A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Hailed by David Attenborough and proclaimed a second Charles Darwin, Charlie Veron has lived up to his namesake. Even as a toddler, he had a deep affinity with the natural world, and by school age he knew more about some sciences than his teachers did. This didn’t prevent him failing in a system that smothered creativity, and it was only by chance that he went to university. And only by chance that he became a marine biologist, through his love of scuba diving.

  But once he found his specialty he revolutionised it. He generated a new concept of evolution that incorporates environmental change and a radical idea of what species are, matters which lie at the heart of conservation. He has identified more coral species than anyone in history, and in the process become known as the Godfather of Coral.

  Charlie has dived most of the world’s coral reefs, revelling in a beauty that few others have seen. In this engaging memoir he explains what reefs say about our planet’s past and future, and why it’s critical they be protected. And also why it’s critical that scholarly independence be safeguarded. For it was the freedom he had as a young scientist, to be wayward, to take risks – a freedom barely imaginable in today’s world of managed academia – that allowed his breakthroughs.

  Exhilaratingly eye-opening, provocative, funny and warm, A Life Underwater is an inspiration to the young and the young at heart.

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  Map of place names in Australia and the region

  Map of place names in the rest of the world

  Many Beginnings

  A jar of worms

  Little Mr Darwin

  Him and me

  Freedom

  Delayed metamorphosis

  Scuba

  Serendipity

  The Great Barrier Reef

  Matters of politics

  The tropics

  Underwater utopia

  Reef builders

  Expedition north

  A Wayward Career

  The first AIMS scientist

  Russians for starters

  Big dusty museums

  Rivendell

  Monographs and bureaucracy

  The Reef expeditions

  Inge of Orpheus

  Two daughters

  Going west

  Travels Abroad

  Trouble in Japan

  Pacific forays

  The Indian Ocean

  A sad end and a lifeline

  Time and Place

  Invading deep time

  Hell’s atoll

  A different evolution

  Origins of The Reef

  The Coral Triangle

  Big Pictures

  A boy and a book

  Paths of conscience

  Reefs in time

  A very big website

  Names that matter

  In Retrospect

  The underworld

  Views from my coffin

  Afterword

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  For Mary, whose thoughtful

  caring hand is in everything I write

  Many Beginnings

  A jar of worms

  I can’t say I was born a marine biologist but it gets close to that. When I was six my family rented a shack for the summer holidays at Collaroy, one of Sydney’s northern beaches. A sandy-haired, blue-eyed ball of energy, I spent most days in the surf with my long-suffering mother, until one morning I caught a nasty dumper and had to be rescued. We abandoned the surf after that and strolled down the beach to Long Reef, which has a spectacular, wave-cut rock platform. At high tide this is a dangerous place. Waves echo around its outermost point where there’s a slight rise, then come rolling in from both sides, leaping against each other in a panorama of angry white on churning blue. But that morning it was low tide and all was peaceful, so my mother left me to play in a small rock pool near the shore.

  I saw plenty of anemones, some red, some green, with long tentacles surrounding what I supposed was a mouth. I held my finger close to a red one, then gave it a quick touch. The anemone didn’t sting – I could stick my finger right into its belly – it just curled its tentacles in and then it looked like a little blob of jelly. That wasn’t much fun, so I turned over a rock to find a worm and held it over another anemone. When I dropped the worm, the anemone grasped it in its tentacles. The worm thrashed about, struggling for its life. It almost escaped but the anemone held on, and then, with more tentacles to the fore, it started to pull the frantic worm towards its mouth. As the battle raged I watched the worm. It was just like a long thin centipede, with a body made up of segments, each with a little leg, but not jointed legs like centipedes had – these were legs that didn’t seem to do anything. It had two long antennae on its head and a couple of shorter ones beneath, but more interestingly it had black eyes, as small as pin pricks, that looked as if they were painted on. This animal could see, but what? Then, as it twisted, I saw that it had jaws. They weren’t small; surely the worm could chomp the anemone’s tentacles off, but it wasn’t trying to. Why not?

  Earthworms didn’t have legs or antennae or jaws, but I wasn’t sure if they had eyes – I’d have to check that out.

  I felt terrible when I realised that the anemone was stinging the worm to death, so I pulled it free, almost pulling it in half – but too late, the worm just lay on the bottom of the pool, only moving because ripples of water had started coming in. With a slightly guilty conscience, I dropped the poor dead worm onto another anemone, but surprisingly nothing happened. Did anemones only think worms were food if they struggled? I tried to work that out by twiddling tiny bits of kelp in the tentacles of another anemone, but again, no luck – they must be smarter than they looked. So I caught a little brittle star with long wavy arms and tried to get an anemone to attack that; still no luck. Did anemones think brittle stars weren’t edible?

  I looked about for something else to try and spied a green anemone growing on a cobble about the size of my fist. Very carefully I moved that up to a nearby green anemone and watched. Again nothing happened, they just ignored each other. Larger ripples were now invading the pool as the tide came in; I didn’t have much time. I moved the green anemone up to a red anemone, expecting nothing to happen again, but war broke out almost immediately – the anemones started attacking each other. Through the ripples I could see that the green one was winning; the red one was withdrawing its tentacles, turning itself into a jelly blob. Were the green and red anemones not related? Was that why they fought? Would the red one be able to move away or would it be killed? My head was full of such questions, but my mother was calling. It was time for lunch.

