The Enchanted Braid

by Osha Gray Davidson

Osha Gray DavidsonPulitzer Prize nominee, Osha Gray Davidson writes on a wide range of topics including the environment and natural history, race relations and other social and human rights issues. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The Progressive, Woman’s Day, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and many other publications. Davidson is also a screenwriter and a member of the Writers Guild of America, West. He is co-writer of the IMAX® film Coral Reef Adventure.

The following is the incredible first chapter of Osha’s engaging book, The Enchanted Braid: Coming To Terms With Nature On The Coral Reef. This chapter was the inspiration behind Coral Reef Report.

“Who Has Known the Ocean?”

There is a story about an ecologist who thought he had found a way to decipher the coral reef. He believed that all he needed to do was to feed the known data about reefs into a huge super-computer, type a few commands, push the ENTER key, and out would come the secrets of life on the reef. He gave it a whirl. What issued from the computer was not the reef’s trophic pyramid, the intricately drawn food web that the scientist had dreamed of, but billowing clouds of smoke.

Presented with such an impossible task, the super-computer had blown up.

The smoke is no doubt a touch of melodrama, a cinematic embellishment. (I’ve had several computers die in my arms, as it were, and there has never been so much as a wisp of smoke.) The entire story, in fact, sounds like just one more cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific hubris.

But knowing several scientists, and a bit about computers and their limits, I’m inclined to believe the general facts of the story. More important, having been around reefs for many years, first as a beach bum in the 1970s, and over the past few years as a more serious student of this most complex of all marine ecosystems, I am convinced of the tale’s essential validity.

Rachel Carson wrote many true and important things in her productive life, but nothing truer nor more important than this: “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I . . .” It is surely ignorance that defines our intellectual relationship with the ocean, and even that iridescent sliver of the sea called the coral reef remains a mystery to us. This, despite the fact that most reefs are close to shore and therefore by definition in shallow and accessible waters.

The source of our ignorance is two-fold: First, we are terrestrial beings and our study of life largely ends at the water’s edge, even though the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. Second, there is too much life on the coral reef ever to think that we know it fully.

Consider the ocean itself. Nothing on land prepares you for the dimensions of the world beneath the water. The deepest valleys on dry land become trifling nicks on the ocean floor. If engineers could build a structure as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep, six of the monoliths could be dropped into the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, one on top of the other- and the pile would still be nearly a mile from the water’s surface. Think of the Gulf Stream, the river of warm Caribbean water flowing north and east within the Atlantic Ocean. If you stood on the shoreline in the Canadian Maritimes facing out to sea, more Gulf Stream water would slip silently by you in one second than is contained in all the roaring rivers on Earth.

But the throng of life found in the ocean is even more impressive than its grand physical structures and sweeping currents. The sea is mother to all life on the planet. This lineage is most apparent in animals. There are 33 animal phyla (or major divisions of the animal kingdom). Thirty-two of them are found in the sea and only eleven of these are also found on land. There is a single animal phylum that is exclusively terrestrial (the Onychorphora, a small grouping of segmented wormlike organisms that live in tropical forests). This biodiversity makes sense since the oceans comprise 99.5% of the planet’s biosphere, or living space. The oceans have had not just space, but time working in their favor. Around three and one half billion years ago, while the young Earth’s atmosphere was still inimical to life, primitive bacteria formed in the ocean’s waters. Life in the sea had plenty of time to evolve into myriad forms- algae, seaweeds, jellyfish, sea urchins, fishes, all the major vertebrate groups, and, of course, corals- before the very simplest land plants first appeared around 400 million years ago.

There is no corner of the ocean that is alien to life, although early scientists believed that life existed only in the upper reaches of the oceans, where light penetrated- the “photic zone.” The British explorer Sir John Ross rocked the scientific world in 1818 when he hauled to the surface living organisms from the Arctic seabed over a mile down. Today, researchers are still discovering new marine life forms at ever-increasing depths. In the summer of 1996, scientists announced they had sequenced all the genes from a microorganism thriving several miles below the surface in the mineral-laden boiling water spewing from hydrothermal vents.

