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Having experienced diving around South Africa on a few occasions I was very pleased to be able to work in Tofo, Mozambique recently for 'the Natural world' a BBC series. I'd heard a lot about the Whale shark population there from divers making their way around Africa. By all accounts there was a large population of these giant filter feeders and it was fairly common to see several in the same area.

Our job though was to film the other population of massive plankton scoopers, the manta rays. Dr Andrea Marshall has been studying the population in Tofo for over 5 years and the programme was focussed on her efforts and her remarkable discovery which has focussed attention recently on this small, remote location.

During her studies Andrea noticed that while their seemed to be a resident population of Manta rays there also seemed to be some more transient Mantas which arrived on the reefs off Tofo then disappeared a few days later. Peaking her curiosity Andrea's further studies revealed a genetic difference. Now where once the scientific community thought we had one species of Manta we now have two and possibly even three!

Myself and the rest of the Bigwave TV production crew spent a productive ten days in Casa Barry Tofo filming some great sequences of Andrea and her research partner Simon as they attempted to tag Manta rays with acoustic and satellite tags in order to monitor their movements. We also had a chance to get in with the whale sharks and grab some pics of visiting scientist Rachel Graham as she deployed tags on the sharks.

On a sadder note we encountered a Manta ray caught inadvertently by fishermen a few miles from Tofo. Dr Marshall took the opportunity to take something positive from this unfortunate event by taking measurements and samples from the ray.

Watch out for 'The Manta Queen' on BBC2 in Autumn of this year and Animal Planet after that.