By Sabine Bergmann
A dark silhouette looms ahead in the sea, floating a dozen feet high, undulating. As I coast toward it, I begin to see the creatures within—hundreds of shimmering silver graybar and yellow spottail grunts, moving en mass like an underwater planet. I swim into the cloud, engulfed in tails and beady eyes. Currents of fish stream above, below and beside me as I snicker bubbles out of my dive regulator. Jacques Cousteau called Baja’s Sea of Cortez “The World’s Aquarium.” In Cabo Pulmo, the aquarium is interactive.
A dusty village in Southern Baja, Cabo Pulmo lies tucked between beige mountains and a deep green ocean. It was Cabo Pulmo’s villagers—led by a team of researchers and a fisherman with a vision—who established this 7,000-hectare marine reserve. During a single decade, Cabo Pulmo’s marine biomass—the physical space taken up by its organisms—increased by a staggering 463 percent, the largest seen in any marine reserve on Earth. Now, herds of flat-nosed Silky sharks snake around snorkelers and thousands of big-eyed jacks wheel around divers in infamous “fish tornados.”
Sinking into the sea, I float along a reef clouded with translucent shrimp and dotted with 100-kilo snappers and grinning moray eels. Then I see the tuna of the tornados. These big-eyed jack aggregations, up to 60 feet across, have earned the name of a storm. But they remind me of something else: a celestial body, waiting to embrace me.
