The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

by Iain McCalman

  The only way out of this impasse was to improvise. Abandoning the formal taxonomic lexicon, Charlie began to identify familiar species with nicknames of his own. He then used a novel way of describing them that he’d come across in reading the work of rain forest ecologists like Len Webb and Geoff Tracey. Confronted with similarly chaotic environmental variations, they had mapped the dynamic relationships between different rain forest species and communities, looking for patterns of connection, struggle, and dominance—a process they called “population or community ecology.” Instinctively, Charlie had also made his own transition to newly emerging ecological methods, including some similar to those improvised by biologists with Yonge’s expedition to the Low Isles in 1928–29.19

  Being free of the constricting traditional assumptions of professional taxonomists had its drawbacks, however, as Charlie discovered in June 1973 at the Second International Coral Reef Symposium. This was hosted by the Great Barrier Reef Committee on a ten-thousand-ton cruise ship, the Marco Polo, chartered to make a ten-day return voyage between Brisbane and Lizard Island in the far north, carrying 264 of the world’s leading coral scientists. It was a brilliant idea: they drank, dived, danced, delivered papers, and argued while the sublime objects of their study slid past the bows.

  Charlie’s own paper, though, received a tough reception. Patricia Mather, secretary of the GBRC, icily rejected it from the proposed published proceedings of the talks because, as a scientist friend of Charlie’s told him, “she doesn’t approve of people like you messing about with taxonomy.” Burdon-Jones underscored the point by interrupting Charlie on the dance floor to repeat what had become a stock refrain: that he intended replacing him with a proper postdoctoral researcher. Charlie had heard the threat once too often. He grabbed the professor by his tie and threatened to toss him overboard.20

  Thankfully, the ship also carried some less stultified thinkers. One was Isobel Bennett, who wandered up to the shaggy young man she’d last seen as a small boy and welcomed him into the fold of coral science: “I thought you’d come home,” she said warmly. David Stoddart, perhaps the most famous scientist on board, whose portly figure and Cambridge accent turned out to be no signifier of orthodoxy, told Charlie that his paper was “the best of the lot,” and promised it would be published in spite of Mather’s veto. More importantly, he asked Charlie to join the forthcoming northern leg of a Great Barrier Reef expedition he was currently leading for the Royal Society.

  This dream opportunity was approved thanks to Ken Back, vice-chancellor of JCU and a man relaxed enough to share Charlie’s “love of the sea.” Back was prepared to put the university’s research vessel, the Kirby, in the hands of a local skipper, Davey Duncan, who’d fished most of the coastlines and islands between Townsville and the Torres Strait. Duncan agreed to take on the considerable challenge of navigating through “3000 kilometers of poorly charted reef waters,” and in November 1973 the Kirby, riding low in the water from its load of scuba equipment, diesel drums, food boxes, and beer cartons, departed Townsville for the Top End.21

  The Stoddart expedition was Charlie’s underwater counterpart to Darwin’s daring Beagle voyage. Skirting Orpheus Island, they followed the ocean-crashed outer Barrier reefs up to the Torres Strait, with “no pre-determined route, nor pre-imagined outcome.” At times they had to use Matthew Flinders’s nineteenth-century charts because there were none better. Stoddart, who couldn’t swim, concentrated on surveying the numerous coral cays, while Charlie dived, experiencing his “first real taste of the joy of discovery, of seeing and doing incredible things.” Residual dreams of the Amazon vanished before the Reef’s realities.22

  One of their rough charts showed the 9,800-feet-deep Queensland Trough to be situated somewhere near the ribbon reef of Tijou, so they anchored the boat and moved around to the reef’s boisterous outer face. Charlie dived down the steeply plunging sides until confronted by the “abyssal depths” of the trough. As the first diver ever to see this dizzying sight, he pushed downward through the clear water until he reached the limits of his body’s capacity. Later, diving in Tijou’s lagoon, he had to fend off two unusually frenzied sharks, though these proved to be only a vanguard of the seventeen others he counted circling feverishly there the following day.

