Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  No fewer than fifteen hundred species of fish have been counted in the Great Barrier Reef. There are also, in huge variety and abundance, all manner of turtles, dolphins, manatees, skates, sharks, stingrays, small whales, and porpoises. There are numberless varieties of snails, anemones, clams, sea slugs, sea grasses, sea horses, and seaweeds. On the sand islands that peek above the sea surface, there are ferociously dangerous saltwater crocodiles, as well as generally benign flora and fauna and a significant percentage of the world’s shorebirds and waders. There is an entire spectrum of seabird types, from the quite commonplace flocks of gulls and terns, shearwaters and tropic birds, frigate birds and boobies to the majestically solitary white-bellied sea eagle, a creature revered for thousands of years by the aboriginal peoples who live on the coasts nearby.

  Charlie Veron, most recently chief scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, knew exactly what was causing the bleaching he first spotted in 1981. A coral polyp usually contains an abundance of algal plant cells, called zooxanthellae, which live in symbiotic harmony with the coral animals, and which perform the photosynthesis that allows the coral to flourish. The coral provides a protected home to the algae. The algae, when secure and happy, then produce the oxygen that the corals need in order to make, among other things, the calcium carbonate for their skeletons—skeletons that are in essence the building blocks of a coral reef. The algae also give the coral its color—but only when, once again, they are secure and happy.

  But once in a while, and for a variety of reasons, the corals suddenly instruct the algae to leave home. Their previously symbiotic relationship is brought to a rapid end, whereupon the coral polyp equally rapidly finds itself in the awkward position of being unable to get the oxygen it needs, or to get the glucose and amino acids that are the by-products of the algae’s photosynthetic efforts—and also unable to sport the decorative colors for which zooxanthellae are renowned. To the outsider, the coral’s color is suddenly shed; it becomes deathly white. It has been bleached. And if the condition persists, without oxygen and glucose and proteins, the coral polyp dies.

  Veron also suspected why his Gonioperae were so brusquely expelling their algae and ending the once friendly and necessary relationship with the coral. It was entirely due to stress. Coral is an animal that has taken skittishness to an art form. On every occasion when the warm and shallow sunlit waters of its home are seriously disturbed, it goes into a state of shock, with the zooxanthellae being the first victims of what might be called the coral’s new and distressed state of mind.

  There are two prime reasons that corals become distressed: the sea’s temperature may rise, and its chemistry may become more acidic. This was precisely what was happening back in the 1980s. For reasons that were then neither fully accepted nor agreed upon, the average ocean temperature had risen by about one degree Celsius—meaning that the very hottest days on the reef were even hotter than a coral could stand, and it reacted with disastrous and very visible drama. And worse was to come.

  That initial bleach was to be suddenly spread just weeks later. The affliction cannonaded not just around the Pacific—an early episode of bleaching had been seen, at about the same time as that on Pandora Reef, among corals eight thousand miles away on the Galápagos Islands—but around the world. This first-ever worldwide mass bleaching event of 1981–82 indicated that the problem in Australia was undeniably the planet’s problem, too.

  The cruel irony for Australia was that only a matter of weeks before the Pandora Reef bleaching, UNESCO had placed the Great Barrier Reef on the list of World Heritage Sites. This was a great honor, but it also focused the world’s attention on Australia’s being the custodian of an entity that was now officially revered by all humanity—such that any troubles that might befall it could be Australia’s to bear alone. Australia had won the honor, but now Australia would bear the blame.

  There have been further global assaults on corals in the years since. Most notoriously, in 1997–98, in a ferocious bleaching disaster, a species of hot-water corals, which exist mainly in the Red Sea and around the Andaman Islands, were all being killed off, since the waters became so warm that even this coral’s special adaptation to high temperatures proved useless. The year 2001 saw an even more massively widespread attack, such that many well-respected marine biologists began to predict that all coral reefs could well vanish from the world in another fifty years.