But while it is true that life exists everywhere in the ocean, nowhere is it so varied and so dynamic as it is on the coral reef. Despite the above, in comparison with the reef, the rest of the ocean is a desert. Although coral reefs comprise less than two tenths of one percent of the area of the global ocean, approximately a third of all marine fish species are found in this tiny zone. Even more remarkable, coral reefs are home to approximately a quarter of all marine species.

Coral reefs are literally overflowing with life- wherever you look on the reef you will find life in astonishing variety and abundance.

One example: On a single coral reef surrounding one tiny Australian island there are 1,000 known species of fishes. Zoom in closer: a scientist has counted 620 species of shrimp living on corals. Get even closer; go inside the coral. There, searching through a labyrinth of passageways within a single colony, an investigator found 103 separate species of a single kind of worm. Perusing scientific journals you can find dozens of equally compelling examples. But, for the sake of brevity, perhaps it’s better to just sum up: The reef is home to a spectacular yet unknown number of species of fishes, shrimps, worms, snails, crabs, lobsters, sea cucumbers, sea stars, urchins, anemones, sea squirts and sea plants- not to mention several hundred species of corals. The lowest scientific estimate is that reefs are home to about one million individual species. For the upper-end estimate multiply that number by nine.

The only terrestrial analog to the coral reef is the tropical rain forest. And, in fact, coral reefs are often referred to as “the rainforests of the sea.” But while rain forests outdo coral reefs in sheer numbers of species, reefs contain far more phyla than do rain forests. And bear in mind that rain forests cover twenty times more area than coral reefs.

If we were not so terrestrial in our thinking, we might do better to call rain forests the “coral reefs of the land.”

Life on the reef is so rich and varied that even the most fastidious scientists write with poetic abandon when describing this environment. In his 1930 lecture on “Coral Reefs and Atolls” delivered at Boston’s Lowell Institute, Cambridge University biologist J. Stanley Gardiner opened his description of coral reefs by extolling “The beauty of their immense wreaths of green floating upon the sea, brilliant ultramarine in the hot sun, the whole dappled with the cloud shadows. . .”

Several decades earlier, the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with CharlesDarwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was traveling through the Indonesian archipelago collecting beetles, birds and butterflies for sale and study. Wallace was taking a boat to his new base-camp on the island of Ambon in the eastern part of the chain when he looked over the side and saw in the water “one of the most astonishing and beautiful sights I have ever beheld.”

The bottom was absolutely hidden by a continuous series of corals, sponges, actiniæ [sea anemones] and other marine productions, of magnificent dimensions, varied forms, and brilliant colours. . . .In and out among [the rocks and living corals] moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusæ [jellyfish] floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a coral sea.

Notice Wallace’s slight dig at others who had been moved to write with passion about the beauty of reefs, with the implication that what Wallace saw in Ambon uniquely justified his own effusion. This, too, is typical of scientists after a close encounter with a coral reef. They find the rhetoric of others a bit . . . overstated, and they imply that if their own writing departs from the cooly analytical prose demanded of science, it is only because reality compels them.

Darwin himself set this pattern a couple of decades before Wallace. After complaining about the “rather exuberant language” of “naturalists who have described, in well-known words, the submarine grottoes decked with a thousand beauties. . .” the great scientist proceeds to rhapsodize on the miraculous nature of the coral atoll that arose before him in the Indian Ocean: “We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!”

Personally, I’m willing to excuse nearly all impassioned writing when it comes to reefs- and not merely so that I can pursue my own florid prose. The profusion and spectacular diversity of life found on coral reefs simply elicits this reaction in humans. The scientist Gardiner was probably right when he said “There is something in the psychology of mankind to which coral reefs never fail to appeal.”

