Problem one: when a species name is changed (the old ‘priority versus stability’ argument), much of the information that goes with the old name gradually fades away. And as I’ve said, linking information about a species is what names are good for. Worse, the older the name, the less clarity it usually has. In many cases the oldest name is not even based on a type specimen, but on only a drawing or vague description, as with Pocillopora damicornis. Even today, taxonomists will triumphantly change an old, well-known name for an even older name that has never been used, and there’s nothing to stop them doing this.
The name Pocillopora damicornis, for one of the world’s most common and most studied coral species, is based on this rather doubtful drawing.
Problem two: one size fits all. Corals are not sponges, salamanders or parrots. These animals have almost nothing in common except the rules by which they are named. Corals have a special need here because so much work on them is becoming DNA-based. We need new type specimens with living tissue preserved: an essential case of ‘out with the old and in with the new’. Certainly there are difficulties in doing this, but that doesn’t mean they can be left in the too-hard basket.
Problem three: Latin! Latin was once firmly entrenched in the language of international law, religion, history, astronomy, anatomy, taxonomy, and heaven knows what else. Now, as far as I can see, it’s only entrenched in the Roman Catholic Church and the ICZN. My book Corals of the World (not to mention many of my other publications and those of other authors) has descriptions of a large number of new species. All, says the ICZN, must be in correct Latin, whatever that is, for I don’t know Latin grammar but am reliably told it has several forms. But I do know an old Catholic priest, unlikely though that seems; however, he confessed he didn’t know any Latin either. So, heretic though I am, I did try, but for what reason? After all, we’re only dealing with two words.
As things now stand, ICZN rules require a species name to be changed if that species is reassigned to another genus that has a different gender: how’s that for creating a snag in today’s world of electronic information searches?
Problem four: ancient junk. A long time ago, a German naturalist by the name of Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) devised an elaborate though mindlessly pointless system of nomenclature that included names of seven common coral genera we use today. The problem was that he didn’t believe in binomial nomenclature, so the ICZN ruled them invalid (‘unavailable’, in their lingo). Six have since been approved, but poor old Turbinaria remains out in the cold. Who, besides me, knew that? Who, including me, cares? This matters because coral taxonomy is riddled with such cases, the fate of Favia, one of the world’s most commonly used coral names, being the latest.
When I first visited John Wells, back in 1975, I complained that the type species (the species a genus is based on) of Favia was obviously not a Favia at all. He agreed and commented that Thomas Vaughan (1870–1952), John’s autocratic mentor, thought so too. Let sleeping dogs lie, John advised. And so I did, that is until Favia was given another name, one nobody had ever heard of. Why? Because Favia, one of Oken’s once invalid genera, did not have a designated type species. A.E. Verrill, always on the lookout for something to do, gave it one, in another instance of Verrilliana – he got it wrong. So one may well ask: should an obscure 200-year-old publication, supposedly corrected by a hundred-year-old mistake, matter when the name Favia has now been used unambiguously in more than a thousand publications? Obviously not. I am not the complaining sort, but this time I couldn’t resist publishing a complaint, using the politest phrases I could muster.46
I have been grumbling about the role of technical trivia for a very long time, my point being that the ICZN has done little or nothing about it. The account of Favia is an example but of these there are many, all contributing excuses for making changes ahead of reason.
Problem five: The multiple needs of molecular taxonomy. Enough already said, especially about the usefulness of old type specimens that don’t have any DNA.
ICZN technical trivia reached a low point for me a year or so after Corals of the World was published, when a curator at the Smithsonian wrote to the journal Science claiming that all the new species I’d included in my book were invalid because I’d only nominated type specimens in a subsequent monograph, rather than in the book itself. As it happened, that same year (2000) the ICZN published a revision of their Code, which would indeed have left my new species invalid. The issue according to them was: which came first, my book or their code? After months of deliberation, which was actually between the commission and a friend of mine on the commission who took my side, it was finally agreed that my book did, but only because the contract I had with the printer was signed in December 1999, whereas the new code came into effect in January 2000. That is to say, had the contract to print my book (a matter involving a lot of time and money) been delayed a month, the commission may well have declared all the new species in it invalid. In the end the commission couldn’t help writing to me, noting with approval ‘my’ use of their language (ha!), but also giving me a lesson in Latin grammar. What a lot of bunkum.
Decades ago the ICZN had essentially done the job it was originally created to do. If it can now shape up to future needs, excellent, for that will mean giving more attention to forward-thinking young people and less to worn-out history. Perhaps the tiger should give itself a new set of teeth.
The ICZN’s rules pale into insignificance compared to the problems created by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES was established in 1973, and a very good move it was. All was well until 2002, when CITES’s Animals Committee produced a list of coral genera that they considered unidentifiable. They further decided that it was bad to collect corals for the aquarium trade: what if endangered species were being collected? As corals were too hard (for them) to identify, they simply classified all scleractinian corals as endangered species. The precious deep-water coral Corallium, which is not scleractinian but is threatened, having been harvested without control for centuries, did not make the list – that was blocked by commercial interests. The aquarium trade, which does immeasurably more good than harm, is battling on with uncertain success, but not so the scientists who need to collect corals for their studies, and to do so in all countries where the species they are interested in occurs.
