The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  We may yet learn a thing or two from flounders. Among those things is that the effects of change can be subtle, yet operating all around us.

  * * *

  While all that moves is heading north toward spring, we’ll be going south, to the Caribbean, to see some of those subtle changes—and to gain a wider view. Honestly, I’m always disappointed to have to leave and miss the flow of any season. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, said Marcel Proust. And T. S. Eliot famously wrote that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. But seeing new landscapes—and seascapes—does improve one’s vision. And so Kenzie watches dolefully as the familiar duffel bags come out of the closet and I fill them with short pants and T-shirts, and my mask and snorkel. Sorry, Kenzie, you have to stay.

  TRAVELS SOLAR: CORAL GARDENS OF

  GOOD AND EVIL—BELIZE AND BONAIRE

  Looking like a helium-filled peach, the moon floats free of the horizon. I slip into warm black water and begin swimming. When the ocean’s motion begins massaging my progress and a swell rolls over my snorkel, I know I’ve reached the channel slope. I flick on my light. Its halo ushers me among the hulking shapes and shadows of massive Elkhorn Corals.

  The seafloor is a field of their broken skeletons overgrown with seaweeds. But many living—or partly alive—coral colonies also stand here. The hope: that these survivors might be disease-resistant, signaling possible recovery from the epidemics.

  Squid jet past my light beam; night is their time, too. The reflective eye of a smallish Nurse Shark reminds me that there may in such dark water lurk much larger sharks, though certainly far fewer than in the past.

  As porch lights attract moths, my beam soon swarms with frenzied mysids and polychaetes and glass-clear larval fishes that whirl and spin too fast for me to closely examine them.

  I’m actually searching for something I’ve never seen. I’m inspecting the corals’ tiny polyps for signs of pregnant swellings. The moon cue is right, but I’ve been told it doesn’t happen every year. I dive, and the polyps look—though it’s subtle—bulgy and lighter colored.

  My light beam begins filling with minute pink balls wafting from the polyps. Suddenly the reef is a fantasy ballroom, a blizzard, and I can hardly see. This blizzard falls upward. Soon the sea’s underside is coated with drifting pink grains of bundled eggs and sperm. At the dark surface, the smell of them is thick and erotic, the smells of oils and sex.

  * * *

  In the morning, a couple of very tired scientists are still poring over microscopic new corals. They show me single egg cells, a four-cell blastula, and an embryo with sixteen cells. These are the first unfolding stages of the same set of instructions that will enable these creatures to build the most massive structures created by living things, rock formations visible from space: coral reefs. As the embryos in the lab become swimming larvae, the researchers will test where they decide to settle down to begin growing into what we think of as “coral.”

  A stone’s throw away from the island lab on Carrie Bow Cay, Caribbean waves lap an exposed bank of coral rubble and limestone stretching away to the north and south. Running from Mexico’s Yucatán along Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Mesoamerican Reef is the world’s second longest, after Australia’s Great Barrier.

  * * *

  Wiry and athletic, Susie Arnold grew up on Cape Cod. Her PhD adviser, professor Bob Steneck, in his late fifties, is the kind of older professor young students have a hard time keeping up with. He has light gray-green eyes and a jaunty reddish goatee. He’s not tall—about my height—but broad across the chest, and always revving. During fieldwork, Bob dives daily and works toward midnight entering his data. A few hours later, he drifts out of bed in the moonlight to log a couple hours’ worth of writing and several cups of coffee before breakfast. His university tenure would let him coast, but Bob’s name appeared on twenty-one published studies this year. He annually completes a dozen and a half research trips and conferences, and travels to give two dozen academic talks, for which he charges no fee. When I asked who else in his field works so hard, it seemed the question had never occurred to him.

  * * *

  Susie has put fifty 6-by-6-inch terra-cotta tiles out on the reef. The tiles act like blank diary pages. Coral larvae settle on a tile and start growing. So do seaweeds, sponges, and a lot of other things. Susie and Bob have tiles on other reefs in the Caribbean and across the Pacific. With these tiles they can, in a sense, read what reefs are writing across vast regions.

