by Carl Safina
Rob van Woesik gestures and says over the engine noise and wind, “These islands—I never get enough.” Van Woesik is tall, Australian-born, late forties, with a soft, almost woofy voice. He’s well-read outside of science. He started as a commercial fisherman and followed his curiosity along a winding path that took him to academia. He spent eight years as a professor in Japan, earning such respect from his colleagues that a retiring professor bequeathed him his entire personal library, including books two centuries old.
From behind the vines, yawning, partially hidden caves harbor rusting remnants of Japanese cannons, relics of horrific fighting here in World War II. When Japan disarmed, its strategy for conquest took a new tack. Our boat displays a sticker announcing that it comes courtesy of Japan. Computers in the lab proclaim, “Technological Cooperation from the Government of Japan.” But there is a price: complicity. Palau, which has never been involved in hunting whales, has joined the International Whaling Commission at Japan’s behest, where its votes support Japan’s festering whale hunts. It trades its votes for boats but harms the world consensus. As the world gropes toward democratic agreement on the conserving of nature with bodies like the International Whaling Commission and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, Japan stacks the deck with jokers and wild cards, countries paid to subvert the whole intent of these bodies whose purpose is to debate and decide how much to use or to conserve. Or, as it’s done with tuna fishing, Japan votes on limits and then simply cheats; it has been been convicted of systematically overfishing its quota of Southern Bluefin Tuna. Japan isn’t the only country hunting whales. Iceland and Norway do, and even the United States permits some whale killing by Native people. Japan is just the only government that operates so dishonestly, undermining the broad consensus of the rest of the world and the other nations’ ability to honestly debate the matter. The U.S. government was for years as dishonest and disruptive about climate change. At least the United States has improved on that issue.
* * *
We exit the Rock Islands, traveling across lime-green flats to a channel that takes us outside Palau’s great ring of reef. The open Pacific Ocean seems surprised to find an atoll here, and does not so much greet the coast as attack it. A ragged line of snarling surf roars across the reef’s crest.
We anchor in the swells. Our boat driver assesses how the hook is holding, then stuffs a new wad of betel nut into his cheek and relaxes. We splash in and descend. The water—warm: 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28°C).
I land almost on top of a sea cucumber that looks like a slow-crawling caterpillar the size of a loaf of French bread. Visibility out here is over one hundred feet. The crest we’re on slopes to an abrupt vertical wall, plunging to true abyss. The current, insistent, pushy, makes this a tricky spot to dive. One moment you’re over reef corals almost close enough to touch. One lick seaward and you’re in open ocean, staring into blue-black water thousands of feet deep, silhouetted for any Tiger or Bull Sharks below like a roast pig at a banquet. It’s intense.
The bewildering array of corals instantly overwhelms. And the thing is: ten years ago, this was devastation. Now—just look at it.
Corals shaped like finely filigreed tables, like sand castles—dozens of kinds. Many are much smaller than the corals that had been, but it’s again a coral reef. The recovery looks better than I’d thought possible.
Embedded in bouldery corals, “small giant” clams—the size of my hand—pout psychedelic lips over the rims of their open shells. The color-crazed algae inside those lips turn the reef’s solar power into the clams’ food. Those wild lips are so sensitive that they twitch at my approaching shadow. At the wave of a hand, the shells close. I’m playing peekaboo with a clam.
The fishes—angels, parrots, surgeons, rabbitfishes, sweetlips, goatfishes, triggers, wrasses, breams, blennies, many more; clown fish, emperors, unicorn fish—different kinds of each. I recognize most groups, but the species are dizzying; this region has about fifteen hundred reef fish species.
Why on Earth so many? Can they really parse the habitat finely enough to give each kind a different job? Or do many perform redundant roles? Do the hundreds of different coral species here create such a palette of niches that only an explosion of specialists can exploit them all?
