A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  After the banquet had concluded I was chauffeured back to my guesthouse to the waiting arms of Mama-san and Papa-san, rather under the weather and wondering what the whole show had been about.

  The following day there was no diving; the boat wasn’t ready, I was told. Instead I was asked to attend another banquet in my honour, this time as the guest of the Director of Fisheries. This was held in another hotel, but seemed to me to be an exact rerun of the previous night – the same circle of men, no women, and the same food. The day after that the boat still wasn’t ready, so Shirai collected me in his car, an enormous black Lincoln Continental, for a sightseeing tour. He was so small he had to sit on a large cushion to see over the dashboard. I’m only a bit over average height in Australia, but according to the locals I was the tallest of the forty thousand people on the island.

  That night there was a ‘formal dinner’, which was more of the same except that this time Dieter Kühlmann, the curator I’d met in the Berlin museum nine years earlier, was there. Dieter had just arrived from Berlin to join me for a couple of weeks’ study of the foreshores. He also did some diving with me eventually, as did Shirai and his assistant, but mostly I saw little of Dieter. Nevertheless, he was welcome company, particularly at the banquets, which never seemed to end.

  For day after day our diving was cancelled on one unlikely pretext or another, but the banquets continued, always with the same men in the same suits. This must have been costing a fortune. Furthermore, Mama-san and Papa-san’s television was almost always on and I’d see myself in every news broadcast. My photo was on the front page of nearly every newspaper. Why? It wasn’t as if I did anything, and who would care anyhow? Shirai said it was just the Japanese way and to forget about it. This sounded increasingly phoney.

  One day, when out walking, I was warmly greeted by a local dive shop owner, and so when yet another day’s diving was cancelled I stole away from the guesthouse with Papa-san’s ancient wooden wheelbarrow, went to the dive shop and borrowed a couple of tanks. The nearby reef flat was about a kilometre wide and the tide was in, so I swam to the outer edge, photographed corals all morning and then swam back, a journey taking several hours. Shirai thought this terribly dangerous. It wasn’t, but it did prompt him to make sure our boat, a fishing trawler, would actually be ready the following day.

  Thereafter, if the boat wasn’t ready (‘Very sorry’), I would go off by myself. Every time the boat was ready, there were reporters to interview me, in Japanese of course, and one or two television cameramen were always waiting. I would again be on television and my photo would again be in the local newspapers. Not Dieter’s photo, nor Shirai’s either, just mine, and of course I had no idea what all the newspaper articles were about.

  After a couple of weeks of this, the mayor arrived at my guesthouse with a huge bowl of fruit and managed to say he knew that I was unhappy with my visit, so to cheer me up, would I please come to a special private dinner in my honour? I said I would; I always did. This time there were fewer men in suits, but there was a gorgeous girl, called Butterfly, seated next to me. Not only was Butterfly astonishingly beautiful, but she spoke perfect English, albeit it with a slight American accent. She explained that she was visiting Ishigaki Island from Tokyo. She had no idea why I was on the island except that it had something to do with diving. It was the most interesting dinner I’d had in weeks, even if it did take me a while to work out what her job actually was.

  Two days were unusually interesting. On the first we went to the southernmost point of the island, where I embarked on a long swim to a bay that had no road access. The corals there were more or less the same as in other places until, abruptly, they were all white. Initially I thought this must have been the result of a crown-of-thorns starfish outbreak, but I soon ruled that out. Every coral was completely dead; starfish don’t do that. I decided it had to be due to something dumped in the water, but then I remembered recent reports of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. This was the first instance of mass bleaching in Japan, and the first I had personally witnessed.

  The second interesting day was a visit to a wide expanse of reef near the village of Shiraho, at the end of the island, close to the airport. The attraction was a lagoon in the outer part of the reef flat, clearly visible in the aerial photos we had. Shirai initially refused to go, saying that the villagers were dangerous; there’d been some sort of riot there. He gave in after I told him I would ask the dive shop owner to take me there if he didn’t. So off we went, in his big black Lincoln Continental, which was a bit of a struggle because it didn’t fit down most streets. However, sure enough, there was evidence of a riot everywhere, including a street barricade made of bits of houses, furniture and overturned cars. The village was deserted.