  Often, the first pioneer on the tiles is a coralline alga called Titanoderma. It’s just a thin, pink crust—but alive. (Coralline algae—like corals—make calcium carbonate, basically limestone.) Titanoderma’s talent is in getting there fast, but it gets overgrown by pretty much everything else that comes along. Other pioneers shed their outer layer, so in the cutthroat race for living space, they slough off competitors. By contrast, Titanoderma doesn’t shed. To corals, this is a big difference.

  And so, a lab experiment: Hundreds of coral larvae go into several dozen dishes with chips from three kinds of coralline algae. Where will they settle? Under a microscope I watch oblong larvae moving through the water. Avoiding corallines that shed, they probe until their senses say, “This is it.” Usually they choose Titanoderma.

  “If a coral larva selects Titanoderma,” Susie explains, “it can stick.” It won’t get sloughed off. To a coral larva, all the other surfaces available—tiny sponges, bushy bryozoan colonies, algal films, and the like—are hostile territory. Coral larvae have no eyes, but we’re watching them home in on Titanoderma by taste. With such exquisite fine-tuning, they begin their struggle for survival against nearly impossible odds.

  Almost as soon as a larva attaches, its pill-shaped body flattens. Within hours calcium carbonate forms around the soft parts and it begins creating the coral’s characteristic polyps. Coral larvae have no mouth. High on the to-do list: get a mouth. Soon we have an oral coral. What seemed wondrous in the night sea becomes incredible by noon. Some say science spoils the mystery. They stay mystified, and miss the miracles.

  * * *

  With Susie steering, our boat skims across a polished sea over corals in air-clear waters. When Bob’s GPS says we’ve arrived, we drop anchor on sand in forty feet of water, an easy swim to the reef.

  We suit up and tumble overboard. As the bubbles clear, I am amazed—and this time not in a good way—to find myself in a sea of plastic bits. Everywhere I look. Their uniform size (they’re all about three inches square) suggests a ship’s macerator. The United Nations has banned dumping plastic at sea. The U.N. isn’t here to check.

  I pull my snorkel from my mouth and ask Bob if he’s ever seen this kind of thing. He’s as dismayed as I.

  All naturalists carry the reasonable fear that anything new is the start of something unfortunate. Burdened by foreboding, we soon reach the reef. It’s a series of corrugated coral ridges alternating with sandy grooves.

  Living hard coral covers only 10 to 20 percent of the whole reef area. Few branching corals remain.

  A tightly packed group of snappers with gray bodies and yellow fins—Schoolmasters—spontaneously rises excitedly, releasing eggs and sperm. That’s normally done toward night. Last night’s moon must really have their hormones juicing.

  A seaweed-seeking parrotfish grinds into a coral with its fused, beaklike teeth. Each time it hits the coral, I can hear it from ten feet away. Any coral that a parrotfish ingests returns as fine sand. Enough parrotfish, over centuries, largely built the tropics’ coral-sand beaches. Yes, those lovely beaches: parrotfish poop.

  I’m not certain what kind of parrotfish this is. Hundreds of fishes inhabit Caribbean reefs. Like birds, many look different as juveniles and adults, males and females. Some change sex. And some even develop very different-looking dominant “supermales.” Knowing one species requires being able to recognize three o
r four different-looking fish. It’s a little like learning the alphabet; for each letter you need to recognize four letterforms: uppercase and lowercase, script and print. But instead of twenty-six letters, there are over five hundred species in this region. That’s just fish; never mind the sixty different corals, the snails, shrimps, jellies, sponges, and other animals. Or the algae.

  Susie, working along a ten-meter tape, is counting baby corals. Along another tape, Bob is noting how much coral, how much algae, how much sponge, which species.

  Bob points to his eye, meaning, “I want to show you something.”

  On my pad he writes, “More small corals here.” I glance around, see them, nod. He takes my pad again, writes, “Little seaweed here—more nursery habitat.” Then just a few yards away he plunges his fingers into a deep cushion of weeds and writes: “Lots of seaweed—few nooks for baby corals.” He pushes away weeds at the base of several young fist-sized corals, revealing dead white coral skeleton. They’re doomed.