The people who manage CITES in Australia and the US found ways to bolster their regulations, the most effective being that an export permit from the country of origin must be obtained before an import permit can be issued. That seems straightforward, but when I first applied for an export permit some countries that have corals had never heard of CITES. Still, customs officials learned how to exploit that quickly enough.
‘You want export permit? Export permit take lot of work. Cost extra for quick processing.’
‘How much extra?’
‘Forty American dollar. One hundred dollar better. Cash only.’
At first Australian Customs were not too concerned about corals. I would just explain who I was and what the corals were for. Then they tightened up. Now they will pounce on anything that looks like a coral.
Corals are not made of ivory and corals are not white rhinos. Certainly they are endangered, due to mass bleaching caused by climate change, but the CITES charade has done enormous damage to coral research everywhere while doing nothing meaningful for conservation.
In Retrospect
The underworld
It’s hard to believe, but when I started diving I knew nobody who’d ever been scuba diving, except those French photographers I met on Heron Island. Now there are at least six million recreational divers worldwide and they spend most of their time on coral reefs. But diving for research is not like diving for any other reason: scientific divers usually go to places seldom visited by others, remote places where the water may be murky, the currents unpredictable and local knowledge non-existent. Nor are these divers there to enjoy the scenery or take snapshots, they are there t
o work. To do this safely requires a lot of know-how and careful thinking, especially when handling equipment underwater. The scientific diver must concentrate on the job, and so the actual act of diving needs to be second nature. And this kind of diver must know how to deal with the unexpected and must not depend on others to make decisions.
My style of diving, where I decide what’s safe and what isn’t, has long ceased to be compatible with how things are done at most research institutions the world over. I have no problem with regulations if they’re based on knowledge and reason, but sometimes it seems that a learning curve is missing from institutionalised diving. Some of the regulations created by bureaucrats in my time are fascinating, such as keeping unbroken, eye-to-eye contact with your buddy. Even blinking would have violated that one, and doing any work would have been impossible. Another brilliant idea was that a fully kitted up rescue diver be on standby during all dives. In the height of summer on the Great Barrier Reef it would have been the rescue diver who needed rescuing, from heat exhaustion. Then there was the notion that divers had to have a surface buoy attached to them by a float rope – which would get entangled with every turn around a coral or propeller on an outboard motor.
These rules and regulations kept changing like the proverbial tide, and many were seriously daft. Since that first nervous dive in Sydney Harbour fifty years ago, I have logged more than six thousand hours on scuba, most of them on the world’s great coral reefs. This might sound like six thousand hours of fun, but almost all my diving has been for work that requires heavy-duty thinking. And that, dare I say it, means diving alone. This is not something peculiar to me; just about every diver I’ve known whose job involves a lot of concentration feels the same. We might have a helper along, in my case to carry a basket for the corals I collect, but if so I’m not looking after the helper, which means they are diving alone.
Amateurs are usually aghast at the thought of not having a buddy when diving; it breaks rule number one, they say. Sometimes on a dive from a regulation-infested boat, rule number one just has to be obeyed, so it’s good to team up with someone who also has real work to do, then the rule becomes ‘same time in the same ocean is a buddy dive’. All we need do is start the dive together, then go our separate ways.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been so easy, especially those times in Japan when I was hosted by the owners of dive shops: then my buddy was invariably a son or friend of the shop owner. As most reefs in Japan lie in the path of the Kuroshio, working on them usually involved swimming down to the bottom quickly and then crawling along, hand over hand into the strong current, holding onto chunks of reef or coral. When so doing, I often found myself with a buddy swimming frantically above me in the full force of the current and rapidly getting exhausted. On four separate trips my buddy had to be rescued and it became obvious that it was only a matter of time before a rescue would be a serious, perhaps fatal, matter. Had it been possible to talk about the dive before we did it, we might have been able to sort it all out, but most of the time I found myself with a buddy who couldn’t speak English, or if he could, would not admit that he wasn’t up to diving with an old gaijin. Diving alone, as I always wanted to do, was much too dangerous, they insisted.
After one rescue that could indeed have been serious, because it turned out that my buddy was a novice, I hit upon the idea of trying to ‘drown’ new buddies on the surface before the dive. This was done by enticing him to go for an ordinary swim, out into the current. Most Japanese don’t swim well, or didn’t in those days, so when a would-be buddy had to turn back I had a good excuse to go it alone. To save face – his face – I would give a shamefully exaggerated account of my swimming prowess, after which I was generally left to get on with it alone.
For me, rule number one is usually ‘for safety’s sake, dive alone’.
