A Life Underwater

by Charlie Veron

  It is now popular opinion that climate change will allow corals to disperse to higher latitudes. That’s a sexy notion but it’s been overplayed. Most reported latitudinal range extensions are actually due to improved identification skills or to the chance discovery of a species that wasn’t previously recorded. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there before. Some may come and some may go over geological time – the normal way of things for most organisms living at the extremes. Certainly, distributions are likely to change a little, but it will be change to distributions that have always been changing, and that’s a hard thing to attribute to temperature or anything else, including differences in light regimes and mechanisms of reef erosion.

  We may see corals appear on the north coast of New Zealand, as it may now be getting warm enough and they were there in the geological past, even building small reefs. It is more a question of getting the right current to take coral larvae there.

  Today there are hundreds of magazines and dozens of books devoted to the underwater world of coral reefs, but in the early 1980s there was almost nothing. I’d been publishing my findings in scientific journals and monographs, but such publications conveyed little to the public, and nothing of the biology and beauty of reefs to anybody. So I decided to write a book for lay readers, which became Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific.19 This was no small undertaking as it needed thousands of photos, making it expensive to produce. Angus & Robertson, at that time Australia’s foremost publisher of natural history books, welcomed my proposal and so I began the long task of putting together a volume that ended up rather larger than intended. It had a lot of information that would have been new to most readers, including scientists.

  I also had an ulterior motive: Noni had always wanted me to write a ‘beautiful’ book about corals and I wanted to dedicate this one to her. As a frontispiece I included a distant underwater photo of her taken by Ed Lovell on her first dive, at Keeper Reef.

  Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific was published in 1986, and in 1987 I was privileged to be awarded the Whitley Medal for Australia’s best natural history book – Noni would have loved that. As far as I know, the book contained the first photo of a bleached coral, something of little interest then, but prophetic of times to come.

  The Scleractinia of Eastern Australia series and Corals of Australia and the Indo-Pacific gave both AIMS and myself a measure of international recognition. At least AIMS thought so – I was promoted to the top rung in 1987, the only promotion I ever got that didn’t involve winning some sort of argument with a bureaucrat.

  With my work on Japanese corals well under way, I was delighted when an opportunity came to make a study of the corals of the Philippines, where the Kuroshio starts. This was paid for in a rather unusual way: Ed Gomez, then professor of zoology at the University of the Philippines, had attended a coral taxonomy workshop that Carden Wallace and I had given in Phuket, Thailand, and he was keen to see this work extended to his own country. Being a man of great initiative, Ed had obtained a large grant from the US State Department for me to give a lecture at his university. When I arrived in Manila I went straight to Ed’s office, where I saw a pile of pesos covering half a table.

  ‘Good to see you, Charlie,’ said Ed with a grin on his face. ‘This was to be for your lecture,’ he went on, gesturing towards the pile of banknotes. He then carefully pushed the pile to the other side of the table, except for a single note which he ceremoniously presented to me. ‘This is for your lecture’, he said, ‘the rest is for your study.’

  I never did give the lecture. I used the money to travel all over the Philippines with Gregor Hodgson, an American coral biologist who lived in Manila and spoke fluent Filipino, as well as a couple of regional dialects. I felt a twinge of guilt about not giving the lecture that America had so generously paid for, but Gregor and I did produce something much more valuable: a publication about the corals of the Philippines.20 It was nothing like the detailed monograph it could have been, but we wanted to be careful not to tread on the toes of Professor Francisco Nemenzo, who was nearing the end of his days after spending a lifetime studying Philippine corals and producing a string of publications about them.

  Our work involved some very interesting diving, all in small boats using scuba tanks that Gregor was always able to scrounge, even in small villages. One dive was more memorable than most: we had headed out in a canoe with an outrigger and tiny outboard motor. The driver spoke no Filipino, although he seemed to understand that he was to anchor – he had a length of rope tied to a chunk of rock for this purpose – and wait for us. When we finished our dive he was nowhere to be seen. This was no great problem because there were boats everywhere and we literally hitchhiked back to the village we’d set out from. When he saw us there, our boat driver nearly collapsed with fright – he thought we were ghosts. He’d never heard of scuba diving, and when we hadn’t surfaced the poor guy assumed that we’d drowned and was terrified he would be accused of killing us.

  Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Philippines, particularly the small towns and villages, I was continually shocked at the poverty, especially the number of destitute children. Gregor had to stop me giving away all our money; he also had to stop me getting into disputes with people who were treating animals with appalling cruelty. I was much bigger than most Philippine men, but Gregor insisted they had knives and would not hesitate to use them. I was also distressed by the plight of young girls. ‘They’re either married or for sale,’ Gregor said, for a girl could earn more in one night than her father might in a month. They were usually taken back into their otherwise devoutly Catholic families once they’d reached their use-by date, early twenties at the latest, but after living in Manila hotels for years, and probably having contracted the diseases of their profession, a poor village life, perhaps without the prospect of a husband, must have seemed like a prison.

  I saw the same thing throughout Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The culture that these people had built up over a thousand years was being trashed wholesale by Western and Japanese wealth. Worse were the movies the villagers knew about, featuring live rape, even murder. I lived with locals in all these countries and had a glimpse of real life, so different from that served up by tourist operators.

  For many years afterwards, I kept in contact with the students and university staff I met in Asia, often helping them to get jobs or scholarships. No trouble for me, life-giving for them. I was also able to repay Ed Gomez for his support of our study. Ed had founded the Marine Science Institute in the north-west Philippines. It was an impressive building, the likes of which did not exist in any other developing country. Then a Taiwanese company started to build an enormous cement factory right next door; it would have destroyed the institute. When I next saw Ed he was in bad shape, having fought against the factory with all he could muster, to no avail, and he believed his life was seriously in danger. I wrote to President Marcos, on AIMS letterhead, giving myself the status of grand professor of all things marine. I said I felt obliged to inform him that he would be shocked to hear of the imminent destruction of his precious institute (which he presumably neither cared nor knew anything about). He must have been in a particularly dictatorial mood, for he ordered the immediate closure of the factory. The whole exercise would have taken me an hour at most, and AIMS even paid the postage.

  After the Philippines, Gregor and I went on to Vietnam to work on corals with local experts. Driving up the coast road at that time was like driving through a National Geographic magazine, with one rustic picturesque scene opening onto another. We spent three weeks on the central coast, working out the corals and comparing them with those of the Philippines on the other side of the South China Sea. Our journey ended in Hanoi, at a time when the whole country was jubilant about America’s decision to normalise diplomatic relations. I found it hard to see what these people were so happy about given what America, and Australia for that matter, had done to them.

  It was also a time wh
en the US was lifting its embargo on White House tapes made during the Vietnam War, and I spent a surreal half-hour listening on the radio to the deep gravelly voice of Henry Kissinger telling Richard Nixon that ‘nukin’ the fuckers’ wouldn’t go down well with the American people. From my hotel window I could see Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, right where the bomb would have been targeted.

  I left my hotel to get a bite to eat. People were dancing in the streets in celebration, reminding me that many years ago I only just dodged being conscripted to come to their country to help kill them.

  Shortly after the studies of the corals of the Philippines and Vietnam were finished I had an interesting sojourn in Vanuatu, which Terry Done organised. We had a large yacht, the Coongoola, perhaps not the fastest of vessels, but its owner knew the country and kept his boat in good shape for diving.

  This turned out to be a thought-provoking voyage for me. Swimming over the coral, I saw none of the problems of taxonomic detail that had plagued me in Western Australia, Asia and Japan. I swam on, getting a little bored with seeing so much more of the same.

  What’s here that tells me I’m not on the Great Barrier Reef? The corals are identical.