Like love, the coral reef is a great mystery that sweeps over us, bypassing our rational minds entirely and eliciting feelings we didn’t know were in us. The experience can be overwhelming. The head of an environmental organization devoted to preserving Florida’s reef once told me that the first time he dived in a “forest” of elkhorn coral he was so moved that he hyperventilated and almost drowned. I know the feeling. I was snorkeling on the reef which surrounds Australia’s Heron Island, just one of the nearly 3,000 coral reefs that make up the 1,400 mile-long chain known, collectively, as the Great Barrier Reef. I made my way out toward the reef crest an hour before sunset, when daylight creatures were still active. (The reef is like a factory, with day and night shifts, separated by a thirty-minute “quiet period” when few fish of either shift are seen.) On the lagoon bottom, the sheltered and shallow reach between the island and the reef crest, there were innumerable black sea cucumbers, each up to a yard long, feeling their way slowly across the sand and leaving behind elongated fecal pellets of pure sand- more pure than the sand which had entered their mouths, because the creatures remove most organic matter. Soon, the sandy bottom gave way to a rockier environment. I drifted over a New Caledonian sea star- more commonly, but mistakenly, called a “starfish”- with an intricate mosaic of orange and yellow, the lines so finely drawn that it resembled cloisonne jewelry. I stopped to gently pick up a bright blue sea star, its long arms draped over algae encrusted rock. I had expected it to go limp in my hands, but the creature was more rigid than I had expected- its five appendages retained the shape of the rock. I turned the sea star over in time to see its dozens of tubed-feet retract along a groove that radiated down each arm. I returned the blue sea star to its perch and swam on, passing over yet another, but very different kind of sea star- a cushion star. It’s mosaic pattern was brown and green, but the creature lacked apparent arms, looking like what its name suggests, a five-sided cushion. Cone shells, beautifully patterned but venomous snails capable of firing a poisoned tooth from one end of their shell, crawled over the hard bottom, in search of a meal, probably worms or perhaps small fish. A honeycomb eel poked its black and white head out from its rocky den to see who wascoming by and then slowly withdrew.

As I continued swimming in a line perpendicular to the beach, a juvenile green sea turtle appeared from the right, spotted me, and veered off gracefully in the opposite direction, looking more like a bird than the reptile it is (but birds descended from reptiles, so the impression was apt). I must have approached the reef crest for all at once living corals were everywhere, in the amazing variety of color and form that Wallace had described. Leatherlike greenish corals, the colony folded-in on itself many time. Large table-tops of lacy coral structures, comprised of perhaps a million individuals, their tiny tentacles still withdrawn and waiting for darkness. Blue-tipped corals, and others with a reddish tint.

And strewn around the bottom, like upside-down mushrooms, Fungia corals.

Fishes were everywhere, too. An orange-and-white striped clownfish peered out from a tangle of purple-tipped stinging tentacles belonging to a sea anemone. Curiosity got the better of him and as long as I remained immobile, the clownfish inched his way toward me. As soon as I moved, however, he tore back into the safety of the tentacles, like a base runner tagging up. A black-tipped reef shark swam lazily by, the prominent bulge of her abdomen identifying her as a pregnant female. After moving out of range the shark returned, eyed me for a moment and disappeared again. Multicolored wrasses poked in and out of holes. Angelfishes of many varieties nibbled bits of algae from rocks and coral. Large, gaudily-colored parrotfishes did more than nibble at the coral. They bit off entire chunks of coral, hard skeleton and all, using their fused beak-like front teeth and grinding up the mixture of limestone, algae and soft coral tissue with a specialized rock-hard device called a pharyngeal mill, located at the back of the throat. (One coral scientist has described the parrotfish’s unique ability this way: “They’d eat a McDonald’s parking lot to get the grease out of it.”)

My favorite among the fish were the many species of boxfish, probably because their sharp-edged rectangular shape, the result of fused-skeletal armor plates, seemed so unlikely. And perhaps I liked these fishes, among the most highly evolved in the sea, because they seemed as curious about my form as I did about theirs, allowing me to approach quite close, sometimes initiating the contact themselves.