  Even farther north, just below the Torres Strait, they reached the approximately eighty-acre coral cay of Raine Island, which had rarely been explored by scientists since Joseph Beete Jukes landed there from the HMS Fly in 1844, in the company of a group of convicts sent to build a beacon. To the Kirby mariners it felt like a “re-discovery.” Clamoring colonies of seabirds shared the sand and rocks with “the biggest turtle rookery in the world.” Twenty thousand turtles scrabbled up the beaches to lay their eggs, while their slower brethren were being tossed in the air by giant tiger sharks.23

  Like Jukes 130 years earlier, Charlie found it difficult to convey the primeval immensity of the Great Barrier Reef to people who’d not been there: “we just haven’t got enough words.” Wild, for example, was an overused term, but to Charlie it meant “never seeing any other sign of humanity, never seeing any evidence that there was anybody else [who’d] ever been on this earth, except at dusk, you would sometimes see a satellite go over, and that’s it. You get this feeling of wilderness, of immense amounts of wilderness … the feeling of being an explorer, getting into places that no human being has ever seen before…”24

  Occasionally, moved by some ancient urge to merge with the Reef’s subterranean life, he would wait for a full moon and sneak out alone to the outer reefs. Plunging down into the blackness, he would drift to the sandy bottom and lie back, relaxing in a spectral world. “In very clear water the whole reef becomes a weird silver-gray and is full of life. Crustaceans crawl everywhere. Corals, seen mostly in silhouette have tentacles extended, making all manner of other-worldly shapes. Some fish are asleep, others are hunting. Sharks appear out of the silver, perhaps to circle around to check the newcomer, then to vanish. They are hunting, giving further spice to an already overloaded atmosphere. Reefs seen by moonlight, when one is all alone, are wondrous peaceful places.”25

  * * *

  All apprenticeships must end some day. Darwin evaded post-Beagle restrictions on his intellectual freedom by becoming an independent scholar. Wisely he bought a house in Kent designed to meet every need. It became a family home, a refuge, a base for correspondence, a library for reading, an office for writing, a laboratory for experimenting, and a garden for experiencing nature.26

  Charlie had no such luxury. As his postdoctoral scholarship drew to an end, he needed a paid job. Salvation, once again, came from the fairy-godmother figure of Isobel Bennett. Late one evening in 1973, in foul weather, he leaped off the boat after returning from a dive near Townsville, to see Issie emerging from the dark. She shone her torch on his face and announced that he had to apply for the position of foundation coral scientist at the new Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville—the fruits, indirectly, of John Busst’s lobbying a decade earlier.

  Charlie hedged. He was ineligible, he said. “I am a naturalist. Not a scientist. I’m a nature-lover naturalist, that’s what I am.” Nobody in those times paid naturalists to observe and think about what they saw. The days of Darwin were long gone. AIMS would want a credentialed marine biologist. Waving away his protests, Issie warned him she would ring AIMS to check that he’d applied.27

  In the end Charlie didn’t need to apply. The newly appointed director of AIMS was an earthy, energetic American called Red Gilmartin, who’d been attracted to Townsville by the challenge of starting a first-class research center on the frontier among straight-talking Australians. And he found Charlie suitably blunt when he met him, at a dinner they’d been invited to by the vice-chancellor. Next morning Charlie picked up the phone to hear himself being offered a three-year job as the first AIMS scientist. Red wasted no time. Charlie was to start the following day in his new lab—a steel shed at Cape Pallarenda, a few miles nort
heast of Townsville. His brief was to write a series of monographs on the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.