Diversity and color. I have dozens of fish species to view simultaneously: fish wearing pastels, wearing war paint, wearing spin art. Here Pablo Picasso meets Jackson Pollock. That yard-long cornetfish looks like a flute with fins. The shapes, colors, and patterns—the dots and dashes and stripes and hues—seem playful. The bold color patterns must have evolved along with the diversity, to help them sort out whom to mate with; I don’t know another explanation that makes sense.
There are fish everywhere I look. Compared to what you’d find on land, the density and diversity of vertebrate animals is staggering.
* * *
Bob, Rob, and Peter all lay measuring tapes and swim along them, tallying what they see; Bob’s absorbed with his crusting algae, van Woesik with corals; Peter swims with the fishes. Susie, meanwhile, checks terra-cotta plates she’d left here previously. Her tiles are clear of seaweeds. That’s a big difference from most of the Caribbean. In fact, here I see no seaweed at all.
Seaweed-grazing fishes are much denser and diverse here. The Caribbean has only three species of surgeonfish; this region has about a dozen. The Caribbean has about a dozen parrotfishes; this region, about thirty. And the Pacific also adds different grazing groups, like rabbitfishes and others.
So many fish are doing so much grazing that they continually scour every surface. This coral garden is a harsh, harsh place for algae. Most “seaweed” never gets tall enough even to be called fuzz. It doesn’t last as long as a daisy in a herd of goats.
Bob and Peter have analyzed video footage showing that the fish deliver up to one hundred bites per square meter of seafloor, per hour. Sitting here on a patch of sand under my bubbles, simply watching, is helping me see the intensity of a well-functioning coral reef.
Just off the wall, streamlined fusiliers and rainbow-hued Anthias positively swarm in the running current, as dazzling as fireworks. They part to accommodate a Whitetip Reef Shark—a pretty big one, at about six feet—that glides in serenely and effortlessly, poker-faced and confident. It reinforces the shark stereotype with its easy control, and betrays not a flicker of interest in me as it melds into the blue distance.
Along the drop-off, as if out for a stroll, comes a Napoleon Wrasse as big as my head and torso, displaying its blue-green body, its maze of fine markings, its curious eye and Nubian lips. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland fish. Boats engaged in the insatiable Chinese restaurant live-fish trade have scoured this fantasy with fins from reef after reef, coast after coast, country after country. Palau remains among the Napoleon Wrasse’s last few strongholds—thanks entirely to Palau’s fishing laws, which ban its export. Also banned: live export of any reef fish, export of crabs, lobsters, giant clams, and most sea cucumbers, and possession of groupers during spawning season.
The regulations are why this place still works. It works as few places do, as well or better than probably any other humanly inhabited reef region in the world.
* * *
Back aboard, Peter removes his mask, wipes his face, and says, “After doing my transects, I was just having a look around and thinking, ‘This has to be the most incredible ecosystem on Earth. Absolutely.’ ”
Van Woesik says to me cheerfully, “It’s nice to know it’s not all gloomy, isn’t it? Nice to see all this recovery going on.”
Bob says something I’ve never heard him say: “There’s very little seaweed here.” And at other reefs around Palau, both inside its vast lagoons and out along its plunging ocean slopes, the story, happily, is the same. “Here, in ten years,” Rob van Woesik sums up, “it’s recovered from near-zero live coral to about seventy percent of the reef covered in live corals. That’s remarkable.”
Two reasons: One, the fish.
Two, the corals themselves. I ask van Woesik how many different kinds of hard corals live where we just dived. If anybody knows, he does.
“I don’t know,” he says. He consults his clipboard for an estimate, tallying thoughtfully, then, in his Aussie accent, gives me his total.
I ask him to confirm this: Did he say between eighteen and nineteen?
“No; between eight-tee and nine-tee. Eight-oh,” he affirms.
“In other words,” Bob says, “more kinds of corals live right here on this patch than in the entire Caribbean.”