  Round us like Greek statues stand hulking wrecks of old Elkhorn colonies, their broken limbs gesturing toward the sun. Staghorn fragments lie everywhere, fuzzed with seaweed. Over millennia, branching Elkhorn and Staghorn Corals built the Caribbean’s high-rise reefs. Starting in the 1980s, nearly a dozen diseases no one had ever seen swept through, apparently triggered by stresses such as seaweeds, warming waters, changing ocean pH, and certain pollutants. Floor upon floor, those corals collapsed. Seaweeds took over.

  * * *

  In the lab, Susie’s examining tiles she’s brought up temporarily from the reef.

  The tiles display only a film of greens, browns, blues, rusts, and crusts. But the microscope reveals an astonishing community of plants, animals, and plantlike animals—all battling for real estate. Baby sponges, bryozoans, baby urchins, minute snapping shrimp living inside minute sponges, copepods, amphipods, baby brittle stars—. Among this minuscule menagerie, Susie seeks corals. Suddenly she says, “Here, take a look.”

  A small coral comes into focus. It’s about half an inch across. Susie checks the plate number and announces, “So—I first noted this one a year ago.”

  They certainly grow slowly!

  She adds, “See all this fleshy seaweed on the side of the tile? This little coral’s gotta deal with all this. To make it, it’ll have to outgrow all this stuff.” She’s finding high mortality; over 90 percent of baby corals die.

  Reef corals internally harbor single-celled algae that use sunlight to make sugars. They’re a little like renters, paying with the sugars that the corals need for survival. A bright reef full of healthy corals reflects light into safe nooks. But if the reef gets weedy, shadows fall across crevices. Susie muses, “When you look at a reef and see a lot of seaweed and it’s kind of dark? That’s, like, the last thing a baby coral sees before it dies.”

  Besides creating deadly shade, seaweeds can carry infectious bacteria to corals or irritate coral polyps so they close—and starve.

  Bob says, “None of the ways seaweeds affect corals are good; they’re all different variations of bad.”

  Susie, gazing into the microscope, adds, “It’s a tough time to be a baby coral.”

  * * *

  Bob recently stumbled upon some photos he’d taken of his sister swimming underwater in the Caribbean in the early 1970s. The whole backdrop is corals. “You could drive a boat along and see branching coral mile after mile,” he says. “Ten years later—it was all dead.”

  Why? Three waves of assaults: an unprecedented sea urchin–killing epidemic, those new coral diseases, and fishing.

  “After they pretty much fished out groupers and snappers,” Bob says, “people started targeting parrotfish.”

  But parrotfish turn out to be really important for reefs. Parrotfishes’ fused teeth make them uniquely capable of scraping seaweed. “There was absolutely nothing else like them till the Eocene, which started about fifty-five million years ago,” Bob says. There still isn’t. Surgeonfish graze seaweed, too, but they nip it; parrotfish really scrape it away. Fossilized reefs show that before parrotfish, reefs were moundlike and dominated by seaweed. When parrotfish evolved, modern reefs appeared. They’ve been scraping seaweeds from reefs ever since. Without parrotfish, reefs would likely again become moundlike and dominated by seaweed.

  Corals probably don’t care whether seaweed gets removed by fish, urchins, or a guy with a brush. What matters is, the reef must be frequently scrubbed.

  Fast-forward to the early 1980s. With fish depleted by overfishing, the Caribbean’s Long-spined Sea Urchin, Diadema antillarum, assumed the role of major seaweed grazer. Urchin densities rose to ten to fifteen per square yard. But in 1983, an urchin-killing epidemic appeared off Panama, and in just months the Caribbean’s urchins were covered with a death blanket.

  “The urchin die-off,” Bob remembers, “caused just unbelievable change. It was cataclysmic for the Caribbean because too many reefs were already overfished.” Bob emphasizes the point: “The reefs needed either grazing fish or urchins. They could not withstand losing both.”

