I float at the surface, anticipation building about the surprises the deep might reveal. The small fishing boat rocks along with the waves as the strong wind begins to blow. These small-scale fishers are far offshore from the Tanintharyi Region of mainland Myanmar, at a small islet called Black Rock, renowned as Myanmar’s prime diving spot. I am on a survey expedition, navigating the Myeik Archipelago, a group of over 800 islands. Access to this region has been limited since the pandemic in 2020, followed by the coup d’état in 2021 that triggered the current raging civil war.

Mud spiny lobsters (Panulirus polyphagus) start showing up in the nets in good numbers. Though the least delicious of all spiny lobsters I’ve tried, they still fetch relatively high prices among tourists and buffet lines. Moments later, the white bellies of some Indian halibuts (Psettodes erumei) reflect in the light. This flatfish species was my favourite food fish as a boy, and I often asked my mother to buy them from supermarkets in Bangkok some 30 years ago. Nowadays, they are becoming much rarer as the waters of the Andaman Sea have been depleted from over five decades of intensive industrial trawling.

At last, I saw what I was looking for, a weird-looking fish with a shark-like tail, flat body, and spotty brown patterns, followed by many more. These are the Ranong guitarfish (Rhinobatos ranongensis), a species described in 2019. I had seen these elusive elasmobranchs during a cold year with upwelling at the beginning of the 2020 Indian Ocean Dipole year, but I thought it could be an anomaly. The presence of these guitarfish in an average year indicates they live around Black Rock, one of the few places where the species have been spotted in the wild. The late-term pregnant females later inspected on the fishing boat suggest that this could be an important habitat for this recently discovered species, a finding with significant conservation implications. The Area is designated as an Important Shark and Ray Area in 2024 by the IUCN Shark Specialist Group. 

Since 2018, I have spent years traveling around the Myeik Archipelago, tagging along with dive boats, hopping among fishing villages, and being on the last vessels to leave this place since the pandemic hit in early 2020. Throughout those years, my coverage plan kept changing as the conservation situation among these islands was far different from what I expected. On paper, the Myeik Archipelago is listed as a Mission Blue Hope Spot, a key biodiversity region of the Andaman Sea, and also on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Archipelago had long been closed to visitors for many decades by the military junta since the previous civil war, with the exception of tourism boats operated from neighbouring Thailand, before being promoted to attract international tourists in 2016 as a new unspoiled tourism frontier in Asia.