Intent on following a particularly colorful boxfish, I nearly swam right into a huge round table of coral- Acropora valenciennesi, an spectacularly well-branched variety that, from a few feet away, looks like the world’s largest rack of elk antlers. The colony was round and dotted with dozens of species of multicolored fishes looping in and out of the white-tipped “antlers.” I swam above, and hovered there, mesmerized. I lost track of time. With my arms and legs fully extended, my toes and fingers just barely reached the perimeter described by the circular colony. I felt like the man in the famous da Vinci drawing, the sketch of a man with legs and arms similarly outstretched and conforming to a perfect circle.

I floated there at the reef’s edge. It was now the cusp of day and night. Below me was a perfect living circle of slender-branched corals, their tiny gelatinous tentacles just now beginning to emerge for their nighttime feeding from a colony that was precisely my size. Above, if I turned my head, I could see a few faint stars venturing out, like the coral polyps below, into the tropical twilight. And rather than feeling alien in this exotic world, I was filled with the opposite sensation: I felt completely, if inexplicably, at home, as if I belonged there as much the fishes or the sea cucumbers or the corals. It was as if all those years on land had been the sojourn in foreign territory and now, on the reef, I had arrived back home.

What lay behind those feeling, so irrational, but at the same time, so strong? Was it a genetic memory- the response of an animal whose ancestors, the earliest amphibians, had first lumbered out of these waters some 370 million years ago? Was it an emotional response to the overwhelming beauty of the place? Perhaps the exertion of swimming a kilometer had stimulated my pituitary gland to release an abundance of endorphins and these feelings were merely a side effect of a brain drunk on neurotransmitters. I don’t know. All I know was that in that moment I didn’t want to return to land, ever.

But, of course I did return. I swam slowly and regretfully back to shore, cursing my lack of gills all the way. I passed two huge octopuses, mottled red and white, who, as I approached, blanched completely white and reared up, their heads as big as basketballs. These shy creatures, molluscs without shells, are able to change their skin color, by contracting or expanding specialized cells called chromatophores, each one containing minute sacks of dye. The ghostly twins held their ground, literally, their sixteen tentacles (eight apiece) sliding nervously through holes in the rock as they directed large and human-like eyes at me. I moved off slowly. I was so excited about this excursion that when I had almost reached the beach I did a spontaneous somersault in the water- nearly landing on two huge rays resting on the sandy bottom. Climbing at last onto the beach, I lay there for a long time, exhausted and exhilarated and still under the reef’s spell, looking up into a sky slowly being set ablaze with stars.

There is a word to describe what Gardiner, Wallace, Darwin and the rest of us have felt when in the presence of the reef: “awe.” Confronted with the reef, awe is the most appropriate response. It is probably in our nature.

It is also, apparently, in our nature to destroy that which we hold in awe.

Perhaps we want to subdue whatever arouses those powerful feelings of awe, to master it, so that we are no longer threatened by such primal emotions. I’ll leave that one to psychologists and philosophers. Regardless of the motivation, however, we are doing a rather good job of destroying coral reefs around the world. According to the recent estimates, “about 10 percent [of the worlds’ coral reefs] have already been degraded beyond recovery and another 30 percent are likely to decline significantly within the next 20 years.” In some areas, human activity has destroyed entire reefs, converting them into algae-covered rubble. Who knows what species, the known and the unknown alike, have already been wiped out? Who can say which ones will be winking out in the near future, their intricate genetic codes, formed over millennia, suddenly terminated, their potential for medical and other human uses forever gone, their role, perhaps key to the complex patterns within the reef community, ended? Like so much else about the coral reefs, we don’t know the answers to these questions. But we had better start looking for them, for a lot is riding on those answers.

The reef and our bond to it makes a fine metaphor for our larger relationship with nature. But there is more going on here than metaphors. For a variety of reasons, which I will attempt to explain throughout this book, our fate is bound up with that of the reef.

Of course, if we are to save the reefs, we must understand them better. But here we have come full circle. We have returned to our initial question, the one that faced our computer-reliant ecologist:

How do you comprehend something as complex as the coral reef?

Probably the only way is to start at the beginning. You contemplate the simplest, the most fundamental element of the coral reef. You begin with the individual coral polyp and move outward from there.