  Charlie now had no choice but to make himself a genuine taxonomist. Red told him bluntly that a comprehensive coral taxonomy had to precede any “meaningful ecological work.” Fortunately, Red believed in supporting his missions properly, and at least in the early days there were few bureaucrats to stand in the way of Charlie’s curiosity. An old diving colleague from his Solitary Islands days was appointed as his assistant, and gradually Charlie acquired an impressive collection of field scientists to collaborate on the monumental task.28

  First he needed to visit the great natural-history museums of London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington to examine the “type specimens” that underpinned existing coral taxonomy. To his chagrin, many of these foundational types proved flawed. Deskbound taxonomists of the past had named new species with promiscuous abandon, when these were often only local variations of the same species. Charlie later estimated that five thousand different names had been given to around two hundred coral species. A major offender was none other than the legendary British pioneer of coral taxonomy, Henry Bernard. Had the great man spent just one day in the Great Barrier Reef, Charlie reflected wryly, “his world would have been turned upside down.”29

  For the next eight years Charlie and his colleagues threw themselves into a grinding routine of identifying, observing, mapping, collecting, illustrating, photographing, and describing the myriad variations of live reef-growing coral colonies (of the order Scleractinia), from the southern temperate to the far northern tropical zones of the Barrier. In the process, Charlie clocked up an astonishing seven thousand hours of diving.

  Scleractinia of Eastern Australia, the first in what would become his multivolume monograph series, appeared in 1976 to a rough reception from Northern Hemisphere paleontologists. Several wrote sniffy reviews or scathing letters, taking exception to Charlie’s unorthodox views on environmental variations within species. He took some consolation, however, from the fact that one of the world’s most distinguished taxonomists, John W. Wells, professor of geology at Cornell University, thought the book “refreshingly original.”

  Even so, Wells, who was a specialist on Marshall Islands corals, suggested that Charlie had exaggerated the problem of environmental variations in that particular location. There remained only one way for Charlie to prove his point to the famous but nondiving professor. Visiting a Marshall Islands reef with Wells, he swam down around 165 feet and, at decreasing depths, collected samples of a single well-known coral species that Wells had described. Laying these out on a bench, Charlie left the taxonomist to examine the samples at length.

  Shaking his head, Wells eventually conceded that they were undoubtedly a single species, but that paleontologists “would have called most of these specimens a different species and … would probably have made several genera of them.” In fact, so converted was he to Charlie’s viewpoint that he now expressed doubts that a single taxonomic framework of the world’s corals would ever be possible.30

  After several extended visits to Western Australia in the early 1980s, Charlie began to fear that Wells was right: the chaos in his mind seemed to be increasing, if anything. The Indian Ocean reef of Ningaloo was fascinating but additionally puzzling. After ten minutes of snorkeling there, Charlie realized that the ocean currents bordering Africa, South America, and Australia could not run in a northerly direction up Western Australia’s coast, as was commonly thought. Ningaloo was rich with distinctive Indonesian corals that must have been carried by southward currents. Moreover, at the more southerly reefs of the Houtman Abrolhos chain of islands, where tropical corals battled with cold-water algae, he found a mixture of corals like nowhere else. Yet there was something slightly odd about many of the species there compared to their counterparts on the Barrier Reef. Were his previous identifications of Scleractinia somehow flawed?31

  * * *

  For several decades Charlie pursued this nagging puzzle of the divergences between the same species at different locations. His quest took him to hundreds of reefs in both hemispheres and across the vast Indian and Pacific oceans. He dived and collected in Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and then farther afield, in Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, and at remote Clipperton Atoll in the eastern Pacific, about 750 miles southwest of Mexico. Always he traveled by boat, always he worked with locals, and always he spent hours underwater, observing and memorizing.

  The many comparisons he made led to a fresh discovery. When his records of species distribution and diversity were mapped, gathered, and interpreted—material that later became Charlie’s computer database, Coral Geographic—they confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef’s coral diversity, rich though it was, didn’t match that of Indonesia and the Philippines. It was clear that the greatest coral diversity in the world was centered on a roughly triangular area within the Central Indo-Pacific, known ever since as “The Coral Triangle.”32

  Charlie Veron exploring coral species variations on Emre Turak Reef in Madagascar (Courtesy of Charlie Veron)

