‘Rays of Hope’ – an Interview with Karen Fuentes, founder of the Manta Caribbean Project

The Manta Caribbean Project is doing vital work to catalogue and protect giant manta rays off the Caribbean coast of Mexico – Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell talks to its charismatic founder.

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Words by Mark 'Crowley' Russell, Photographs by Valentina Cucchiara

Tell me a little about how you got started,’ I ask at the start of our conversation, and an hour later, I’m still listening to the force of nature that is Karen ‘Manza’ Fuentes, founder and director of Manta Mexico Caribé – the Manta Caribbean Project.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Karen graduated from university in 2008 with a degree in tourism and management. It was during her studies that she set her sights on moving to the coast.

‘I was always thinking about animals, and I really loved geography,’ she says. ‘When it was time to prepare my thesis, I needed to create something that allowed me to get into the world of coral reefs, so I created a sustainable management proposal for the coral reefs in Cozumel.

‘I always loved management and policy making, it’s one of my strengths. But after I finished school, I was like, “boom” – I never went back.’

Her work with reef management saw her move from Cozumel to Playa del Carmen and eventually to Isla Mujeres, a small island off the coast of Cancún on the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

The region is famous for one of the largest whale shark aggregations in the world. Between June and September each year, hundreds of the giant fish gather to feast on the eggs of spawning bonito, the local name given to little tunny (Euthynnus alletteratus), which gather to spawn in vast numbers between June and July.

The bonito are following the huge plankton blooms generated at the meeting point of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, feeding on the the smaller fish and crustaceans that accompany them.

The blooms also attract another large pelagic visitor: Mobula birostris, the giant or oceanic manta ray.

As soon as she saw them, Karen knew she had found her calling. ‘I had followed manta ray documentaries for years, but the first time I saw them in the water I was in shock,’ she says. ‘I was thinking that they are so beautiful and someone should be studying them, but nobody was.’

FILLING A GAP

Karen had already been working with local tour operators (whale shark tourism is the main source of income on Isla Mujeres) for several years through her reef management work, which provided her with a platform to establish the Manta Caribbean Project in 2013.

She was aided by the Manta Trust, a UK-based conservation organisation founded by Dr Guy Stevens in 2011, now an umbrella for a network of 31 affiliated projects around the world.

‘The Manta Trust taught me everything,’ says Karen. ‘They were my mentors from the beginning, and fundamental for my growth into marine sciences. They make sure we use standard methodologies for all the data we collect, and we work with over 30 projects as a network, to feed each other with more manta ray knowledge.’

The Manta Caribbean Project started out with just a manta ID catalogue, a database used to record individual manta rays, which can be identified through the distinctive markings on their undersides.

Twelve years later, Karen’s database is one of the largest in the region, holding records of more than 800 individuals.

‘It’s a great achievement and helps us understand more about the population dynamics and habitat use of the species in this region,’ says Karen. ‘Living on [Isla Mujeres] has helped me to establish relationships with the local people, so we can learn more about the main threats to mantas, which include bycatch and ghost gear.’

Ghost gear – abandoned, lost and discarded fishing equipment – is a global problem, indiscriminately killing manta rays and other large species that become entangled in the nets and lines.

The people best placed to report both ghost gear findings and manta ray sightings are the people who spend their lives at sea, and Karen has devoted herself to building a bond of trust with the islanders, who have a long history with their fisheries.

Like many small communities, they are mistrustful of outsiders.

‘I cannot maintain the monitoring all the time because it’s very expensive,’ says Karen, ‘so we rely on our community. We need to go between 15 to 60 miles offshore, which is a big distance for us. You can’t do that until the fishermen and locals trust you and don’t see you as a threat, because other researchers have taken advantage of their traditional knowledge.’

THREATS TO MANTAS

Mexico’s Caribbean manta rays have not faced quite the same threat as their Indo-Pacific relatives, whose gill-rakers – the tissue between a manta’s gills that strains plankton from the water – are sought after as an ingredient in ‘traditional’ Chinese medicine.

Instead, some mantas caught around Isla Mujeres were previously used by the locals for shark fishing, because they were a plentiful source of meat to bait the hooks.

Since 2019, however, and thanks in part to Karen’s work, all mobulid rays – which includes mantas and their devil-ray cousins – have been fully protected under Mexican law.

Scuba diving and snorkelling with the mantas is technically forbidden by law, but snorkel trips to see the whale sharks between May and September are not. As mantas are considered a ‘companion species’ to the whale sharks, however, should they appear during a whale shark snorkel tour, tourists have the chance to swim with simultaneous aggregations of both species of ocean giant.