Copyright © 1998 Osha Gray Davidson

The Enchanted Braid

by Osha Gray Davidson

Osha Gray DavidsonPulitzer Prize nominee, Osha Gray Davidson writes on a wide range of topics including the environment and natural history, race relations and other social and human rights issues. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The Progressive, Woman’s Day, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and many other publications. Davidson is also a screenwriter and a member of the Writers Guild of America, West. He is co-writer of the IMAX® film Coral Reef Adventure.

The following is the incredible first chapter of Osha’s engaging book, The Enchanted Braid: Coming To Terms With Nature On The Coral Reef. This chapter was the inspiration behind Coral Reef Report.

“Who Has Known the Ocean?”

There is a story about an ecologist who thought he had found a way to decipher the coral reef. He believed that all he needed to do was to feed the known data about reefs into a huge super-computer, type a few commands, push the ENTER key, and out would come the secrets of life on the reef. He gave it a whirl. What issued from the computer was not the reef’s trophic pyramid, the intricately drawn food web that the scientist had dreamed of, but billowing clouds of smoke.

Presented with such an impossible task, the super-computer had blown up.

The smoke is no doubt a touch of melodrama, a cinematic embellishment. (I’ve had several computers die in my arms, as it were, and there has never been so much as a wisp of smoke.) The entire story, in fact, sounds like just one more cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific hubris.

But knowing several scientists, and a bit about computers and their limits, I’m inclined to believe the general facts of the story. More important, having been around reefs for many years, first as a beach bum in the 1970s, and over the past few years as a more serious student of this most complex of all marine ecosystems, I am convinced of the tale’s essential validity.

Rachel Carson wrote many true and important things in her productive life, but nothing truer nor more important than this: “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I . . .” It is surely ignorance that defines our intellectual relationship with the ocean, and even that iridescent sliver of the sea called the coral reef remains a mystery to us. This, despite the fact that most reefs are close to shore and therefore by definition in shallow and accessible waters.

The source of our ignorance is two-fold: First, we are terrestrial beings and our study of life largely ends at the water’s edge, even though the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. Second, there is too much life on the coral reef ever to think that we know it fully.

Consider the ocean itself. Nothing on land prepares you for the dimensions of the world beneath the water. The deepest valleys on dry land become trifling nicks on the ocean floor. If engineers could build a structure as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep, six of the monoliths could be dropped into the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, one on top of the other- and the pile would still be nearly a mile from the water’s surface. Think of the Gulf Stream, the river of warm Caribbean water flowing north and east within the Atlantic Ocean. If you stood on the shoreline in the Canadian Maritimes facing out to sea, more Gulf Stream water would slip silently by you in one second than is contained in all the roaring rivers on Earth.

But the throng of life found in the ocean is even more impressive than its grand physical structures and sweeping currents. The sea is mother to all life on the planet. This lineage is most apparent in animals. There are 33 animal phyla (or major divisions of the animal kingdom). Thirty-two of them are found in the sea and only eleven of these are also found on land. There is a single animal phylum that is exclusively terrestrial (the Onychorphora, a small grouping of segmented wormlike organisms that live in tropical forests). This biodiversity makes sense since the oceans comprise 99.5% of the planet’s biosphere, or living space. The oceans have had not just space, but time working in their favor. Around three and one half billion years ago, while the young Earth’s atmosphere was still inimical to life, primitive bacteria formed in the ocean’s waters. Life in the sea had plenty of time to evolve into myriad forms- algae, seaweeds, jellyfish, sea urchins, fishes, all the major vertebrate groups, and, of course, corals- before the very simplest land plants first appeared around 400 million years ago.

There is no corner of the ocean that is alien to life, although early scientists believed that life existed only in the upper reaches of the oceans, where light penetrated- the “photic zone.” The British explorer Sir John Ross rocked the scientific world in 1818 when he hauled to the surface living organisms from the Arctic seabed over a mile down. Today, researchers are still discovering new marine life forms at ever-increasing depths. In the summer of 1996, scientists announced they had sequenced all the genes from a microorganism thriving several miles below the surface in the mineral-laden boiling water spewing from hydrothermal vents.