  Meanwhile, during the 1980s, new diseases raging throughout the Caribbean killed almost all the branching coral. With the fish populations depressed and the urchins all but gone, there were not enough grazers to suppress the seaweed that sprouted on all that dead coral, “and the reefs just flipped.” What had been high-rise coral reefs became seaweed rubble mounds.

  Fishing, the urchin-killing epidemic, and the new coral diseases. These decades later, Caribbean fish remain widely depleted by overfishing, and the urchins remain down by over 90 percent.

  In the 1970s, live coral covered more than half the surface of most Caribbean reefs. By the early 2000s, live coral cover had plunged to 10 percent. With enough parrotfish, young corals would have weed-free space for potential recovery. It’s not possible to have both widespread overfishing and healthy coral reefs.

  Where seaweed eaters get scarce, seaweed blooms. Where seaweed blooms, it kills even more coral. Expanding seaweed creates a death spiral that Bob calls “the Coral Garden of Evil.” Keeping the seaweed in check creates a positive life spiral for the reef, the Garden of Good.

  But even if there were enough fish, reefs now face the larger threats of changing climate and changing ocean chemistry.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon I watch Ruddy Turnstones picking along the tropical shoreline, working their way north toward the Arctic. Assuming they follow the coast, they’ll have to pass near Lazy Point on their way. Maybe I’ll see some of these same individuals in a few weeks. Ospreys are here too, but these are whiter-headed locals, not migrants. It’s a distinct kick to see an Osprey catch a bright, colorful reef fish. And I hear—then see—Roseate Terns. Immaculate white adults, as well as juveniles, work the channel in small groups. In late spring the largest Roseate Tern breeding colony in the Western Hemisphere convenes on Great Gull Island, just across the sound from Lazy Point. It’s quite possible that these very terns have been frequent foragers in the Cut. Seeing them here reminds me again that the familiar is always also the exotic.

  * * *

  We settle in, beers in hand, to watch the sun go down. Bob is color-blind, a rather cruel cosmic joke for someone dedicated to rainbowed reefs and isles of pink sands and pastel sunsets.

  “Because I’ve worked with fossils,” he says grimly, “I can envision a bleak future for coral reefs.”

  I see that it’s not quite happy hour.

  “Before the major continental breakup,” he says, “the movement of Earth’s plates caused extremely high volcanic activity, which streamed enormous plumes of greenhouse gases into the air. It got really warm—and corals and a lot of other groups suffered heavy extinctions.” This “Great Dying” of 250 million years ago (not to be confused with the much later asteroid strike that helped terminate the dinosaurs) killed about 95 percent of all life in the sea and 70 percent of all life on land. By far the most catastrophic extinction in Earth’s history, it ended t
he Permian Period and began the Triassic.

  Bob takes a swig of his beer and adds, “So when heat spikes in the 1990s started causing all that coral bleaching in the Pacific, and so much coral died, I thought of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’re putting into the air, I thought of the Permo-Triassic extinction—and it suddenly hit me like: ‘Holy shit; we’re doing that to ourselves!’ ”

  * * *

  When the Titan Prometheus stole fire for mankind, an enraged Zeus punished both him and man. Prometheus was bound to a rock, where, each day, an eagle tore his liver from his immortal body. To man he sent Pandora, who unleashed all the world’s ills. This is a story older than even the ancient Greeks imagined; it appears that “we” weren’t first. An earlier human, Homo erectus, appears to have controlled fire perhaps as early as 1.5 million years ago. Origins aside, fire changed human evolution.

  But humanity did not change fire until the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, using fire always meant an open flame. Much later, inventors realized that the steam from boiling water—if confined—had power to make things move. With steam engines we harnessed fire’s power and put it to work for us. When we placed the combustion directly inside an engine, we almost literally set the world ablaze. Fire power vastly extended our reach into the soils, the seas, the forests, and the skies. It allowed us to literally move mountains to get at more fuel or at minerals locked deep within the earth, to slice down gigantic trees in a matter of minutes, or to send the nets of fishing fleets deep within the ocean. Harnessed fire allowed construction, destruction, and transport at a scale and speed unimagined before 1800.