“It’s Pocong time”: the Bajau freedivers of Sumbawa going back to their breath

In Poto Tano, a Bajau fishing village on Sumbawa Island, 40 octopus fishers have stopped using compressor air hoses and gone back to diving on a single breath. They now close parts of their fishing grounds in rotation so the octopus can recover, and a village regulation has made that self-governance official.

The pocong is a wooden lure the size of a real octopus, carved to look like one and wrapped in strips of felt. The name comes from a ghost in Indonesian folklore, a corpse bound in a white burial shroud. Men like Well, Nadir, Wandra and Kadir carry it down to 15 to 20 metres without scuba tanks, holding their breath the whole way.

They find their way the old way, by the stars, the wind, the air and the currents, and they use no GPS. The fishers say Bajau children are taken to the sea when they are a week old. The Bajau, also called Sama-Bajau, have lived along the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines for centuries. Many of their ancestors lived on houseboats.

Their bodies seem to have adapted to this life. A 2018 study in the journal Cell, led by geneticist Melissa Ilardo, compared Bajau people with the Saluan, a neighbouring group who live on land. The Bajau had spleens about half as large again. The spleen stores oxygen-rich blood and releases it during a breath-hold dive. The researchers linked this to a variant of the PDE10A gene.

For a time, many of these fishers dived another way. With compressor diving, a diver breathes air pumped down a hose from the surface. Without training or decompression schedules, divers can get decompression sickness, which can paralyse or kill. The fishers of a group called PELITA have now turned away from that method and gone back to diving on their own breath.

They have also changed where they fish. The group closes two or three fishing areas at a time for several months and then opens them again. This works because of how octopus live. The day octopus, a common catch in small Indo-Pacific fisheries, grows fast and lives only about a year, so a closed area can fill up again within a few months. The idea of short, rotating closures started in 2004 in Andavadoaka, a village in southwest Madagascar, with support from the conservation group Blue Ventures. It has since spread to other coastal communities.

Hani Nusantari and Boen, co-directors of the Jari Foundation, work with the fishers on this approach. On shore, women in the village started Women for Marine Conservation in 2022. More recently, the village approved a regulation that makes the community’s control over its marine resources official.

The dive has not changed. A man watches the water, speaks a few words, and the others take a breath and go under.