Scientist at Work Blog: Living Reefs, Under Fire

Drew Harvell is associate director for environment at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. She is studying the health of coral reefs and marine ecosystems in Indonesia.

Friday, Jan. 18

It was hardly a cheerful group that settled onto the flight from Ujung Padang (also known as Makassar, Sulawesi) to Biak, Papua, at 1:30 in the morning, nor that trooped off the plane 2 1/2 hours later. But we snapped awake when we reached the hotel at 5 a.m. to find grass-skirted, bare-chested and head-dressed men gathered in a lovely old Kipling-esque hotel, signaling that we had reached a remote place in the world.

Biak is an island to the far north east of Papua, exposed directly to the fetch of the Pacific. It is both a site for a collection of COREMAP village-based Marine Protected Areas and one of three possible sites in Indonesia for the new Capturing Coral Reef Ecosystem Services project.

We had arrived to interview stakeholders about how to enhance ecosystem services, like the health of mangroves, seagrasses and coral reefs, and develop eco-based businesses. An eco-based business is one that contributes to sustaining ecosystems while simultaneously increasing their economic value.

All four people on our dive team have dedicated their lives to studying, managing and now conserving coral reefs. Peter Mumby is the president of the Australian Coral Reef Society and principal investigator on C.C.R.E.S. Jamaluddin Jompa from Indonesia is the executive director of COREMAP, one of the largest coral reef management programs in the world. And Andrew Hooten is coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

Our goal for today was to visit the best and the worst reefs near Biak. We wanted to see the best reefs to consider their tourism and ecosystem services potential. For example, we had to assess: how healthy are the corals, how apparent is the biodiversity, and would the area support a sustainable reef fishery?

Even though Biak?s coral reefs are remote from oppressive, population-related stresses, like pollution and regular over-fishing, the reefs near Biak have been affected by dynamite fishing.

We had to travel more than an hour by boat to reach the best reef. Above water, we stopped near a stunning, deserted tropical rock island.

Underwater, our site, like many that I?ve seen in Indonesia, was a steep drop-off reef, with a wall stretching from 15 feet below the surface to more than 200 feet. The current was rapid, so this was going to be a drift dive, and by the end we managed to cover nearly a kilometer underwater.

As I edged over the drop-off, I could see this was a spectacular reef from anyone?s perspective ? clear, clean water and a dazzling array of coral reef fish.

Let?s talk about the fish, because this is how a reef should be, especially one near the center of coral and fish biodiversity in Indonesia. The makers of ?Finding Nemo? had it right when they picked the clownfish as their star ? nothing is as enchanting as a family group of brightly colored clownfish nestled restlessly in the tentacles of a giant anemone. The image says so clearly, ?This reef is my home.?

And there was a non-stop succession of giant anemones, with their resident clownfish, arrayed along the top of the wall. But there is nothing ordinary about seeing three different species of clownfish. By the end of the dive, I had about 30 pictures of the different species, but in most pictures the shy clownfish had ducked into an anemone?s tentacles as I shot.

But this was only the beginning, since there were so many bright fish at all levels of the food chain. From the parrotfish grazing on algae to the coral-eating butterflyfish to the spectacularly bright plankton-eating chromis hiding nervously in the branching corals to the lurking moray eels, the scene was a multihued circus of fish. And below us in deeper water lurked a cadre of much larger predatory fish that I couldn?t even identify.

We were rushed along by the current at a pretty good clip ? fast enough that stopping wasn?t possible without grabbing for a rock outcrop. The wall was covered in rich reef-building corals that are solar-powered by their symbiotic algae, but also a myriad of brightly colored marine invertebrates like sponges, and sea squirts and soft corals that were dependent on the current to bring them food. And lots of overhangs and holes creating lobster condominiums, revealed by long antennae poking from the reef matrix.

Up ahead I saw a flash of white on the reef and grabbed an overhang to take a closer look. The coral colony was completely white, with all living tissue newly stripped off. Usually this kind of mortality is caused by either a predatory starfish called the crown of thorns starfish, or COTS, or a predatory coral-feeding snail or some kinds of coral diseases. In this case there were several dead corals of different species, and there lurking on an overhang was the culprit, a spiney COTS. During an outbreak, a group of COTS can devastate a reef, but this one was not causing much damage on this healthy reef.

So that was the good ? a reef inhabited by a brighter diversity of fish and invertebrates than I had ever seen.

And now onto the bad reef, which was just a short hop, one island over from our first dive site. It is interesting how much you can tell about how your buddies feel underwater just by their posture and the way they move. This whole team underwater was visibly subdued, deflated and discouraged by the vast expanse of dead coral rubble that we saw.

This wasn?t just any reef, this was a far remote reef in the center of marine biodiversity. We just looked at the rubble, scattered with occasional fish and solitary coral heads, with very heavy hearts. It was poignant to see that there were still fish clustered in the islands and pockets of still-living reef among the rubble. I only saw one solitary clownfish on its anemone, surrounded by rubble, and it was once again sad that it was even there, still alive, but all alone.

There were those nasty, coral-eating starfish pests, COTS, but the one we pried out of the reef had lost half its arms, so I even felt bad for the COTS. We all felt shell-shocked and devastated.

So much of my work focuses on the ?death by a thousand cuts? problem ? how to make reefs healthy that are subject to many degrading forces that are tough to combat like pollution, over-fishing, and climate change. But here, this reef had been reduced in a matter of minutes to complete rubble by a few people wielding dynamite ? people often from places distant to the bombed location. And it was reduced to rubble, for as far as we swam that day.

This reef no longer has any ecosystem services: it?s not valuable for fishing, for tourism, for filtration and certainly not as a coastal protection against surging waves or tsunamis.

This is the crux of our job here ? to translate and make tangible the value of a living reef, and help all to see how much more valuable a cathedral of nature is than a pile of rubble.

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/living-reefs-under-fire/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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