Of all the articles, seminars, interviews and documentaries I have written, spoken and appeared in, one stands out in my memory. In 2009 Robyn Williams, who thirty years earlier at AIMS had recorded me talking about the first Australians living under coral reefs, asked me to do an item for Occam’s Razor, another of his science productions for Australia’s national radio. The production required a written script and had to be recorded in a studio. This was something new for me and I discovered how important speaking to a person is. I was in Townsville with only a microphone for company and the producer was in Sydney. He told me to take my time, and then proceeded to stop me about ten times in as many minutes.
‘How did it go?’ asked Mary, who had helped write the script.
‘I haven’t the vaguest idea,’ I replied in all honesty.
When Robyn introduced my talk a couple of weeks later, he said it was among the most important he’d ever recorded, which is saying something coming from the person who probably knows the pulse of Australian science better than anybody.43 It also says something about how times have changed, for what I said then would be old news today.
It was a plea from the heart, but trying to keep emotion out of it I had painted the future of coral reefs just as science said it would be, without spin or exaggeration. It’s an incredibly important subject, yet now I’m reluctant to talk about it at all, for it’s hard to see a bright side, and hope is an essential ingredient for just about everybody. Better to shut up and try to figure out why religions succeed when reason doesn’t.
Our French hideaway had turned out to be one of Mary’s great ideas for our family, but the outcome – my understanding of climate change – has robbed me of much of the enjoyment I once had in working on reefs, for I have a clear idea of what lies ahead, and wish I hadn’t. It’s an exceedingly sad thought that nobody will ever study the world’s coral reefs as I have because much of that world no longer exists.
A very big website
Not long after Corals of the World was published I started thinking that the world needed a website where anybody could find out about all corals from all points of view – could identify them, and see a lot of photos of them and maps of their distribution. Advances in computer technology made such a website possible, but doing something about it was another matter. There were two main jobs: getting the mass of taxonomic information and photos together, and doing the mapping.
The ideal way to build such an all-encompassing website would be to have all taxonomists agree about the taxonomy, then contribute all they know. Unfortunately that will never happen, for taxonomists are an independent lot and they tend to battle opposing views. Not overtly, but through synonymies. It’s a territorial thing, and can have its amusing side. But on a practical level, Nature’s fuzziness does not make consensus easy, particularly for work that has a restricted geographic scope. Moreover, often what we read is as much about the taxonomist’s personal biases as the actual taxonomy.
During the expeditionary work on the Coral Triangle, I’d come to know and greatly value Emre Turak and Lyndon DeVantier, field workers who excelled at recognising species underwater and who made careful collections for subsequent studies of species of interest. I asked them if they’d join Mary and me in building a website, which would be like the book Corals of the World but more comprehensive. Mary came up with the notion that users could get the website to build customised maps, which could be continually updated by us. It was a great idea and it worked in ways we never imagined, producing statistics and allowing all manner of interesting analyses to be made.44 At least, that was the happy ending; the road along the way was more a matter of dogged perseverance.
In 2008, about a year after the Coral Triangle Initiative was launched, I was asked to attend a supposedly high-level conference about it sponsored by the Australian government, which up to that time had contributed little to its establishment. Naturally, given Australia’s previous lack of interest, I wondered what the conference was all about, and am still wondering. I wasn’t alone there: a group of delegates from Indonesia asked me to bring a coral triangle to the conference, as they’d never seen one. I explained that I only had one and it was too big to move. They said they never realised that . . .
There was also a mob from AIMS at the conference and they too seemed none the wiser, for they wanted to know why I was repeatedly mentioned whenever someone made a speech. ‘If this work was your doing, Charlie, why wasn’t it an AIMS project?’ asked one.
‘Well, someone suggested that but it got turned down. Remember?’
‘Vaguely. So why don’t we make it an AIMS project now?’
Why would I want to do that?
‘If you guys did the website building, maybe we could,’ I said.
Two years later AIMS’s lawyer finally put the finishing touches to a thick document which said that the building of Corals of the World Online, as they called it, would be a joint operation: AIMS would do the website engineering, Mary would design the whole thing, and Mary, Emre, Lyndon and I would do the coral work. AIMS and I would both seek funding for it.
All went well until the AIMS scientist responsible for managing the institute’s side of the bargain found another job; then their guy responsible for the mapping left also. We muddled on for a while, with computer technicians putting together a website with temporary text and photos from my book as placeholders. But AIMS was happy with this, corals not being high on their priorities, so we parted company.
Building the website we wanted would be a costly business; I screamed for help. Fortunately, Dave Hannan, the founder of the conservation foundation Ocean Ark Alliance and a character generous beyond belief, launched a financial rescue and Google Earth chipped in. By the end of 2011 we were up and running again. I also found a company who could engineer it all, with genuine skill and dedication.