  We hadn’t taken scuba tanks that day because Shirai claimed he didn’t want them in his beautiful car, so we set off wading. Shirai went knee-deep while his assistant took photos of him every few metres, with the village in the background. I kept wondering why as I continued on to deeper water alone.

  The lagoon turned out to contain the biggest stands of blue coral, a living fossil, I’d ever seen. I had seen these corals many times, but never on this scale. I took lots of photos of them, later to be reproduced in my books and in magazine articles all over Japan.

  After that, one day merged into the next, each with the same routine. Either the boat would be ready, allowing me to get on with diving, or I took myself off with Papa-san’s wheelbarrow. By this time Dieter had returned to Germany. I carried on because I needed to complete the study for my own purposes, but I’d become so sick of reporters and cameramen that I bluntly demanded Shirai send them away, and in future not tell them when we were going diving. It was all very strange, and could not possibly be ‘the Japanese way’.

  The following morning things came to a head. The boat was ready, and so were the cameramen. After Shirai had made sure the cameras were on him, he came over to talk to me about the weather. I’d had enough. To show him the Australian way, I smiled sweetly at the cameras, picked Shirai up and tossed him over the side of the boat. Splash. I never saw him again.

  The project was cancelled. I kept on diving and collecting and photographing corals, usually leaving my cameras on the beach under a towel when collecting. I soon became a tourist attraction, with one glass-bottomed boat after another hovering above me, their outboards making a horrible racket. I would give them the finger, until a honeymooner told me this meant nothing to the Japanese and showed me the hand motion that did. That worked.

  One day I returned to the beach with my laundry basket full of corals to find that my cameras had vanished. I went to the guesthouse and tried to explain to Papa-san that I needed to call the police. He didn’t understand, so I tried again. Then his face lit up; he led me into the kitchen and there they were, on the table, with my towel folded neatly beside them. The next day, I took the cameras on my first dive then went collecting, leaving them on the beach. The same thing happened; a group of children were ‘helping’ me. But why? I could only conclude that they were treating me as some sort of hero, as some of the local men did.Certainly they seemed to know something that I didn’t about why I was on the island.

  At that point the Director of Fisheries turned up and told me that he’d taken over the survey himself, and that I could do all the diving I wanted, except near the airport, where it was ‘too dangerous’. When my work was all done – and he was very attentive, considering my barbarian ways – he flew with me to Tokyo, where we did some sightseeing and had some fabulous meals. Oh, how I had come to love Japanese food.

  Of course I was very suspicious about all that had happened, so before leaving Japan I put together collections of newspaper articles about me and posted one set to the Australian embassy in Tokyo and the other to Katy Muzik, a researcher at the Smithsonian and presenter of natural history programs that were popular in Japan. I had met Katy in America and knew she’d once lived on Ishigaki Island, and that she spoke flue
nt Japanese.

  The embassy made no response, but Katy knew exactly what was going on: a plan to increase the length of the Ishigaki airport runway to accommodate wide-bodied jets. That would involve extending it over the reef flat and Shiraho Lagoon. A large hill adjacent to the airport would supply the necessary rock. The mayor, the old man I’d trusted, had foreseen this and purchased the hill for next to nothing. When the airport development was proposed, the hill was suddenly worth $us70 million. The riot at Shiraho had been in protest against the development, peace being declared only after it was agreed that two foreign experts would make a study of the corals of the island and evaluate the worth of the reef that was to be destroyed. Shirai had allegedly been offered $us3 million to produce a report that vindicated the government’s, and the mayor’s, proposal. I was their reef expert, Dieter’s role was to make notes and drawings of the foreshores. All the television appearances and newspaper articles had been fakes, always reporting me toeing the government’s line. This hadn’t fooled the locals, but that didn’t matter to the mayor – decisions about such things were made in Tokyo.

