'Giant batmobiles': In search of the manta rays of the Hauraki Gulf

Every summer, the world's largest ray species cruises the waters of the Hauraki Gulf. Researchers are racing to find out more about these charismatic creatures as their habitat continues to decline around them.

The plane's shadow skims over the wide ripples of the ocean, its twin engines throttled back into a low burr, searching.

To the left in the distance is the Tutukaka coast and Whangārei Heads, and to the right, the Hauraki Gulf fades to a hazy horizon.

But our eyes are fixed on the surface of the water just a few hundred metres below us.

Then, crackling through our headsets, comes the one word we've been waiting to hear: "Manta."

Exclamations erupt over the comms and everyone's eyes now swivel to where Catherine Meyer, seated near the front of the 10-seater on the left, is gesturing out the window.

"My nine o'clock."

The plane banks round into a tight loop. There, unmistakable against the peacock-blue, is the black diamond of an oceanic manta ray, te whai rahi - the largest ray species on the planet.

For the past half-hour, we've been following the 200-metre depth contour beyond the Poor Knights Island group, along a route determined earlier that morning at Claris airport on Great Barrier Island.

There, we rendezvoused with Lydia Green - island resident and project director of Manta Watch NZ, a charitable trust she founded in 2017 and has run mostly solo ever since.

Manta rays, which can measure up to nine metres wingtip-to-wingtip, are found worldwide. Until recently, though, there was only anecdotal evidence of them visiting and living in New Zealand waters.

Once Green and a crew of researchers and volunteers started running boat surveys, and encouraging citizen scientist sightings from fishing boats and other vessels, verified sightings exploded.

Since 2020, there have been more than 1200 manta ray sightings between North Cape and Wellington, and Manta Watch has satellite-tagged 20 individuals that have been tracked as far north as the tropical Pacific.

What Green really wants to prove is that these manta rays are no passing visitors, but a native population that breeds here.

Consistent, frequent data collection is crucial. Despite being globally endangered, the species is classed as 'data deficient' in New Zealand - denying it the greater protections that would come with being declared locally endangered.

The manta ray may need those protections. The biodiversity-rich Hauraki Gulf has been in a state of decline for decades, and last-minute carve-outs to the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill, a piece of legislation years in the making, have dismayed marine researchers and environmentalists.

Today's flight is the first aerial survey of the gulf's manta ray population - covering in just a few hours an expanse of ocean that would take days and days to survey by boat, and taking Green ever closer to cracking the manta code.

At Claris, we board an angular, blunt-winged Britten-Norman Islander - a Swiss Army knife of a plane with big windows, and perfect for the low-altitude, low-speed cruising necessary to spot rays from above.

From take-off, it takes just a few minutes to clear the hills of Great Barrier, where tree fern crowns pop like green starbursts from the otherwise dark bush.

Then we're out over the ocean again, and already Green has spotted something.

There's a work-up on the surface, where fish gather to feed, and in turn attract birds and larger marine animals. There's no ray action, though, and we head further out into the gulf.

At the controls is Island Aviation pilot Hobby Hafiz, who has also flown aerial surveys in this area for BBC's Blue Planet. Green sits up front next to him, quietly directing Hafiz towards anything of interest she spots on the surface.

Also on board are World Wildlife Fund New Zealand chief executive Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, and two volunteer spotters and marine science postgraduate students, Sanaa Nair and Catherine Meyer.

For Nair, this is the best day of her short career so far. As soon as she discovered Manta Watch existed, she pestered Green via email for a year, before eventually tracking her to a conference and demanding to volunteer.

"I had no idea [manta rays] were here until two years ago. It just blew my mind."

Manta rays have the largest brain of any fish, have no stinger, and eat only krill - like whales, they are gentle giants of the ocean. From her first sighting on a boat, Nair was captivated by these "large, beautiful, charismatic, insanely intelligent" animals.

Armed with clipboards, she and Meyer take a side each, resting their foreheads against the windows as they scan intently for signs of life below.

Before Meyer spots that first ray, Green already has a working theory that they'll congregate along the contour lines, where the depth of the ocean floor changes.

Here, the upwelling of fresh ocean water into shallower areas brings with it an abundance of the zooplankton that manta rays love to feast on.

And after that first sighting, they're suddenly everywhere.

It's all Meyer and Nair can do to note down the details of each one: the time it's spotted, its colouring, what kind of behaviour it's exhibiting.

"I can't write fast enough!" Meyer says, but it's not a complaint. The excitement has infected everyone on board, shuffling and turning in our cramped seats every time someone says that magic word, "Manta."

Hafiz the pilot joins in on the action, his keen aviator's eyes making him a natural - the rays may be big, but they're still tricky to spot from afar.

Manta rays aren't all we spot. There are pods of dolphins, a Bryde's whale, flocks of pelagic birds, and a fever of 15 devil rays - the other species Manta Watch NZ aims to document and protect.

By the time we land in Whangārei for a refuelling stop, the team has found 17 manta rays - a mix of the more common 'chevron' rays, which are black with white shoulder markings, and melanistic rays, which are completely black: "like giant batmobiles", Green says.

The route back to North Shore airport takes us through the inner Hauraki Gulf, where we spot one more cruising manta ray to add to the day's total.

"It's like a huge, exciting game of hide and seek," Green says the day after.

The residual "manta buzz" kept her awake most of the night.