The project just kept getting bigger, better and more complicated, and was soon costing much more than I’d anticipated, partly because it had no precedent and so didn’t fit any mould. That also made it look like a risky venture, but nevertheless more generous backers who believed in what we were doing heard my call, and hundreds of others helped in all ways possible. We felt very privileged; we still do.
Despite the complexity of the undertaking, anybody looking at the website now would be forgiven for thinking it’s all straightforward. It was designed to be this way, and to give instant answers. We still have a long way to go with it, for there’s nothing to stop it having the capability to track the fate of all species, endangered or not, thus giving the best scientific support for their protection. This is a distant goal but would be the biggest step forward in coral conservation ever. It would be another massive task on top of all we have so far done, requiring detailed information about coral habitats worldwide and the paths of ocean currents that connect them, along with mountains of information about the biology of each species.
For me, an all-abiding problem remains. The website gives each species a name and includes descriptions, photographs and a distribution map. Species are therefore treated as if they’re isolated units, even though, as I’ve explained, this is seldom the case. There are no options here, or at least none that I can think of, and it means that every point of information we have may not be exactly correct for a particular place. This may involve a minute error here, but a potentially larger one there. Such is the troublesome truth of reticulate evolution. I don’t know if reticulate patterns are the last frontier, as some have said, but the subject is something that must eventually be confronted.
On 20 June 2016 a preliminary version of our website was launched at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Honolulu, amid 2000-odd delegates.45 Having it ready was a cliffhanger: Mary flicked the switch at 4:30 am the day we left for Hawaii.
I pause to wonder what John Wells would think of our website. I hope he’d think his wall chart has been given a good future.
Names that matter
For more than two hundred years
before the age of scuba diving, people had been amassing corals during expeditions of discovery to the tropical world; in fact, corals became one of the most popular collectables of all time. Naturalists collected them from reef flats at low tide, sailors who could swim collected them from deeper water, or they were purchased from natives with an eye for trade. By such means they accumulated in great quantities in museums across Europe and America, where they made contributions to natural history, especially when they were the subject of those big scholarly monographs that so defeated me when I first worked on corals.
Some corals in these collections were swapped or borrowed, sometimes returned and sometimes not. Inevitably, many specimens were lost, or given new labels when incorporated into another collection, commonly without any indication of their original source. No matter, except for type specimens, many of which were hard to track down if they weren’t distinctively marked. Others presumed lost may never have existed. Of greater concern, type specimens were often oddities because they were atypical growth forms found only in shallow water. Worse still, they did not represent any group or population – they were just different. This is ancient history but it’s a history we must deal with, because it has created so many problems for nomenclature.
Coral taxonomists of the remote past, not being scuba divers, had no idea how species appeared underwater, and as we’ve seen, specimens were sometimes proclaimed a new species and given a new name simply because they looked different. Scuba diving opened a door to another world, and quickly became essential for reef field work, something Cyril Burdon-Jones foresaw when he applied for the grant that supported my post-doc. No doubt my scuba background was the reason I was offered a post-doc at all, given I had no formal qualifications in marine biology. No complaints on that score; I had the best training a would-be taxonomist could ever have – none. This enabled me to see central issues afresh, without being burdened by the baggage of the past.
A coral taxonomist working in a museum or university without studying corals on reefs would be in the same predicament as a tree taxonomist shut inside a herbarium without venturing into forests. What would Henry Bernard, who described so many species, have thought if he could have spent just one day on a reef? His world would have been turned upside down. Instead, having never laid eyes on a living coral, he abandoned binomial nomenclature and took up religion. Another author, the Indian George Matthai who published a massive volume in the same monograph series that much of Bernard’s work was published in, ended up shooting himself. Maybe if those guys had spent a little time on a tropical island they might have lightened up a bit.
Seeing corals living on reefs allowed species to be identified with much greater certainty; it provided distinct criteria for separating closely related species that occur together, and revealed how variations in skeletal structures are linked to the environment in which the coral had grown. This reinvigorated coral taxonomy and led to detailed studies that, forty years on, are still progressing, providing a solid foundation for reef studies as well as overwhelming support for conservation. Nevertheless, we are still left with the legacy of the past, one which has more to do with the foibles of humans than with corals. This situation is far from unique to corals, but the ramifications seem particularly unfortunate in their case.
There are several types of coral taxonomists, the most prominent historically being the museum sort. Working on specimens collected by someone else, perhaps from unknown places and usually from unknown habitats, is not conducive to much original thought, so these people made the most of what they had by describing selected specimens in great detail and by constructing elaborate synonymies. In times long gone, such people tended to look to museum shelves for inspiration, but when all’s said and done, Nature hardly got a look in.