  Katy said I must write to Asahi, Japan’s most widely circulated newspaper, saying why I had gone to Japan and what I had done. My brief article caused an explosion. All Okinawan newspapers carried a photo of me with headlines like shirai accuses veron of lying. There was another riot at Shiraho. The following day the governor of Okinawa called an emergency meeting in Naha, the capital. I was accused of all manner of devious crimes, which, through a telephone linkup to my desk at AIMS that my accusers didn’t know about, I could immediately rebuff. Television companies, especially NHK, had a field day. A dozen Japanese reporters must have come to Australia to interview me, and one morning NHK had me talking live on a breakfast program from Townsville, the first ever live coverage of a news event between Japan and Australia.

  Over the several years that followed I made many more trips to Japan, usually accompanied by Moritaka Nishihira, a professsor of marine biology at a university in Naha and a delightful roly-poly character whom I dubbed my little Buddha. He and I visited all the tropical island groups of the Ryukyus that had good coral, and then Kyushu. But my last dives in Japan were without Moritaka, for they were along the coast of Honshu, where corals were scarce and not so interesting for him. Doing this, I found the most northerly coral communities in the world, at the Tateyama Peninsula, south-east of Tokyo. I caught a ferry from Tokyo and stayed in a little inn on the western side of the peninsula, near where the corals were. There were not only living corals there, but also fossil corals, in an area where the land had been uplifted several thousand years ago. Naturally I went fossil-hunting and soon found a 3-metre-deep drainage ditch where specimens of species no longer found along the mainland coast had been dug up. After many hours of scrabbling around in the ditch I looked up to see a row of peasants watching me, clearly at a loss as to what I was doing. This was a great time to test my fledgling Japanese; perhaps predictably, they understood not a word.

  The morning of my last day at Tateyama I decided to go for a swim. There were no sharks of course – Japanese love shark-fin soup – the only thing to be wary of were ships going in and out of Tokyo. I waved at a couple of ferries that passed me but only received blank stares for my trouble. Swimming back, it seemed that the trees around the lighthouse on the tip of the peninsula kept changing, and then I realised I wasn’t getting any closer. I was being swept around the headland by the current – next stop Hawaii.

  That was a long day, and for a time I felt it might be my last. There was no way I could outswim the Kuroshio, but I thought – hoped – it would have a small coastal gyre as it headed into the North Pacific. So I swam across the current to where I thought this might be. It was rather scary but the sea was calm and the lighthouse was slowly coming into the right position. I had started out on the west coast of the peninsula and ended a long way up the east. It was getting dark by the time I walked back to the inn, hungry and very tired. That little swim was not a good idea but the study was definitely worthwhile.14 It’s one that can never be repeated, because the living corals have all been dredged and the fossils are now under apartment buildings.

  I look back on my time in Japan with a good deal of wonder. Over the months that followed my stay on Ishigaki Island, both the mayor and the governor lost their jobs, but the battle over the airport raged on for ten years. In the end, Shiraho Lagoon was proclaimed a national monument, although I’m not sure what conservation value that had.

  I kept returning to that strange country for years, to study, for conferences, and sometimes I was invited for ceremonial occasions. I don’t know what happened to ‘Dr’ Shirai (the Dr bit was fake, or so I was told) but I did revisit Shiraho, where I was warmly welcomed. When I was leaving, a local took me to the town garbage dump to show me the remains of a burnt-out Lincoln Continental.

  In 1992 I published a monograph on the corals of Japan.15 And in 1995 Moritaka and I – mostly Moritaka’s doing – produced the lavishly illustrated, rather expensive book Hermatypic Corals of Japan, in Japanese.16 All well and good except that I had become familiar with Japanese corals in finest detail, and troublesome aspects about how closely related species could be distinguished were always cropping up. It was the same feeling of disquiet I’d felt when working in Western Australia, although in Japan the combinations of species that caused me trouble were mostly different. Once again I had to do some diving on the Great Barrier Reef to reassure myself that I hadn’t made mistakes.