But while it is true that life exists everywhere in the ocean, nowhere is it so varied and so dynamic as it is on the coral reef. Despite the above, in comparison with the reef, the rest of the ocean is a desert. Although coral reefs comprise less than two tenths of one percent of the area of the global ocean, approximately a third of all marine fish species are found in this tiny zone. Even more remarkable, coral reefs are home to approximately a quarter of all marine species.

Coral reefs are literally overflowing with life- wherever you look on the reef you will find life in astonishing variety and abundance.

One example: On a single coral reef surrounding one tiny Australian island there are 1,000 known species of fishes. Zoom in closer: a scientist has counted 620 species of shrimp living on corals. Get even closer; go inside the coral. There, searching through a labyrinth of passageways within a single colony, an investigator found 103 separate species of a single kind of worm. Perusing scientific journals you can find dozens of equally compelling examples. But, for the sake of brevity, perhaps it’s better to just sum up: The reef is home to a spectacular yet unknown number of species of fishes, shrimps, worms, snails, crabs, lobsters, sea cucumbers, sea stars, urchins, anemones, sea squirts and sea plants- not to mention several hundred species of corals. The lowest scientific estimate is that reefs are home to about one million individual species. For the upper-end estimate multiply that number by nine.

The only terrestrial analog to the coral reef is the tropical rain forest. And, in fact, coral reefs are often referred to as “the rainforests of the sea.” But while rain forests outdo coral reefs in sheer numbers of species, reefs contain far more phyla than do rain forests. And bear in mind that rain forests cover twenty times more area than coral reefs.

If we were not so terrestrial in our thinking, we might do better to call rain forests the “coral reefs of the land.”

Life on the reef is so rich and varied that even the most fastidious scientists write with poetic abandon when describing this environment. In his 1930 lecture on “Coral Reefs and Atolls” delivered at Boston’s Lowell Institute, Cambridge University biologist J. Stanley Gardiner opened his description of coral reefs by extolling “The beauty of their immense wreaths of green floating upon the sea, brilliant ultramarine in the hot sun, the whole dappled with the cloud shadows. . .”

Several decades earlier, the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with CharlesDarwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was traveling through the Indonesian archipelago collecting beetles, birds and butterflies for sale and study. Wallace was taking a boat to his new base-camp on the island of Ambon in the eastern part of the chain when he looked over the side and saw in the water “one of the most astonishing and beautiful sights I have ever beheld.”

The bottom was absolutely hidden by a continuous series of corals, sponges, actiniæ [sea anemones] and other marine productions, of magnificent dimensions, varied forms, and brilliant colours. . . .In and out among [the rocks and living corals] moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusæ [jellyfish] floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a coral sea.

Notice Wallace’s slight dig at others who had been moved to write with passion about the beauty of reefs, with the implication that what Wallace saw in Ambon uniquely justified his own effusion. This, too, is typical of scientists after a close encounter with a coral reef. They find the rhetoric of others a bit . . . overstated, and they imply that if their own writing departs from the cooly analytical prose demanded of science, it is only because reality compels them.

Darwin himself set this pattern a couple of decades before Wallace. After complaining about the “rather exuberant language” of “naturalists who have described, in well-known words, the submarine grottoes decked with a thousand beauties. . .” the great scientist proceeds to rhapsodize on the miraculous nature of the coral atoll that arose before him in the Indian Ocean: “We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!”

Personally, I’m willing to excuse nearly all impassioned writing when it comes to reefs- and not merely so that I can pursue my own florid prose. The profusion and spectacular diversity of life found on coral reefs simply elicits this reaction in humans. The scientist Gardiner was probably right when he said “There is something in the psychology of mankind to which coral reefs never fail to appeal.”