Van Woesik amplifies: “Actually, there are more species of hard corals growing on the concrete dock at the lab—I’ve actually counted—than in the whole Caribbean.”
While the Caribbean has about sixty coral species, Palau has about sixty-five coral groups, called genera (single: genus), each with numerous species. For example, as I’ve mentioned, the great thicket builders of the Caribbean were Staghorn and Elkhorn Corals. They’re closely related, so they’re both in the genus Acropora. In that genus, the Caribbean has only those two species. The Indo-Pacific region has over 150 Acropora species.
While the whole Caribbean is about the size of New Guinea, the tropical region of the Indian and Pacific Oceans combined is truly vast. Big places have more species than small places and are more resilient to shocks. Over the contours and corners of this swath of the world, there lie so many coasts and islands that—over geologic timescales as sea levels have risen and fallen and climates changed—corals are continually getting isolated, evolving under new conditions, then spreading and evolving more as they interact and adjust to one another. It’s the greatest evolutionary cauldron in the sea.
* * *
And here, some corals grow fast. Acropora begin reproducing when their diameter reaches about two inches (four centimeters). In the Caribbean, that might take ten years. Here: four months.
But that only explains rapid coral recovery here compared to the Caribbean. It doesn’t explain rapid coral recovery here compared to other places in the western Pacific with as many—or more—kinds of corals. The fish, at densities high enough to utterly suppress seaweed, explain it.
The fish are why seaweed didn’t just spread like wildfire and take over the reefs here when almost all the coral bleached and died. The fish are why baby corals regained their foothold and have flourished. Because Palau decided not to let its fish get exported—and because its human population is small compared to their vast reefs—it now has: the fish, boatloads of paying tourists, and the highest coral-recovery rate ever recorded.
What I learned in Belize in the negative, I see here in the positive: reefs need enough fish to work overtime to suppress algae after something goes wrong for the corals.
Lessons: Diversity = resilience. Abundance = resilience. To survive catastrophe, you need a surplus, a reservoir, money under the mattress, food in the fridge. If you’re already starving, you won’t survive a famine. Take the world down to the bone and the only thing that flourishes are boneyards; the only thing that expands is collapse. For a reef to survive bad times, in good times it needs more than enough fish. Palau kept ’em, and now it has its reefs back.
So far, Palau has defended itself against distant export markets for its fish. Instead it draws a different distant market here: the tourism that lets Palau keep the goose and the golden eggs. But Palau is modernizing. Hotels serve foreigners the same kinds of reef fish that can’t be exported to foreigners. There’s pressure to build more hotels, bring more people, relax the rules—the usual story. I hope they don’t overdo it. In one village, the rooms of the primary school are not numbered but are named after the different phases in the ripening of coconuts. Attention to detail, valuing what’s local—that’s usually the first casualty.
At one time in the yard of an old Palauan woman grew a magic tree. This tree had a big hollow branch, and through that branch came a continual stream of water and fish. The generous woman let anyone come, and a constant procession of people held their baskets under the tree, filling them with fish for their villages. But some envied the woman and coveted the tree. One night, they came with their adzes and chopped the tree down and took it to their own village. It never produced another fish. Turns out, that hollow branch had an underground connection to the sea. So don’t mess with what works. Don’t ruin a good thing. The greed of a few starves all.
A lot’s at stake. Scientists have named over eight hundred species of reef-building corals globally, but on coral reefs live hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to two million, other species.
I hope Palauans don’t wait till it’s gone to realize what they’ve got. I visited one young Palauan at his home, which by U.S. middle-class standards would be considered poor. He told me he’d never considered Palau as anything special. It was all he’d ever known. But he’d recently returned from his first visit to the Philippines. “I was just shocked by the poverty there,” he said. “I had never seen people living like that.”
I have. I’ve seen Philippine markets offering piles of fish so small you’d expect to find them in a living room aquarium. Fried, they resemble potato chips. That’s all they have left. That’s the apocalypse, happening now.
