The shallowness of the water, which made possible communication between these islands and the continent
during the Pleistocene era, now means the sea bed is able to receive light and heat.
The marine fauna and flora have here found conditions favourable to life,
and few places in the world can boast of such a profusion of forms.
Here, a single bay may contain twice as many species as the entire Caribbean.
In these submarine paradises, evolution has created beings so different from those of the surface that,
for many years, scientists were at a loss to explain.
This clown fish, for example, does not rub against a plant, but rather an anemone, an animal of the polyp family.
The anemone, with its stinging tentacles, protects the clown fish from its enemies.
The fish, in return, cleans its protector of parasites.
Long before science was able to study the symbiotic relationship between the clown fish and the anemone,
the sea was, for man, a place of countless mysteries. Its depths were unreachable and its fauna, in many case, unknown.
The lack of scientific information was compensated for by the imagination of man,
filling the ocean with marine unicorns, giant snakes and mermaids.
The stories told by the sailors passed from mouth to mouth, feeding people’s imaginations,
and given further credence by the numbers who dies at sea each year.
Some of the dangers lying hidden in the waters took the form of multi-coloured fish which possessed weapons capable of killing a man.
The members of the scorpaenidae family have poisonous barbs on their fins, to dissuade predators from any attempt to hunt them.
Some of these species, such as the lion fish, are clearly visible, but others camouflage themselves, blending in to the coral background.
Anyone who makes the mistake of bumping into them will die in just a few hours, never having identified what it was that had attacked them.
On other occasions, the danger came from much more familiar animals, the snakes.
Man’s primeval fear of snakes was immediately applied to its marine relatives, and in some cases quite rightly so.
The olive sea snake is not only swifter than any land serpent, but it also possesses the deadliest poison of any snake in the world.
As well as fearing the coral reef, man also admired it.
The clear lagoons of the Indian Ocean make for levels of visibility impossible in other seas.
On calm days, from the surface it was possible to observe the ecosystem unfolding just a few metres below.
Before man’s eyes appeared a paradise full of colours, and until then unimagined forms.
A world in which the fish shared their habitat with animals that looked like plants, such as the holothuroidea (sea cucumbers):
strange, gigantic worms which seem to expel their digestive system when they are threatened.
Beneath the surface of the water, man had discovered a world whose mysteries were greater
even than those of the depths of the Indonesian jungles.
Beyond the coral reef, lie the open waters of the ocean, one of the environments most feared by man since ancient times.
The sea bottom is lost in the dark depths, and all that can be seen is the so-called Great Blue, the immensity of the ocean.
This is a world almost without colour, dominated by the great sea predators, the territory of the most feared ocean animal, the shark.
Of all the species of shark in the seas, only a few attack man,
but that has been enough to earn them a reputation inspiring fear and panic.
Few people are able to tell the difference between these silky sharks and other species of shark, and if in doubt,
it is best to err on the side of caution, especially if you take into account that the warm waters of the Indian Ocean
are visited by white sharks, the most dangerous of all.
In this way, aware or not of their ignorance, men have always considered all sharks to be vicious assassins.