Seaplane

Parts of a plane wreck emerging from the water

We rounded the corner and cruised into a small bay. The water was surrounded by a dense jungle that acted as a natural humidifier. Birds sang from somewhere deep in the trees. Our driver, Lee, shifted into neutral as we coasted cautiously into the shallows. The water was almost perfectly still, disturbed only by our gliding wake. I could see something sticking out of the water. It was metallic and had a smooth, curved edge - obviously a man-made structure. Could that be the plane? 

As we inched closer, it became clear that the plane wreck was just that - a wreck. Scraps of metal were strewn about the muddy floor, and nothing seemed to live on them. This was obviously not the wreck we wanted. Even if the wreck was uninteresting, there was a tall limestone cave adjacent to it that caught our attention. Apparently the Japanese hid planes in caves during WWII. This one must have just missed the entrance before sinking. 

Cas and I at the surface above the seaplane. Photo by 
Matthew-James Bennett.

The map said there were two planes close together, so it was worth our time to keep hunting a bit. Lee gently eased the boat out of the cave area and over to the other side of the bay. Through the clear water, I could see my target: a mostly intact Aichi E13 "Jake" Seaplane from World War II. Bingo. 

I am fascinated by Maritime Heritage Ecology - you know this, friends. If it lives on or around a ship, plane, car, or anything else that humans have dumped in the ocean, I want to study it. I couldn't resist the chance to check out some WWII shipwrecks last time we were in Palau, and I wanted to round out my dataset with one more site. There were rumors of an intact plane wreck somewhere in the northeast part of the Rock Islands, so we went hunting for it. Some false coordinates, unanswered phone calls, and a conversation with the dive shop owner eventually got us there - the plane is actually in Airai, not Koror. 

A large coral living on the pontoon of the seaplane.

Over the last few years, I've noticed that there are a lot more things that live on shipwrecks versus plane wrecks. It just always seems like coral communities on sunken ships are denser, more biodiverse, and healthier than comparable communities on submerged planes. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I've expressed my observations to several other divers and all seem to be in agreement - yep, the ships have more corals than the planes. It could be that planes are just smaller, but I think there's something else going on. Generally speaking, ships are steel, and planes are aluminum. Maybe there's some process related to those construction materials that drives the difference in community structure. 

We undertook a standard sampling of the plane wreck with photo transects, but I also wanted to dig into the question of metals. I sampled the water and some of the corals around the plane so I could measure the concentration of trace metals. The small number of samples I collected will probably not be publishable, but it might be enough for me to get another proposal funded. We'll have to see! 

I was so glad we found the plane wreck and look forward to digging into the data. Not only was it a fascinating site to study, but the search took us into a new part of Palau.