Tour operators are bound by a strict code of conduct governing interactions with the animals. This code, which Karen developed with the aid of the Manta Trust, is helping to reduce pressure on the animals and promote their conservation, an especially important goal, given that Caribbean mantas may well be a different species than the two currently known to science.

Manta rays were first formally described as Raja birostris in 1792 by the German physician Johann Julius Walbaum. They were given many different names before Manta birostris became standard, but were considered a single species until 2009, when Dr Andrea Marshall of the Marine Megafauna Foundation (MMF) published a paper formally describing a second species, Manta alfredi with the common name ‘reef manta.’ (Both species were reclassified as Mobula in 2017.)

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

Reef mantas spend most of their time close to shore and are considerably smaller than oceanic mantas, with an average disc width (wingspan) of 3.5m in adults, compared to the 7m disc width of their highly migratory cousins.

The two species have markedly different spot patterns on their undersides, and oceanic mantas have a very distinctive black and white ‘T’ shape on their dorsal surfaces, as well as an inert spine on their tails that is not found in reef mantas.

Even in the early days of her project, Karen believed the Mexican Caribbean mantas were different from other populations of oceanic manta rays, such as those found in the Indian Ocean and Asia Pacific region, including the Pacific coast of Mexico and Ecuador.

‘I thought they looked different from other manta populations, but I wasn’t sure,’ she says. ‘I went to train as a scientist by travelling to other Manta Trust sites, and from there was able to start learning about the differences.

‘The average size of our mantas is 5.5m across and the colouration patterns are completely different. They have a mix of reef manta and oceanic manta colouration patterns, which I believe is proof they are genetically different.’

The mantas of the Mexican Caribbean have been provisionally named Atlantic mantas and classified Mobula cf birostris (where cf denotes uncertainty over the classification).

Formal identification is waiting on the publication of a genetic study by scientists at MMF, but most manta experts believe the third species will be confirmed.

• Read: It’s official – there are three species of manta ray!

POPULATION PUZZLES

While confirmation of the third species may be on hold, Karen’s work moves on apace. Her team is now collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US and other regional manta research projects to study the movements of the mantas.

Using satellite tags and sightings data they are attempting to determine where the animals go to mate and give birth. Potential nurseries have been found in the Flower Garden Banks area of the Gulf of Mexico and another near Florida, but to date there has been little evidence of crossover between the different populations, implying that they might not be as migratory as first thought.

‘Each area has ID catalogues and we don’t have a match with any of the Gulf of Mexico manta rays populations, and not with the Florida manta rays either,’ says Karen.

‘It’s interesting because we know they travel long distances, so where do they go? It could be that each population is resident, but it could also be the case that they travel to other parts of the world, but come back to the same place when they feed – which 90 per cent of the time is when we see them.’

Needless to say, Karen’s work takes a great deal of time and requires a large amount of money. She is reliant on grants, charitable donations and a programme by which student volunteers can pay a fee to work with the foundation (see box below).

‘We are busy all the time, and I am the only person in the office,’ she says. ‘I have great people working in the field, but I also have to manage all the funding, which is a big challenge, especially since Covid.’

Grant applications are a complex and arduous process, taking up to two months each. With different grant windows open at different times and funding periods limited, it’s a cycle that never stops. Karen estimates she spends up to half her work time on fundraising.

‘Even if you have a great brand, you are competing with hundreds of other projects,’ she explains. ‘You also have to think about how your projects are beneficial not only for the species but also the community, which has always been my strategy.’

Karen is also responsible for the Manta Caribbean Project’s finances, its volunteer and training programmes, permits, reports, statistics, the ID database and running the project’s online shop – and yet still finds time to head out to sea to check on her mantas.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

During our talk Karen repeatedly references the project’s community engagement – it is clearly something in which she, as an outsider now considered almost native, takes great pride.

There are between five and 10 people working for the project at any one time, including an all-female team assisting with the research, plus four local captains and a handful of other islanders who help out when needed.

Locals now report manta sightings and the presence of ghost gear without being prompted to do so, even inviting Karen to sail with them so she can gain more insight into how they work and which species they are finding.

‘My team is 100 per cent from Isla Mujeres. They are all Mexicans born on the island, so they are family, and now I feel like a family member with them,’ she says.

‘Living here has allowed me to understand not only the animal side of conservation, but also the human point of view, where conservation and community need to match with a good strategy to reach our goals.

‘It made me realise that we need to build strength within the community, because in the end, me and captains are not the ones that are going to be taking care of the natural resources in the future, but their sons and their daughters.’

As for the future of the Manta Caribbean Project? ‘I see it thriving, definitely,’ says Karen. ‘The challenges make us stronger: we are a strong community, and we can achieve our goals – slow but steady – to create a movement that can make the difference for manta rays.’

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