  Ishigaki Island, showing living corals in the foreground, the reef flat (yellowish), the beach (white), the coastal strip of agricultural plots, and the mountain ridge behind.

  A coral knoll at the Ryukyu Islands, Japan. It is a formidable job identifying each and every coral.

  Blue coral in Shiraho Lagoon, Ishigaki Island, Japan.

  Pacific forays

  The earliest scientific account of the distribution of corals on the Great Barrier Reef was by John Wells, who originally described the dropout sequence of coral genera from north to south.17 Nothing surprising in that, but what was interesting was that tropical corals did not have temperate replacements, as have almost all other marine animal groups. Why not?

  In 1984, with the last volume of Scleractinia of Eastern Australia published, I made more trips to the ends of The Reef in between visits to the west coast. When satisfied that I’d filled in the main gaps in my records, I plotted the results and was almost dismayed to find that the dropout sequence for species was even more orderly than it was for genera. The far north of The Reef, where species numbers were low, was an exception, due to the turbidity and strong currents of the Torres Strait, an unhealthy combination for just about everything.

  The sequence begged further questions. Did all groups of corals drop out at the same rate? Was it due to the temperature gradient down the reef, or battles with seaweed, or the presence or not of reefs? If the last, what was it about reefs that permitted a different diversity? The first question at least could be answered without further ado: mushroom corals (Fungia) dropped out quicker than the others, and so, to a lesser extent, did Porites. The interesting thing about Porites was that the colonies mostly became smaller in the south. This was unexpected because Porites, in experiments and in the geological record, are usually one of the best survivors when conditions get tough.

  As work in Western Australia continued it became clear that a similar dropout sequence applied there, although much of that could be explained by the big gaps between reef areas. Both coasts had south-flowing currents and both had a temperature gradient from the tropical north to the temperate south. Both also had reefs, with a much higher diversity than nearby places where the temperature was about the same but there were no reefs.

  Japan was the best place on the planet to take a better look at this question. The Kuroshio, the world’s strongest continental boundary current, originates around the northern Philippines then streams north, past Taiwan, up
the length of the Ryukyu Islands, finally turning east along the southern coast of Honshu. These conditions mean that there’s no other place in the world where the relationship between temperature and diversity can be studied in anything like the detail it can in Japan.

  These were the thoughts that bumbled around in my head when I first headed for Ishigaki Island, and they stayed bumbling around until I became determined to make a detailed study of them. Early in my travels to Japan I discovered that, being a nation of seafood addicts, the Japanese kept very careful records of ocean temperature, that being a good indicator of what seafood might be where. I could get some temperature records from central government agencies in Okinawa and Tokyo, but these were usually open-ocean records collected by ships of opportunity – mostly passenger liners and freighters. The records that mattered as far as I was concerned were those taken inside reef areas, right where the corals grew. These were kept by small research stations or local government agencies, which seldom shared them with anybody. To conquer this I developed a symbiosis with a couple of Japanese volunteers who accompanied me. The records, which the Japanese never published, would be politely handed over to me, ‘the foreign expert’, while my buddies did the talking.

  Over the years we worked on about ten islands in this way, some in remote places. Each time, I would make a copy of whatever temperature records there were, then go diving.

  This study confirmed the widely held belief that the minimum temperature for reef development was 18°C. That sounds simple enough, but why should it be so? What I found was that about a quarter of all corals could tolerate a temperature of 10.5°C, and a half tolerated 14°C. Even so, the old notion that reefs did not occur where the temperature went below 18°C held true, almost.18 They won’t grow if the temperature falls below 18°C for more than a few weeks. Corals can tolerate a much lower temperature, but a key factor is that they need at least 18°C to grow fast enough to provide homes for the herbivores that keep seaweed in check. It’s a matter of ecology, not temperature tolerance.