"They're such an elusive animal and the biggest thing for me was just having a good idea of where I thought they'd be, because it's the first time we've ever conducted a dedicated aerial survey."

Confirming her suspicion that manta rays would be found on the depth contour lines was "massive", she says.

"I was just really proud of the knowledge that we've been able to collectively gain."

The concentration of sightings in the outer Hauraki Gulf also supports another hypothesis: that the rays stay out in deeper water at this time of year, and then as summer progresses and blue oceanic water inundates the gulf, they follow their food sources further inshore.

"It sets a really good foundation for how we're going to conduct all of our survey efforts moving forward this year," Green says.

From now until autumn, Green's life will be dictated by wind and tide. As Manta Watch's only permanent staff member, she juggles fundraising, upskilling volunteers, and doing outreach education, but her overriding concern at this time of year is organising vessels and crew for the boat surveys that the trust hopes to conduct over the season.

Born in the middle of the UK, hours inland, Green nonetheless had an early and deep connection to the sea.

"I was always drawn to bodies of water and I had an aquarium. And basically as soon as I had autonomy over my body, I went to the coast and I never looked back."

She completed a marine biology degree and then dedicated her life to following the ocean, continuing to learn from first-hand experience.

Seventeen years ago, she fetched up in New Zealand, and when she and her partner moved to Great Barrier four years ago, manta rays became a full-time job.

The trust's work has grown organically, helped along by Green's "manta husband" Mark Erdmann, a coral reef ecologist based at the University of Auckland and non-profit organisation Conservation International.

"He owns a boat, which is very helpful. He enabled the project to really grow in terms of the satellite tagging project."

At other times, Green's work maintains a DIY element. She owns a drone, and will often put it up from shore at Okupu, the island settlement where she lives. At the height of the season the rays come close enough in that she's been able to collect footage of them, adding to the growing tally of sightings.

But what she really wants is to get as many people involved as possible.

Manta Watch will launch its citizen science app this week, which will let anyone who spots a manta ray log a sighting with the time, date, GPS location and other details such as photographs.

Over 70 percent of the trust's sightings come from the general public, but Green says there is a lot of to-and-fro at the moment to glean the details they need to verify a sighting, and get good-quality images where they exist.

"With the app, it just streamlines everything and hopefully cuts out a big chunk of admin for our project.

"The really cool function is that you can upload everything offline because a lot of these areas don't have cell service … and then it will upload when you've got signal."

But at the same time that Manta Watch is seeing sightings rocket as people become aware of them and go "manta crazy", the ray's habitat is also under threat.

The Hauraki Gulf is in "a state of advanced decline", WWF's Kayla Kingdon-Bebb says.

"We've seen that through successive State of the Gulf reports produced through the Hauraki Gulf Forum. We're very concerned to see the health and mauri of Tīkapa Moana restored. We know that oceanic manta rays are a sentinel species, so they can tell us a lot about the health of the ecosystems in which they reside."

Negotiations and give-and-take over more than a decade between ecologists, locals, mana whenua, commercial and recreational fisheries interests led to the drafting of the Tīkapa Moana / Hauraki Gulf Marine Protection Bill, which was introduced under the previous government and supported by the current government.

The Bill will create 19 new protected areas, tripling protected areas from 6 percent to 18 percent of the gulf. Some of those are 'high-protection' areas, where fishing and other extractive activity is forbidden.

However, late changes to the Bill announced in October will create what conservation minister Tama Potaka calls a "narrow exception" in two high-protection areas, to allow a small number of commercial operators to continue ring-net fishing for kahawai, trevally, parore and mullet.

'Ring-netting' involves enclosing a school of the desired fish with a net before drawing it closed at the bottom and hand-hauling it on board. Unlike set-netting, ring-net fishers are supposed to stay with their nets and complete the catch and retrieval in a short space of time - which makes it a lower-impact form of fishing, in theory.

"I am working closely with the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries to ensure that appropriate conditions are placed on the ring-net fishing to minimise the impact to biodiversity," Potaka told RNZ in a written statement.

If approved, the amendment will be 'grandfathered' to the five or six existing operators, and fishing will only take place between March and August from boats up to six metres long, Potaka says.

He will not name the operators until officials have discussed the provision with them in the new year, in order "to protect their privacy".

However, he says the amendment has been allowed so fishers can "continue to supply local communities with low-cost fish".

"The ring-net areas were chosen based on feedback from the fishers who have historically fished in these areas at specific times of the year for specific species."

Kingdon-Bebb says the problem with carving out exceptions, however narrow, is that it undermines the purpose of creating high-protection areas in the first place.

"These high-protection areas are supposed to totally exclude extractive activities," she says.

"[They] have been mapped out because of their importance for the endemic biodiversity in the gulf - manta rays included - and to that end we're really keen to see the minister consider restoring their original intent, which is being safe havens."

Lydia Green says the percentage of ocean that's protected in New Zealand is low, by global standards.

"We know through research that marine reserves do help."

Boat traffic and fishing threaten all kinds of species, she says - not just the big, charismatic animals like manta rays or dolphins.

"A key thing for me is using te whai rahi as a way of connecting people to that offshore environment as well, and getting greater marine protection through manta ray research."

So all summer long, Green will keep her eyes peeled, searching for the telltale flash of white belly or the wide ripples off a cruising dorsal fin that indicate one thing: manta.