and Research Coordinator for the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) at Anthony’s Key Resort in Sandy Bay says, “we can’t afford to have another bleaching event.”

Coral Restoration initiatives are a planned scientific response that, as Executive Director of the Roatan Marine Park, Francis Lean says, “give hope to the reef.” Both of the restoration programs in Turquoise Bay and Sandy Bay use the same coral trees, the same record keeping and naming conventions so they can work together and collaborate in the future.

A piece of staghorn coral used in the restoration program. (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

The coral restoration programs on Roatan revolve around coral tree nurseries. The nurseries are composed of big, 30 foot tall PVC pipes. Like an underwater Christmas tree fragments of two critically endangered species coral, staghorn and elkhorn, hang from thin filaments of wire attached to the thicker PVC branches. To harvest these fragments, they take 10% of viable, healthy specimens of staghorn and elkhorn coral, cut them into little pieces and try to preserve as much of the genetic diversity of these keystone species as possible.

Funderburk, who previously worked as policy director in for the Coral Restoration Foundation setting up restoration programs across the Caribbean says “I am convinced these are important corals. We can grow them and plant them and we can get better at it. I’ve seen it work in Bonaire, Curacao, Mustique and in the Florida Keys.”

Starting in early 2016, the Bay Islands Reef Restoration program installed ten coral trees in Turquoise Bay and another ten in Mahogany Bay. Once the fragments of coral have sufficiently grown, they are planted back onto the reef, tagged, and monitored at regular intervals. Since January, the program in Turquoise Bay has out-planted more than 260 corals onto the reef with a success rate of more than 92%. Funderburk says that the program relies on volunteers, using an “ecotourism” model that doesn’t depend on “government grants or charity,” but provides their guests with “unique opportunities to learn about coral.”

Tripp Funderburk talking to a group of students at Turquoise Bay Resort. (Photo by Robert Herb).

Renee Setter, who recently completed her PADI Dive Master internship at Turquoise Bay, explains what makes working on the restoration program so special, saying, “ it’s such a unique and fulfilling experience to be able to give back to the reef. It makes divers feel satisfied and rewarded knowing that they gave back to the beautiful underwater world.”

Keck, who oversees a coral restoration program with 24 coral trees with more than 2,000 corals on them agrees that, “the whole idea of citizen science is just growing. People want to be more useful. There has been so much interest among recreational divers.”

While the programs in Sandy Bay and Turquoise Bay have been successful, the ultimate goal as Keck understands it is to “get the techniques down so we can start another nursery in the West End/West Bay area that the Marine Park will manage that would allow local dive shops to get involved and engage the community and make everyone feel like they are contributing.”

Lean agrees that cooperation is critical, saying “communication between all projects is essential to improve the effectiveness of coral restoration.”

While these coral restoration programs are not a fix for the rising temperatures and acidity in the ocean, they do help point the way forward towards a better future. Funderburk stresses that we need to “do as much smart conservation as we can on a local level” with programs that are “effective but also educational.”

Keck also ultimately sounds a positive note, saying that, “We might not have the answer today, but we might next month. We have a seed bank in Norway. We need a coral bank and that’s sort of what these nurseries are becoming.”

People from crawfish rock builds a palapa.

Thatched Roof Construction Business is Booming

On the Jackson-Marbella road hundreds of cohoon palms are within an easy reach of the palapa builders. The younger harvested palms are around 25-30 years old, some are 50 feet tall and as old at a century. They were planted at the height of the Standard Fruit Company’s boom days in Honduras.

Around 150 palms from roughly a dozen cohoon palms are needed to build two large palapas. In order to get this quantity of palms a crew of four men works hand in hand. One man uses a ladder to climb the cohoon palm tree, and then with the machete he cuts the palm leaf off. Another helper breaks the fall of the cohoon so it doesn’t get damaged on impact. “There are many people building palapas, but Ramon [Armijo] is the best,” says Lucas Javier Martinez, a local helping Ramon load the palms onto a truck.

The crew brought a 12-year-old boy to help with work. “If you don’t teach the kids how to work they become thieves and robbers,” says Martinez. Once harvested, the cohoon fronds are then split into two down the length of the stem and dried for a week or more.

The palms are then attached with string to the wood structure of the palapa: rafters, ridges and posts. There are one-pole palapas, two-pole palapas and large multi-pole palapas. While Ramon Armijo was preparing to build a large 12 foot by 14 foot palapa, another experienced palapa builder from Crawfish Rock was building one over the dining area of a house deck. “You’ve got to do everything on full moon. You got to get the posts on full moon. Everything has to be done of full moon,” says Celso Connor. A palapa, if well maintained, can last well over a decade. The secret of a long lasting palapa is to quickly replace worn pieces of thatch.

There is a science and an art to building a perfect Roatan palapa. The palm leaves can be picked year round, but when picked during the full moon, they are said to be sturdier and last longer. “If you pick it right it will last six years, if you pick it wrong it won’t last six months,” says Armijo. “I didn’t used to believe it, but now I do.”

Scientific studies confirm this. “Palm leaves harvested during the full moon had higher total C, hemicellulose, complex C and lower Ca concentrations. These chemical changes should make palm leaves less susceptible to herbivory and more durable when harvested,” writes Kristiina A. Vogt in a Federal Food Safety report. These correlations between plants and animals based on lunar cycle has been known by natives for millennia.