Ocean Quest: The Race To Save The World's Coral Reefs
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Published on Thursday, July 17, 2008 by The Independent/UK
Last week, scientists issued their latest, grim assessment of the world’s coral reefs. But as Steve Connor reports from Florida, extraordinary new ocean ‘reseeding’ techniques mean there may still be time to halt – or even reverse – the destruction of mother nature’s marine marvels
Coral reefs are often described as the tropical rainforests of the oceans. But marine biologists sometimes use another analogy: that of the canary in the coalmine. These birds were used by miners as an early warning for lethal gas; corals, too, are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental change. For Nancy Knowlton, a scientist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, it’s an apt description: “If that’s the analogy, then the canary has passed out on the floor of the cage. Coral reefs are potentially immortal. They only have to die if we make them.”
And that’s just what we seem to be doing. In the 25 years that Knowlton has been studying the reefs, she has witnessed all the signs of their terminal decline. They are being degraded at a rate of 2 per cent a year. About a fifth of the world’s stock has already gone, and nearly half of the remainder is in danger of disappearing within the next 20 years. And like so many other experts in her field, Knowlton is worried: a lethal combination of pollution, predators, disease, rising sea temperatures, over-fishing and the acidification of the sea have put our coral reefs on the critical list.
Its plight is bad news for all of us, but will horrify anyone who has put on flippers, mask and snorkel to experience its magnificence first-hand. Snorkelling over a reef for the first time, as I did last week off the coast of Florida, is like floating over a brilliantly coloured Garden of Eden landscaped by some maritime Capability Brown. Corals of all shapes and sizes grow in the dappled sunlight. Vast, bulbous species covered with beautifully etched crenulations look like the intricate folds on the surface of a human brain. Others resemble petrified trees, their branches sticking up like fingers, or flat pancakes woven with intricate lacework. Waving sea fans drift back and forth with the gentle pulse of the waves, a hypnotic motion that sends you into a trance-like state of awe.
And then there are the fish – lots of fish. Nothing quite prepares you for the variety of sizes, colours and shapes swimming in and out of the coral latticework. There are iridescent blue ones with fins like a teddy boy’s quiff. There are green ones with metallic scales, each a slightly different hue from the next, like the scaly armour of a Scythian warrior. A much larger fish with camouflaged skin and a big, ugly head spies me with his swivelling eyes and tries to hide, ostrich-like, behind a skinny staghorn coral; a huge ray, five or six feet long, glides effortlessly past, trailing a menacingly spiked tail in its wake.
This scene is repeated everywhere on earth where tropical reefs form – which is just about anywhere on the vast, watery belt around the equator. The biggest of them all is the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which is some 2,300km long. It took more than 10,000 years to get to where it is today, growing at a rate of a centimetre or two each year.
Coral reefs are the product of tiny animals called polyps, which secrete an exterior skeleton of aragonite, a mineral made of calcium carbonate. Each generation of polyp grows on the dead skeletons of its ancestors, but because they clone themselves they have achieved a kind of immortality. Some grow slower than the rate at which the continents move – fingernails grow faster. But eventually they form massive structures such as the Great Barrier Reef, which is more properly a collection of 3,000 separate reefs and 900 coral islands, divided by narrow channels. They are the only biological structures that can be seen from space…
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