  The more Charlie ventured into these newly discovered regions, the less certain he became about his previous Barrier Reef observations: “My confidence faltered, not because the corals were different, but because most were neither different nor the same.” A trip to the reefs of Vanuatu, which were linked to Australian reefs by ocean currents sweeping through the Coral Sea, only intensified his anguish. When Vanuatu reefs featured species in common with the Barrier Reef, they proved “virtually identical,” yet not actually so. Despairing, Charlie teetered on the edge of giving up his twenty-year struggle to produce a unified taxonomy of coral species. “I can’t publish work on something that’s only half right,” he tortured himself.33

  … a well-defined species on the central Great Barrier Reef might be a bit different at Vanuatu or the West Australian coast and be a bit different in other ways in Indonesia. In Fiji it might be a different species altogether but if it turned up in Papua New Guinea it might be seen to be a hybrid. These sorts of patterns recurred in one country after another and did so for most species. The more I worked in different countries, the deeper the problem became. It was an unhappy state of affairs because there was no way through; more work made the problem worse not better. There was no solution.34

  * * *

  One morning Charlie got up around 5:00 a.m. to begin work, and as usual made himself a cup of coffee. As the kettle boiled he had a flash of insight that gave him an answer. There was nothing mystical about this moment of intuition: he’d always believed that humans were “good at subconsciously synthesizing information, and that many ideas simply come of their own volition rather than as the intended outcome of planned research.”

  At the same time, Charlie reflected, most humans were not so good at grasping aspects of nature that couldn’t be clearly defined or placed into hierarchies, even though nature’s products were “seldom organized into species at all.” Now he saw that, considered over vast geographical space and long swathes of geological time, coral species were malleable and temporary units, fluidly interlinked by their genes to other units, and forming ever-changing patterns. Corals had to be treated as continua, not as fixed, isolated units.35

  If corals did become isolated and unable to interbreed for long periods, Charlie ruminated, then the fittest among them would, as Darwin had argued, be selected to survive and so eventually form a genetically cohesive new species. But the breeding of corals was one of those simple natural processes that produce inordinately complex results. While corals struggle with one another to survive and dominate within a particular area, the spectacular processes of mass spawning by which they breed hurls out gene-carrying larvae into the ocean, to be carried potentially vast distances by the chance actions of currents. Eventually the larvae might settle to grow and breed within a distant coral empire. Here they would, over geological spans of time, intermix to produce new variations, reconnect
ions between former variations, or even “fuzzy” hybrids.

  Realizing that in evolutionary terms corals behave a lot like plants, Charlie consulted a colleague at AIMS, who explained how his insight aligned with the concept of “reticulate evolution,” a process that plant geneticists, in particular, consider a convincing alternative explanation of how species change over space and time. The theory of reticulate evolution argues for the formation of a netlike skein of evolutionary threads, determined by environment, rather than the famous branching tree of natural selection sketched by Darwin in the Origin. Had Darwin known what modern geneticists know, he might well have agreed, for he was, in Charlie’s words, “a fabulous thinker, just a wonderful, wonderful thinker.” The irony was that Darwin, in his day, acquired a reputation as a heretic for denying the divine fixity of species, and now Charlie was at risk of making himself a heretic by dismantling the taxonomies of species altogether.36

  Like his namesake, Charlie knew he would have to do a hellish amount of reading and research to make his controversial case. Beginning in 1992, he navigated a maze of different disciplines, from paleontology, taxonomy, biological oceanography, and ecology to systematics and molecular science. Darwin had been forced to do something similar, but disciplinary boundaries were neither as numerous nor as heavily patrolled in his day. Specialized traditions and terminologies were now often impenetrable to outsiders, an exasperating problem for Charlie because he wanted to simplify them in order to reach a general readership.

  Mary Stafford-Smith, a colleague, coral scientist, and gifted editor, gave him vital help. She had no compunction about sending him grumbling back to the writing desk, from which he would usually emerge with a clarified text and an improved humor. The resulting book, Corals in Space and Time (1995), was revolutionary by any standard, for it contained the dual discoveries of the “Coral Triangle” and “Reticulate Evolution in the Scleractinia.” The magisterial journal Science devoted a full article to its contents, and Charlie was in 2004 awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal by the International Society for Reef Studies.37