Dive computers have been the greatest invention of all time for scuba divers, yet incredibly, some organisations still insist on their divers using only tables to determine how long they can remain at a given depth. Of course computers, like any instrument, can fail, so experienced divers always keep a mental tally of how deep they have been and for how long. That’s good practice, but fantasy tables that effectively stop a diver from doing much more than paddle about in the shallows are pointless. Before dive computers were invented I used US Navy tables, but for me even these were over-conservative, for I knew I could at least double the bottom-time they allowed. That’s not to say my times would be good for everyone, but they allowed my dives to be many times as long as table-loving institutions now allow. If that’s recklessness on my part, how come I’ve never had any trouble in that regard in so many dives?
I have seldom felt that my regular work diving is hazardous, except perhaps when decompressing. This is normally done by holding onto a rope dangling from a boat for perhaps an hour or more and is terribly boring. Twice I have fallen asleep and discovered that there’s no awakening quite like breathing in seawater. But I’ll admit that this sort of diving can sometimes be dangerous if done in remote places and using unfamiliar equipment in unfamiliar waters without local guidance. So be it; I understand the risk and accept it. I do insist on having a watchful boatman on hand if there’s a current; that’s something I’ve come to be fussy about.
Perhaps the most memorable diving I’ve ever done has been on the outer reef slope of a ribbon reef at night, with a full moon. This needs careful planning, and to be kept secret lest somebody else wants to join in. The first step, done surreptitiously during the day, is to anchor a little buoy on a good spot well away from the mother ship and tie a cyalume lightstick to it. Then, when everybody has gone to bed, you sneak away with a zodiac. The rest is simple: find the buoy, anchor, and slip over the side. With strong moonlight the reef is easily seen, although it’s best to use a torch to find a really good spot. That done, the dive is just a matter of turning off the torch, lying back, and relaxing.
In very clear water the whole reef is a spectacularly beautiful silver-grey and full of life. It is noisy, busy and utterly surreal. Looking up, you see schools of fish flashing silver in the moonlight on one side, then deep grey on the other as they circle. On the bottom, crabs and lobsters crawl ghostlike among the sea cucumbers, urchins and starfish. Corals, seen mostly in silhouette, have outstretched tentacles that make all manner of otherworldly shapes. Some fish are asleep, tucked in the coral and enveloped in a mucous cocoon. Others are hunting. Sharks appear out of nowhere, perhaps to circle around to check out the intruder, then vanish into their silver world with a burst of speed. They too are hunting, giving further spice to an already overloaded atmosphere. Before it’s time to return to the zodiac it’s good to spend a little time swimming around with the torch turned on, because the beam floods everything ahead with colour while the rest of the world goes dark. Reefs seen by moonlight when you’re alone are thrilling places; it’s an experience never to be forgotten.
Some divers might think that such junkets are just reckless, but I don’t. Diving is dangerous if you believe you’ll be rescued should something go wrong. Good preparation is everything.
In September 2014, the American Academy of Underwater Sciences bestowed their Lifetime Achievement Award on me, making me the first non-American to be so honoured. At the award ceremony, I ended my talk with a description of diving alone on the Great Barrier Reef in the moonlight. With dozens of top-ranking diving officers in attendance I thought it might not go down too well, but disappointingly they gave me a standing ovation. The ceremony was held at Sitka, Alaska, a place way outside my diving experience, and I’d signed up for a post-symposium, drysuit diving tour, as I wanted to see the giant kelp beds I’d heard so much about. My participation was assured provided I submitted a pile of paperwork the likes of which I’d never imagined, including a letter of approval from my diving supervisor. Diving supervisor? I think I was the only person at the entire symposium who wasn’t allowed to go diving.
‘Hey man, those moonlight dives so
und real cool,’ said one diving safety officer after my speech. ‘That’s just what I’m gonna do if I ever get to that great big reef of yours.’
‘You’d do that? What about all those bloody awful regulations you guys have?’ I said.
‘Ah, that’s just paperwork, man. No problem.’
No problem for you, old buddy.
A year or so later, after Mary and I had launched our website in Honolulu, I took the opportunity to go on a rebreather dive with a couple of friends. After an hour on a fast boat we found a suitable spot near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Rich, the dive leader, gave me a good briefing as I’d never used a rebreather before. Unlike with scuba, there are no bubbles; breathed air is recycled through a scrubber, which takes out carbon dioxide so the air can be reused. This allows divers to go much deeper and stay down longer than is possible with scuba.
Down we went. All went well until, nearing the end of the dive, I felt something was amiss and looked up to check where our boat’s anchor chain was. Then something hit me like a blast from hell. I inhaled a mouthful of chemical from the rebreather’s carbon dioxide scrubber, which contains sodium hydroxide (caustic soda). I turned my regulator to scuba mode and then copped another mouthful, the same as the first. A lifetime of diving has made me immune to panic, but nevertheless the cover of Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy flashed before me: DON’T PANIC. In a haze of pain, I vaguely considered my options. Heading for the surface without air was out – lethal. Another breath? Just then I felt Rich’s hand gripping my arm and, manna from heaven, the next breath from my regulator was oh so wonderfully, deliciously sweet clean air.
A Life Underwater Page 28