A typical synonymy (this one from the author), where species and the taxonomists who use them are listed to indicate that the species are all one and the same.
The field worker is a very different sort of taxonomist. Spending a great deal of time underwater rather than in museums or laboratories is a much more difficult undertaking, and not just from a practical point of view. On the one hand, field workers must depend on the taxonomy of people of yesteryear who had very different experiences, then blend that into what they see alive on reefs. On the other, they constantly see corals that are new or different from any that have been recorded. These are the people I like to work with, for they usually have original knowledge and of necessity know a great deal about corals.
Molecular taxonomists, who work with DNA, are another breed altogether and today outnumber all others many times over. The best of them combine significant field experience with molecular technology and knowledge of the morphological characters of the species they study, and they seldom fail to get interesting results. But in this approach, good work is sometimes mixed with bad, because many researchers who’ve mastered molecular techniques have little field experience. A lot of students are in this business, striving to get to the front of the pack, and it’s tough, with few winners and many losers. But there’s a big future here, when molecular results are well integrated with a thorough understanding of the species in the field, their life histories, physiology and taxonomic background.
Many scientists try to be part of a combination of these different approaches, and now we commonly see co-authored publications where one author may have no idea what their co-authors actually do. Such works often read like something put together by a committee; however, the combination may tick the boxes of the editors of science journals, and that, in the pressures of today’s academia, is usually the aim of the game.
Does it matter that the name changes these different approaches generate go ever on, with no end in sight? Yes it does, because it’s the name that links information together, whether that information is in the form of a map, photo, description, survey, or any aspect of science or conservation involving species. Of recent years, taxonomy has been a popular subject for PhD theses, a thin (apparently deficient) thesis being one that has re-examined all relevant problems and found little cause for change, and a thick (apparently good) thesis being one that changes everything possible. The same applies to many publications, where the main aim is often change for the sake of change. If it is the end user that matters, names need to be stable and dependable, and, most important of all, the species that the name represents needs to be recognisable in the field and distinguishable from all other species.
That said, the real crunch has yet to come: reticulate evolution says that species divide and merge over big geographic distances as well as over evolutionary time, yet most computer programs, as I’ve pointed out, do not allow lineages to merge, they can only make branches. That’s not something to ignore. Other problems are waiting in the wings, the most important being that some molecular results are clearly at odds with every other line of evidence relating to a species’ phylogeny, and have led to highly unlikely speculations on the part of their authors. Such results are now being found in most groups of animals and I’ve not yet heard a general explanation for them, except for a possible role for ancestral junk DNA. So now coral taxonomy is not just about corals and taxonomists, it’s also about molecular and information technology.
The whole subject has become so very multi-faceted, yet is still beholden to those collectors of ancient times and the specimens they deposited in museums. Type specimens and the name games they inspire were bad enough for field-going scientists like me, but are much worse for geneticists, whose primary expertise is in molecular technology and not the history of museum specimens. The DNA that molecular taxonomists use comes from living tissue, something not found in museum specimens.
Clearly this issue must be addressed: the old nomenclatorial system needs a drastic overhaul or it will become irrelevant. In the meantime, it’s likely that chaos will prevail, which is fine for students keen to publish, but not so fine for anybody requiring names they can rely on.
Taxonomy in the minds
of most people conjures up images of old museums, long boring monographs and even more boring people. But what is taxonomy? It is a description of how Nature is organised, one of the deepest and most complex subjects of all biology. Hardly boring, at least to my mind, but then I don’t often think of myself as a taxonomist.
Pat Mather, who, you might recall, was aghast at my becoming involved in taxonomy, gradually changed her mind and eventually became my staunch supporter. But sometimes I think she might have been right in the first place, given the problems I’ve come across with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
Since its formation in 1895 the ICZN has produced, among other publications, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which proclaims what taxonomists should, shouldn’t, can and can’t do – in some areas but not in others. This code gets revised every couple of decades or so, but it seems to me to be out of touch with taxonomy. Issues with the ICZN are critically important for natural scientists, although some don’t realise it, or don’t want to know about it. Certainly, these problems are not adequately aired. Like the frog that doesn’t notice the warming beaker, we become acclimatised; we even think there’s something normal about it, until it’s too late.
It’s true that the ICZN has done much to tidy up the chaos it inherited more than a century ago, but that tidying was done at a time when the central axiom of all taxonomy was that name changes should only be made if they increased certainty. That notion still exists in theory but has too often fallen by the wayside in practice, leaving us with many problems that should have been resolved long ago. These problems belong to every taxonomist, not just the ICZN, and all biologists who rely on species names would do well to be aware of them. Here are the most conspicuous:
A Life Underwater Page 27