* * *
“Want to see a really gorgeous little recruit?” asks Susie. To the naked eye, it’s a dot on a slimed plate. Under the microscope, what comes into clarity is a tiny lattice of living structure, the tentacles of its baby polyps glowing neon blue.
She shows me that even here, corals prefer to settle on the same Titanoderma as do Caribbean corals. Incredibly, over a great swath of the world, one kind of nondescript crusting algae is superimportant for corals getting their start in life.
Here, because fish are grazing her plates clean of seaweed, Susie is averaging seven to ten new little corals per plate. In Belize, it’s more like two.
But none of this makes the reefs immune from sudden temperature spikes. Bob reminds us, “It could happen again. We could be right back where we were, with hot water and ninety-five percent of the corals dead.”
* * *
On the day I arrived here, the journal Science published a study of coral growth on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It said: “Throughout the GBR, calcification [growth of corals’ calcium-carbonate skeletons] has declined by 14.2% since 1990, predominantly because extension (linear growth) has declined.” The reasons, the authors explained, are two: the seawater is getting too warm and, because of acidification, there’s already too little carbonate for normal coral growth. They examined centuries-old corals for comparison. “Such a severe and sudden decline,” the researchers wrote, is “unprecedented.” The study’s lead author said, “If this rate continues—which is accelerating—then the coral growth will hit zero round about 2050.” Said Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, “There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so.” A few months after I left, scientists announced that the year set a new world’s record high for ocean temperature.
Here in Palau, now, corals are doing great. But you never know when the rest of the world will intrude.
* * *
The world intrudes nightly on the four-channel TV in my little, low-rent hotel room. I can choose among such news sources as Catholic World Network, BBC World News, a Japanese news channel, or Japanese MTV. I tend to choose BBC News. But as I get the news I crave, I feel glad to be in a remote place, out of the mainstream, as news reports of horrors upon miseries around the globe continuously demonstrate that we the people haven’t yet learned to distinguish justice from vengeance. Better to watch the sumo wrestling, an admirably straightforward and mercifully brief form of ritual combat.
* * *
Morning traffic snakes and crawls through Koror’s main street. The first time I came here, there was not a single traffic light in the country. Then they tried them, but nobody paid attention when the light turned red. “It’s like a machine telling people
what to do,” complained one person who gave me a lift. The lights came down. Now, again, the country has not one stoplight.
Palau is a country that can still feel like a small town. It has no pathologist. “If we really need a coroner,” a government official assured me, “we can get him from Guam—but he’s expensive.” Okay, so no coroner unless we really need one. Palau is in the region called Micronesia, which also contains the Federated States of Micronesia (150,000 people), and the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls’ 50,000 people include 30,000 on Majuro, an atoll of more than sixty islands with a combined landmass under four square miles. Parts of Majuro are so hair-thin, you can throw a rock from the lagoon side to the ocean. Its highest elevation: ten feet above sea level.
* * *
Into the Rock Island Café stroll Olai Polloi and Nyk Kloulubak, both around thirty. She’s Palau’s national climate-change coordinator; Nyk is the country’s energy planner. A slight, shy young woman, Olai seems too innocent for bruising international politics.
In one sense, Palau is an innocent place. With only 22,000 people, the country’s contribution to world carbon emissions is far smaller than that of my local university (which has 25,000 students). Yet just as “a rising tide floats all boats,” a rising sea floods all shores, guilty and innocent alike.
We find a booth, and order. Nyk wears a printed shirt and a shell necklace. He’s frustrated that Palau still has no official energy policy. He believes that’s shockingly primitive in this day and age—and it is. It’s also the situation we’ve always had in the United States.
I ask the climate coordinator if the weather has changed, and what she plans to do about it. “Extremes,” she says. “When it’s hot, it’s extremely hot. And when it rains, it’s extreme rain.”