  The next day I couldn’t wait to go back to Long Reef. The tide was out so off we went, my mum and I, armed with a bowl from the beach-house kitchen to put animals in. Finding a lot of them was easy back then, all I had to do was turn over rocks, the bigger the better. There were hundreds more brittle stars, each adorned with a different pattern, and everywhere were starfish in a multitude of colours, mini works of art. I turned one upside down; it waited a few minutes before extending tiny tube feet with suckers on the end and waved them about until one touched a rock. Then, with a lot more feet attached to the rock, it reached back a whole arm. With amazing strength it levered its body over. I turned another upside down in water that just covered it and watched it struggle until I felt sorry for it and gave it a helping hand.

  There were hermit crabs of all sizes that vanished into their shells when I got too close. If I kept very still they would reappear, look around with tiny stalked eyes then move off, dragging their sh
ell and leaving minute tracks in the sand. So many sorts of animals, but from what I could see the pools further out looked bigger and better.

  The following day, my mother watched me trot down the sandy path to the beach, plastic bucket in hand. I also had a scoop net that my father had helped me make from a wire coathanger and a piece of mosquito net. ‘Be careful, stay in the rock pools, and come back as soon as the tide starts to come in,’ she called. ‘And stay out of the water!’

  There were many more interesting animals further out – several types of pretty sea slugs, more kinds of worms under rocks, including tiny tube worms with little doors on their tubes, and oysters all over the place. There were chitons with their eight plates of armour, limpets, barnacles, and purple urchins with spines always moving. I caught several different kinds of fish with my net, and crabs. Then I saw something moving slowly and got it into my net, and joy of joy, it was a blue and white sea slug, just about the most spectacular animal imaginable. To get a good look at it I took it to a little pool but to my dismay it managed to crawl under a rock. No matter, I’d keep a lookout for another.

  I could see waves breaking on the outer point of the platform. They were a long way out but even in the distance looked really scary. Could I run all the way back to the beach from there when the tide turned? I sure could try. Out there I went.

  Right at the water’s edge there were beds of kelp, thick mats twisting and turning in lovely long curves as waves washed them back and forth. There was a mass of purple sponges under most rocks (were they animals?) and tiny tube worms. I was catching a blue-swimmer crab that was trying to bite me with its great big pincers when I heard someone yell, ‘Hey boy, what ya doing there?’

  It was a fisherman. He told me I shouldn’t be out here because it was dangerous. I showed him all the animals in my bucket. He turned over a big rock for me and said, ‘You gotta remember to turn ’em back, otherwise all those animals will die.’

  I felt bad about all the rocks I’d turned over and just left.

  The fisherman cut something brown off a rock. It looked like a dead tree stump but was smaller than my foot. He said it was a sea squirt, and made good bait. An animal stuck to a rock? What was he talking about? He threaded the guts of one onto his hook. It sure looked like bait.

  Next day, the fisherman wasn’t there. I had the whole place to myself. The waves swirled and churned back and forth, forming whirlpools with columns of bubbles disappearing into the depths, and every now and again a larger wave came right up, foaming and hissing, before gurgling back down to a ledge deep below the next wave. I couldn’t see any bottom beyond that. I felt danger was everywhere, but I’d just spotted what I later learnt was a large mantis shrimp. I had to catch that, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I did, after a couple of plunges with my net. When I looked up it was right into the face of a wave looming above me. I dropped my bucket and net, grabbed some kelp and held on like hell. The wave tried to throw me up onto the rocks and then, worse, it tried to drag me off them. The kelp held on and so did I. As soon as I felt the worst of it was over I scrambled up to higher ground and looked back. My bucket was gone but my net was there, in the kelp right on the lip of the ledge. I scrambled down to get it before it was taken out by the next wave.

  I met the fisherman once more that holiday. ‘Hey boy, I thought I told you not to come out here. It’s bloody dangerous. But before you go home, I found something for you.’

  It was a jar. Not an ordinary jar, but one that had been pounded by sand and surf so long it was frosted all over. A treasure beyond description.

  Back home my mother, thinking I’d been playing in a rock pool with my big sister Jan who she’d sent to keep an eye on me, agreed my jar was very pretty and told me it was a preserving jar. She bought a lid, rubber seal and metal catch for it. There were lots of similar jars in the hardware shop, but none all frosted over like mine. I kept it for years. It was my special jar for Long Reef treasures, especially worms, and that summer it was quickly filled. The holiday shack we rented didn’t have many saucepans or bowls or jars and those we had were soon full of booty, some of which was starting to smell bad. My father bought me a bottle of methylated spirits that he said would preserve the animals, so I could sort them out and keep only the ones I wanted. This worked for a while, but the Long Reef rock platform is a big place and there was a lot of collecting to be done.

