Kakaban Island
Interesting facts
- In the local language Kakaban is said to mean "hug", because the island's rim embraces the lake and shuts out the sea.
- The lake is technically anchialine: although landlocked, it still exchanges water with the ocean through porous, cracked limestone.
- Meadows of Halimeda, a calcified green alga, carpet much of the lake bed beneath the jellyfish.
- The lake's jellyfish still carry venom to catch prey; it is simply too weak to be felt by human swimmers.
- Endemic sea cucumbers and a tunicate found nowhere else have evolved in the isolated lake water.
- Sea anemones resembling Palau's jellyfish-eating species also live in the lake.
- Blue Light Cave starts as a crack two metres down, opens into a cavern about 120 metres long, and is named for the blue glow of seawater inside.
- At Barracuda Point divers clip to a fixed line at 24 metres to watch whitetip sharks, leopard sharks, tuna and barracuda pass on the current.
- The island, also known as Samama, is uninhabited apart from monitor lizards, snakes and forest birds.
Why it is worth it
Kakaban is a raised coral atoll in the Derawan archipelago, off the coast of East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, and it hides a lake at its heart. The island's limestone rim, covered in jungle right down to the waterline, rose from the sea in the late Pleistocene and Holocene and trapped a body of seawater inside. Over thousands of years rain diluted it, and today the lake is brackish, slightly above sea level and at most about seventeen metres deep.
Isolation turned the lake into a natural laboratory. Four kinds of jellyfish live in it, and none of them can harm a swimmer: a transparent Aurelia moon jelly, the tiny box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora, a Mastigias close to the golden jellyfish, and the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea ornata, which rests on the bottom with its tentacles turned toward the light. Swimming among them is the experience the island is known for. The lake also holds gobies, cardinalfish, halfbeaks, nudibranchs and flatworms, along with sea cucumbers, tunicates and a crab found nowhere else.
Outside the rim the scene changes completely. The island covers about 774 hectares, and its outer walls drop steeply to depths of around 180 metres, giving divers some of the most dramatic reef walls in the region. Barracuda Point is a steep wall reef, and Blue Light Cave descends to about 44 metres.
Getting there
Kakaban can be reached only by sea. The nearest airport is Kalimarau Airport (BEJ) at Tanjung Redeb, the main town of Berau Regency, about 123 km away; Tanjung Selor, capital of North Kalimantan, is about 150 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kakaban island is a member of the Derawan archipelago, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. The island has an area of 774.2 hectares and is quite steep. Its limestone cliffs are covered with dense jungle right down to the water's edge. The wall drops to 180 metres (590 ft), and currents can be strong with upwelling, downcurrent, and reversing directions.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
2.14432, 118.53624per Wikidata