  A subliminal thought almost surfaced, then faded away when I saw Zoopilus, a large delicate coral that looks like a Vietnamese peasant’s hat. This coral is not found on the Great Barrier Reef. Later I pondered the ship’s chart. Vanuatu is just the other side of the Coral Sea from The Reef, not far away as currents go. I thought about the role currents might play in evolutionary change. But it wasn’t until many years later that this thought became clear and I was able to incorporate it in my concept of reticulate evolution.

  All such matters went on hold when we reached the island of Tanna and walked up Mount Yasur, an active volcano and mega-spectacular sight. The crater is gigantic. Deep in its middle is a second, small crater which, every half-hour or so, exploded with the noise of battleship guns, sending streams of lava half a kilometre into the air like a giant Mount Vesuvius firework and shaking the grey-ash ground we stood on. We watched transfixed, until some hot ash came down a little too close for comfort.

  Not long after we were there, a tourist died from a direct hit by a chunk of scorching rock, and the place is now often closed to sightseers. A pity; unless the volcano is in one of its angry moods, the risk in seeing it is surely worth it.

  The Coongoola, slow but roomy, Vanuatu, 1988.

  The Indian Ocean

  Six contour maps showing the global distribution of coral genera were published between 1954 and 1985, the first being John Wells’s, the last being mine. All vaguely indicate some sort of centre of diversity in the western Indian Ocean. Why so? Where did the corals come from? The Tethys Sea, an ancient seaway which, as I will describe, periodically included the Mediterranean and covered much of Europe? Or did they come from the Indo-Pacific’s centre of diversity? Or had they been there as long as Africa has?

  When I started working in the Red Sea in 1985 these were unanswered questions – or rather, nobody had asked them. The Red Sea has a well-known geological history. It is mostly very deep but has a shallow opening to the Indian Ocean. That shallow opening means that all the life in the Red Sea has been there for less than fifteen thousand years, because the sea level during the last ice age was low enough to isolate the sea, turning it into a hot, lethally saline giant trough about as homely as the Dead Sea is today.

  I first worked in the Ras Mohammad National Park, at the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in 1985, making a detailed inventory of the corals there and shipping a large collection back to Australia. Tourists had started arriving in substantial numbers by then, and Egypt was thinking that some sort of hands-on management might be a good idea. The first job was to find out what needed managing.

  As soon as I started diving, memories of Ehrenberg’s specimens in the Berlin museum came flooding back, but much more poignant were recollections of my detailed studies of Western Australian corals, large numbers of which I was seeing again. Or more or less seeing again, for most were a little different, not surprisingly considering the distance between the two countries.

  I revisited the park with Mary (whom you will soon meet) in 1996 and was horrified to see that it was overrun with tourists, mostly Germans and Italians. Tourists have pretty much trashed the park now, there being limits to the numbers such a place can take, but at that time the reefs were still in good shape. The government was encouraging conservation because the park generated more foreign currency than the Pyramids and Sphinx combined. Egypt also made a fortune from ships that ran aground there, as we immediately saw when we arrived. The rangers took us to see where a big Cunard cruise ship had hit the reef. The ship itself, by then in a dock, was badly damaged and listing heavily, but Mary and I, reluctant witnesses, had a hard time finding much damage to the reef at all. Nevertheless, Cunard was fined ₤8 million, which was pocketed by the Egyptian government, not the national park.

  Although I had all the necessary permits to collect corals – the first and last the Egyptians would ever issue, so they said – I had to keep my specimens covered up, even when I was with a park ranger, because the locals, as well as most tourists then, were very protective of them. We left the park with hundreds of photos of the corals and another detailed collection. The corals in the region are now disappearing rapidly due to oil spills, land development and mass bleaching. However, I did describe several new species and don’t doubt that there are more to be discovered before they disappear.

  On another trip a few years later, rangers took me sightseeing. I wanted to see some Bedouins, who had led the same nomadic existence since biblical days. I was shown into a traditional, dark, carpeted tent, where I could vaguely make out a man sitting in the corner. He started talking about corals. There was nothing unusual about that until he asked me a very specific question. That stopped me in my tracks, and in all honesty I could only say that he should ask Bernard Riegl, a well-known coral scientist who knew all about the matter.