Like love, the coral reef is a great mystery that sweeps over us, bypassing our rational minds entirely and eliciting feelings we didn’t know were in us. The experience can be overwhelming. The head of an environmental organization devoted to preserving Florida’s reef once told me that the first time he dived in a “forest” of elkhorn coral he was so moved that he hyperventilated and almost drowned. I know the feeling. I was snorkeling on the reef which surrounds Australia’s Heron Island, just one of the nearly 3,000 coral reefs that make up the 1,400 mile-long chain known, collectively, as the Great Barrier Reef. I made my way out toward the reef crest an hour before sunset, when daylight creatures were still active. (The reef is like a factory, with day and night shifts, separated by a thirty-minute “quiet period” when few fish of either shift are seen.) On the lagoon bottom, the sheltered and shallow reach between the island and the reef crest, there were innumerable black sea cucumbers, each up to a yard long, feeling their way slowly across the sand and leaving behind elongated fecal pellets of pure sand- more pure than the sand which had entered their mouths, because the creatures remove most organic matter. Soon, the sandy bottom gave way to a rockier environment. I drifted over a New Caledonian sea star- more commonly, but mistakenly, called a “starfish”- with an intricate mosaic of orange and yellow, the lines so finely drawn that it resembled cloisonne jewelry. I stopped to gently pick up a bright blue sea star, its long arms draped over algae encrusted rock. I had expected it to go limp in my hands, but the creature was more rigid than I had expected- its five appendages retained the shape of the rock. I turned the sea star over in time to see its dozens of tubed-feet retract along a groove that radiated down each arm. I returned the blue sea star to its perch and swam on, passing over yet another, but very different kind of sea star- a cushion star. It’s mosaic pattern was brown and green, but the creature lacked apparent arms, looking like what its name suggests, a five-sided cushion. Cone shells, beautifully patterned but venomous snails capable of firing a poisoned tooth from one end of their shell, crawled over the hard bottom, in search of a meal, probably worms or perhaps small fish. A honeycomb eel poked its black and white head out from its rocky den to see who wascoming by and then slowly withdrew.

As I continued swimming in a line perpendicular to the beach, a juvenile green sea turtle appeared from the right, spotted me, and veered off gracefully in the opposite direction, looking more like a bird than the reptile it is (but birds descended from reptiles, so the impression was apt). I must have approached the reef crest for all at once living corals were everywhere, in the amazing variety of color and form that Wallace had described. Leatherlike greenish corals, the colony folded-in on itself many time. Large table-tops of lacy coral structures, comprised of perhaps a million individuals, their tiny tentacles still withdrawn and waiting for darkness. Blue-tipped corals, and others with a reddish tint.

And strewn around the bottom, like upside-down mushrooms, Fungia corals.

Fishes were everywhere, too. An orange-and-white striped clownfish peered out from a tangle of purple-tipped stinging tentacles belonging to a sea anemone. Curiosity got the better of him and as long as I remained immobile, the clownfish inched his way toward me. As soon as I moved, however, he tore back into the safety of the tentacles, like a base runner tagging up. A black-tipped reef shark swam lazily by, the prominent bulge of her abdomen identifying her as a pregnant female. After moving out of range the shark returned, eyed me for a moment and disappeared again. Multicolored wrasses poked in and out of holes. Angelfishes of many varieties nibbled bits of algae from rocks and coral. Large, gaudily-colored parrotfishes did more than nibble at the coral. They bit off entire chunks of coral, hard skeleton and all, using their fused beak-like front teeth and grinding up the mixture of limestone, algae and soft coral tissue with a specialized rock-hard device called a pharyngeal mill, located at the back of the throat. (One coral scientist has described the parrotfish’s unique ability this way: “They’d eat a McDonald’s parking lot to get the grease out of it.”)

My favorite among the fish were the many species of boxfish, probably because their sharp-edged rectangular shape, the result of fused-skeletal armor plates, seemed so unlikely. And perhaps I liked these fishes, among the most highly evolved in the sea, because they seemed as curious about my form as I did about theirs, allowing me to approach quite close, sometimes initiating the contact themselves.

