This is a podcast at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at
UC San Diego. Fewer and fewer places on Earth can be considered pristine--
from the Carribean to Antarctica. The impact of human influences more and more
apparent in areas that were considered so remote
or so vast that it seemed impervious to the encroachment of society.
Around the world, coral reefs that were once thriving with abundant populations of
marine life
are being threatened by overfishing, pollution, and global ocean warming.
Such areas are now being overtaken by algae and bacteria.
They now face declines in fish and invertebrate populations
and poor water conditions. In fact, scientists now say that virtually all
of the coral reef ecosystems that have been studied to date
haven't given us a true picture what they should look like. To find out how
coral reefs appear in there pristine state,
scientists would need the ability to go back in time prior to the influence of
humankinds
or the researchers would have to find that rarest of places-- a location untouched
by humans
or as close to it as possible. In 2005, scientists at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography began doing just that.
During the line Islands expedition, the researchers found a chain of islands in
the Central Pacific Ocean
where coral reef systems could be observed and analyzed as never before.
In Part I of Paradise Redefined, marine ecologists, Enric Sala and Stuart Sandin,
described their thousand-mile journey.
How it felt diving among sharks and other curious fishes
and what it was like exploring a place like no other on Earth.
A few years ago we were invited by the Nature Conservancy to
be part of the Palmyra research consortium.
Palmyra is an atoll in the middle of the Pacific, a thousand-miles south of Hawaii,
and we thought it was unimpacted by humans. So we decided
to join this effort because we thought that that would be a great place to understand
what coral reefs look like before we degraded them.
We put together a team of 15 scientists from microbiologists
to fish ecologists and we realized that
Palmyra was located in an archipelago the: the Northern Line Islands with 5 islands,
located along a perfect gradient. Kingman Reef,
no inhabitants, Palmyra, twenty people, Washington, 900 people,
Fanning Atoll, 2500, and Christmas Atoll,
5000. So that was the perfect experimental situation
to understand what increasing number of humans can do to the coral reef ecosystem.
Our expedition was like a dream back in time.
We went from a reef that is degraded, looks like most modern coral reefs,
to a reef that is visually pristine, a reef the looks
like the ocean was like before human started invading it.
The majority a marine ecology today is conducted on
appreciably disturbed coral reefs. Most humans
have been affecting coral reefs for centuries
and the structure is changed in most locations.
For the Scripps Line Islands expedition, our goal was to find out what's been
lost.
To take something of a time machine to the past, for how
coral reefs use to look in the absence of human disturbance.
Although it's easy to sample coral reefs
in places where people are you can find hardware stores,
boats, food nearby to places where people live
and you can study those coral reefs. But, unfortunately, we generate a lot of that
food from the coral reef itself.
So for us to find a coral reef in the absence of human disturbance, we had to
find a coral reef in the absence of humans.
To get to the Line Island's destination, the expedition team hired the White Holly--
a former US Navy Yard freighter ship. Life on board the vessel spartan at best,
but the researchers didn't mind. They were simply too busy to contemplate their
discomfort and
their thoughts slowly became dominated by the next day's dives.
The thing that impressed me the most about our crew was the
enthusiasm of these people. We did 3
dives a day for five weeks. We conducted over 800 dives
and there was not a single argument among scientists.
There was, of course, a lot of scientific discussion but
it was just a really, really
compact team. We had a mission and everybody was responsible for one
piece and we did the field work. We woke up at
six in the morning, seven morning and we went to bed at midnight
for 5 week straight. And everybody was happy and everybody was
absolutely enthusiastic about what they were doing and when we came back
we got all together and tried to put all these pieces of the puzzle together
and the result was much greater than the sum of the parts. We started with the most disturbed island
and we continued
along the atolls with less and less human disturbance
and all that did was excite the scientists. It excited our entire team
then when we showed up and saw our first shark for the cruise
that was an excitement and we popped up and started discussing that when we saw
the coral cover start to increase.
When we found new species of fish, of corals, when we were able to document
that the water clarity was increasing with decreasing human disturbance.
All of the patterns we found actually kept us motivated to find more, to learn more.
Until we finally reached Kingman Reef, which is at the far north
and suffered the least human disturbance of any of the Line Islands.
When I dove in Kingman Reef for the first time, I must have felt
what Charles Darwin felt when he stepped in the Galapagos
for the first time. Animals don't swim away from you,
they are not used to see humans. So you jump in the water,
and you turn around and you see 10-15 sharks
surrounding you. Your heart beat double
immediately and the shark are with you
during the whole dive. And there are red snappers that grow about
80 centimeters. They are so curious and they come and check
you and test if you taste good. And these guys
bit our ponytails, our ears, our transit rails, our lines.
They were very, very curious or mildly
aggressive if you wish. We were used to coral reefs
that were dominated by small fishes, about this big.
Now we go to Kingman Reef and fish in coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific
and what you see is that this fish is are not so violent.
And in contrast we have lots of sharks,
lots of large snappers and groupers, so what we find in Kingman reef is like the
Serengeti
turn around with five pounds of lion per pound of wildebeest or zebra.
I think that the Line Islands expedition
this one, and the coming expeditions
are going to be remembered for the rediscovery of exploratory science;
for the rediscovery
of the understanding that we don't know everything that's out there
and for our final understanding,
that humans have had a hugely dramatic
impact on coral reef communities globally. To date, we haven't known this
we've been studying places that are already disturbed and we think that
that's our
that's the way that reefs should look. A typical diver that goes to the Caribbean
may see one, two sharks
and and think they're dive trip was a good trip. They don't realize that
150 years ago, 200 years ago, that they couldn't have even jumped in the water
because of all the shark activity that was there.
The community was a lot different. What the Line Islands expedition is offering
is that window, that view to the past
the way the coral reefs used to look. Join us for part two
of Paradise Redefined as the scientists discuss the results of the Line Islands expedition.
The discoveries are leading to new ideas about how coral reefs can withstand the
rebound from harmful influences.
Their data could guide future decisions about marine conservation
and ways to preserve marine resources for the future.
This is Robert Monroe for Scripps Institution of Oceanography
at UC San Diego.