  ‘I am Bernard Riegl’, he said, sounding like he had a grin on his face. Was there nowhere I could go where my knowledge of corals didn’t get tested?

  On another trip, I visited an ancient Catholic monastery, the site of the burning bush of biblical fame. The bush looked a little careworn, though not particularly old, but of much greater interest was the Catholic library, the second-biggest in the world outside the Vatican and the home of hundreds of ancient icons. The icons were still in excellent condition due to the low humidity of the Sinai, and the fact that Napoleon had ordered his troops to leave the place alone. I’d heard that one of the monks there was an Australian and I was going to seek him out when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.

  ‘G’day,’ said a broad Australian voice. ‘Heard you were coming. I’ll show you around in a sec, but would you mind taking a look at this bloody laptop of mine, it’s driving me nuts. It won’t talk to my scanner.’

  And now I’m fixing a computer for a monk in a Catholic monastery in the Sinai desert.

  It turns out that the Red Sea has around 340 species of coral, only fifty or so fewer than anywhere in the western Indian Ocean. So all the old contour maps had got that wrong. A few species are endemic but they are unlikely to have arisen in the Red Sea itself. No corals could have survived the high salinities the Red Sea reached when it was cut off during the last glacial cycle, and the timeframe is not long enough for them to have evolved since then. So those species must have recolonised via the straits and then gone extinct elsewhere. Most western Indian Ocean species, including these, probably crisscrossed the Indian Ocean many times. Be that so or not, they aren’t just exports from the Indonesia–Philippines archipelago, as are the corals of the eastern Indian Ocean: many appear to have originated in the west, and perhaps some go as far back as the Tethys.

  Of all the places on the East African coast I visited over the years, Zanzibar was for me the most interesting. It had a colourful history as an ancient trad
ing port and, more importantly, a small, privately owned island with some of the most unusual coral communities in the whole Indian Ocean. Chumbe Island Coral Park, then owned and run by a dedicated German conservationist, Sibylle Riedmiller, was special. Sibylle had been struggling with local politicians for years, trying to get legal recognition of her park. When I was there, the President of Zanzibar had publicly rebuked her, claiming that corals were rocks, so what was the point of protecting them? I joined the battle on her behalf – successfully, I think. A year later Sibylle offered to give me joint ownership of the park, but I declined. Such a venture might have been interesting but would have plunged me into yet more battles, and my life was complicated enough as it was.

  The evening before I left, I chatted to the rangers who looked after the park. They were a small, dedicated group, and having a visitor who knew about corals was a big occasion for them, so we went on talking into the night. They told me of their work and revelled in the interest I took. I felt I should spend more time doing such things; it was a small thing for me, but so important for them.

  Not long after I first worked in the Red Sea I made my first trip to Madagascar. It wasn’t a particularly successful trip because I was on my own and in those days scuba tanks were hard to come by. Nevertheless, I dived in many places on the west coast, hoping that one day I would return.

  It wasn’t until 2005 that I had that opportunity, along with some colleagues. The trip was run by an American conservation organisation, which, with a curious lapse of judgement, chartered the Inga Viola, one of the most unusual boats I’ve ever been on. She was a 1932 Danish fishing boat but looked more like an old Chinese junk as she was made from curved planks that formed a rather beautiful sweeping deck, which unfortunately leaked profusely whenever it rained. A white box-like wheelhouse adorned the rear of the deck. The skipper, the only crew member, was an Englishman even older than his boat. Most interesting of all, the Inga Viola was powered by a 1928 diesel engine that by rights should have been in a museum. But there it was, with two cylinders, each about 2 metres high and looking more like a pair of microbreweries than an engine. The one used for starting needed kerosene poured into it from a bottle and compressed air from a scuba tank; it was such a complicated procedure that it took half an hour to get through – if nothing went wrong, which it almost always did. It was agreed that if needs be, meaning if the skipper died, I was to be the boat’s ‘engineer’, because of my interest in engines. He gave me a five-minute lesson.