Intent on following a particularly colorful boxfish, I nearly swam right into a huge round table of coral- Acropora valenciennesi, an spectacularly well-branched variety that, from a few feet away, looks like the world’s largest rack of elk antlers. The colony was round and dotted with dozens of species of multicolored fishes looping in and out of the white-tipped “antlers.” I swam above, and hovered there, mesmerized. I lost track of time. With my arms and legs fully extended, my toes and fingers just barely reached the perimeter described by the circular colony. I felt like the man in the famous da Vinci drawing, the sketch of a man with legs and arms similarly outstretched and conforming to a perfect circle.

I floated there at the reef’s edge. It was now the cusp of day and night. Below me was a perfect living circle of slender-branched corals, their tiny gelatinous tentacles just now beginning to emerge for their nighttime feeding from a colony that was precisely my size. Above, if I turned my head, I could see a few faint stars venturing out, like the coral polyps below, into the tropical twilight. And rather than feeling alien in this exotic world, I was filled with the opposite sensation: I felt completely, if inexplicably, at home, as if I belonged there as much the fishes or the sea cucumbers or the corals. It was as if all those years on land had been the sojourn in foreign territory and now, on the reef, I had arrived back home.

What lay behind those feeling, so irrational, but at the same time, so strong? Was it a genetic memory- the response of an animal whose ancestors, the earliest amphibians, had first lumbered out of these waters some 370 million years ago? Was it an emotional response to the overwhelming beauty of the place? Perhaps the exertion of swimming a kilometer had stimulated my pituitary gland to release an abundance of endorphins and these feelings were merely a side effect of a brain drunk on neurotransmitters. I don’t know. All I know was that in that moment I didn’t want to return to land, ever.

But, of course I did return. I swam slowly and regretfully back to shore, cursing my lack of gills all the way. I passed two huge octopuses, mottled red and white, who, as I approached, blanched completely white and reared up, their heads as big as basketballs. These shy creatures, molluscs without shells, are able to change their skin color, by contracting or expanding specialized cells called chromatophores, each one containing minute sacks of dye. The ghostly twins held their ground, literally, their sixteen tentacles (eight apiece) sliding nervously through holes in the rock as they directed large and human-like eyes at me. I moved off slowly. I was so excited about this excursion that when I had almost reached the beach I did a spontaneous somersault in the water- nearly landing on two huge rays resting on the sandy bottom. Climbing at last onto the beach, I lay there for a long time, exhausted and exhilarated and still under the reef’s spell, looking up into a sky slowly being set ablaze with stars.

There is a word to describe what Gardiner, Wallace, Darwin and the rest of us have felt when in the presence of the reef: “awe.” Confronted with the reef, awe is the most appropriate response. It is probably in our nature.

It is also, apparently, in our nature to destroy that which we hold in awe.

Perhaps we want to subdue whatever arouses those powerful feelings of awe, to master it, so that we are no longer threatened by such primal emotions. I’ll leave that one to psychologists and philosophers. Regardless of the motivation, however, we are doing a rather good job of destroying coral reefs around the world. According to the recent estimates, “about 10 percent [of the worlds’ coral reefs] have already been degraded beyond recovery and another 30 percent are likely to decline significantly within the next 20 years.” In some areas, human activity has destroyed entire reefs, converting them into algae-covered rubble. Who knows what species, the known and the unknown alike, have already been wiped out? Who can say which ones will be winking out in the near future, their intricate genetic codes, formed over millennia, suddenly terminated, their potential for medical and other human uses forever gone, their role, perhaps key to the complex patterns within the reef community, ended? Like so much else about the coral reefs, we don’t know the answers to these questions. But we had better start looking for them, for a lot is riding on those answers.

The reef and our bond to it makes a fine metaphor for our larger relationship with nature. But there is more going on here than metaphors. For a variety of reasons, which I will attempt to explain throughout this book, our fate is bound up with that of the reef.

Of course, if we are to save the reefs, we must understand them better. But here we have come full circle. We have returned to our initial question, the one that faced our computer-reliant ecologist:

How do you comprehend something as complex as the coral reef?

Probably the only way is to start at the beginning. You contemplate the simplest, the most fundamental element of the coral reef. You begin with the individual coral polyp and move outward from there.

Copyright © 1998 Osha Gray Davidson

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