  On my eighth birthday I was thrilled to be given an aquarium, and I discovered that living marine life is a lot more interesting than dead marine life. I kept small crabs, anemones, worms, brittle stars, chitons, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, starfish and sea shells, all easy pickings from Long Reef, as were barnacles – my favourites – once I found some on a piece of rock I could hammer off. I watched all these little critters in my aquarium, chin on hand from the back of a couch, for hours. My father found me a supply of brine shrimp eggs at an aquarium shop so I could feed my animals live food. I dropped bits of meat in and watched the crabs eat, their little mechanical mouths going flat out.

  But despite my best efforts most of the animals didn’t stay alive long: the water kept going bad and I couldn’t work out why. The only other marine aquarium I’d seen was at Taronga Zoo, and they could pump as much seawater as they liked from Sydney Harbour. So I regularly asked my mother to drive me to nearby Roseville where I could get seawater from the small estuary in a jerry-can; I’d then have to find someone strong to help us lug it back to the car. As Roseville was no good for collecting, I also had to persuade Mum to take me back to Long Reef to stock up, over an hour’s drive from home. I learnt that keeping a marine aquarium was a matter of trial and error, mostly error in my case, but one stock-up trip was a bonanza. I turned over a rock and there it was, a beautiful little octopus.

  Heart pounding, I took my time to catch it, gently manoeuvring it with my hand until it darted straight into my net. What a prize! Ockie, as I called him, was instantly my most treasured possession. I cleared everything out of my aquarium to keep his water as fresh as possible. Feeding him was a matter of catching a ghost crab from the mudflats at Roseville. He had a voracious appetite, immediately pouncing on the poor crab and whisking it away to a little rock cave I arranged for him. Ockie also liked hermit crabs, gathering up all I gave him and leaving the empty shells in a neat pile by his cave entrance. Much as I tried, I couldn’t see how he got the crabs out of their shells.

  I soon found out that I didn’t need to catch crabs at all; I could get a scrap of crabmeat or a prawn from our fish shop and feed him that. If he was hungry I would see him waiting for me at his cave entrance, usually turning pale tan as he searched around with his tiny hooded eyes. He quickly learned to climb up the glass and take his dinner straight from my fingers, and shortly after that I had him climbing out of the water and onto my arm. He would find his food and scramble back again on his eight little stick-on arms. He would always say thankyou by turning very dark and flashing spectacular blue rings at me before disappearing. I was convinced that Ockie learned to come when he was called, and he did so almost every afternoon for nearly a year.

  I changed his water regularly and believed he would be my friend for life. Then, coming back from a family weekend away, we all noticed a familiar smell in the house. Ockie was already little more than a mound of decomposing sludge. I was devastated.

  Curiously, there was nothing about the southern blue-ringed octopus in any of my books, so I didn’t know then that these little creatures only live for a year or so. And nobody knew the danger I had been in. It wasn’t until many years later that the Sydney Morning Herald ran a headline announcing that the southern blue-ringed octopus is one of the deadliest creatures on Earth, with venom from one bite enough to kill a dozen men. Since then its status has become legendary, helped along by the James Bond movie Octopussy and later by a Michael Crichton novel. Needless to say, Ockie never bit me.

  His death had a continuing effect on me. It wasn’t just that I’d lost a trea
sured pet, it started me thinking about all those rocks I’d turned over at Long Reef and not turned back, about the hundreds of animals I’d collected and then cast off, and about the dozens more I’d tried to keep in my aquarium. Now they were all dead, and by my own hand. I decided that Ockie would be the last: if I was going to watch animals, I was going to watch them where they lived, and not kill them.

  Some fifty years later I made a pilgrimage back to Long Reef, by then a marine reserve complete with guided tours. The place was nothing like I remembered it; there was hardly any animal life anywhere, presumably courtesy of hundreds of kids on school excursions. I came at low tide so I could walk out to the rocky point; it was about 300 metres from the shore, making a round trip of over half a kilometre to be negotiated in a narrow window of time before the waves started rolling in. The barnacles and tube worms were as I remembered them but there were only a few living oysters, and all that remained of the sea squirts, or cunjevoi as they’re better known, were their gelatinous cases, cut open by fishermen for bait.

  I watched the kelp writhing in mesmerising serpentine curves as the waves surged and ebbed and a shiver went down my spine at the memory of the little boy who once played alone in such an appallingly dangerous place.

  Me around the age of six.

  Long Reef rock platform at low tide. At the top is a golf course, then a little promontory (near the centre) that has excellent picnic spots. The big rock platform below the promontory is only exposed at low tide. My favourite collecting spot was at the very bottom.

  Little Mr Darwin

  It was hard going back to school after such a holiday, but at least Lindfield East Public School was fun, especially with the teacher I had. Her name was Mrs Collins and being a real Nature lover she taught us all sorts of interesting things.

  The best days were Tuesdays, when we had show-and-tell. Girls, the silliest of creatures, brought bonnets and dolls and other such junk. I brought really good stuff, mostly dead insects I’d collected, the best being some wasps pinned to a piece of cardboard. I gave a talk about them and then made the girls scream when I went to give them a closer look. With that sort of encouragement, and a slightly guilty conscience, I arrived one Tuesday with a live funnel-web spider in one of my mother’s biscuit jars.