  Already Australia’s reef has lost half its corals, with most of its loss occurring since the disastrous 1998 season. Frantic efforts are now being made to reverse the situation. Laboratories in Hawaii have enjoyed some success, most notably with bold experiments to breed new varieties of heat-resistant corals. Whether this is merely the postponement of disaster remains to be seen. Most scientists2 believe this assault on reefs is caused by ocean warming and ocean acidification, and though arguments still rage over humankind’s culpability in this, apprehension continues to grow that matters have now gone too far, that the dire situation is irreversible, and that corals may soon be fossils.

  Australia’s particular role is rather more complex. Local pollution is proving a major menace: the runoff from the many Queensland rivers, now heavy with fertilizing chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and animal waste, is especially harmful to the reef. Tourists are blamed for causing it casual damage (by being careless in their boats, clumsy in their diving, greedy in their souvenir hunting), and overeager fishermen, foraging in protected areas, are blamed for triggering even more extensive ruin.

  For many years the reef also battled the infamous crown-of-thorns starfish. This spectacularly unpleasant carnivore, which has as many as twenty-one arms, thousands of needle-like spines, and the ability to secrete both venom and a foul-tasting detergent-like foam, settles itself atop a coral, extrudes its enormous stomach over the entire creature, and begins digesting it on the spot: a single starfish can kill sixty-five square feet of reef a year.

  Ingenious means were devised to kill these starfish off: One involved increasing the population of a marine snail called a Triton’s trumpet, which is known to tear the starfish to death with its razor-plated tongue. Another plan had divers injecting the starfish—skilled divers boast they can take care of two a minute—with an otherwise harmless chemical that causes the creatures to blister and ulcerate, lose their bodies’ turgor (their plumpness), and finally wither away and die. Concerted assaults like this have caused the starfish to fall back, for now at least.

  Meanwhile, other threats appear to be gaining ground. The Marine Park Authority, the government body that since its founding in 1975 regulates and protects the reef (and is funded largely by the fees it charges tourists), quickly points out that climate change does the greatest damage. But it has been widely criticized for allowing developers and, most especially, mining companies to undertake projects that place the reef in even greater and more immediate peril.

  The most classic example of such a development is a proposed huge new coal port to be built at Abbot Point, near the central Queensland town of Bowen; this port will be neighbor to the Whitsunday Islands and Hayman Island and Airlie Beach and Lindeman Island and a host of other of the most lyrically beautiful of the reef’s best-known treasures. The argument over the building of this port, and over the millions of tons of seabed that will need to be dredged and dumped to make way for its loading wharves (smothering with dust the clear waters that are so essential for the life of corals and sea grasses), has pitted Australia’s perceived economic needs against the long-term hopes of the much wider world community.

  This argument serves as a reminder that Australia possesses a formidable reserve of the minerals needed by the ever-growing economies of East Asia—China, most especially. A large number of Australians have profited hugely from this trade. The country’s economy has largely managed to insulate itself from the world’s recent economic storms, with the Australian people enjoying and preserving an enviable standard of living even while much of the world beyond h
as been tightening belts and cutting spending. More than a third of Australia’s exports go to China; coal and iron ore account for 70 percent of that total.

  Not surprisingly, Canberra is doing all it can to help keep it that way. In 2013 the government’s ministry in charge of the environment approved the plan for the dredging of Abbot Point, and the government-run Marine Park Authority then issued the necessary permit. Two Australian bodies notionally charged with the protection of nature have in this instance found it more expedient to protect coal mining interests—and have come in for widespread condemnation as a result.

  One might think that even the most myopic and misinformed would regard mixing coal with coral as self-evidently unwise. The entire country was gripped by a drama in April 2010 when a fully laden Chinese-registered coal carrier, the Shen Neng 1, cut a corner in coming out of a coal staithe in Rockhampton, grounded on the reef, gouged a two-mile-long scar in the reef, and left behind it a two-square-mile oil spill. Fatigue was offered as an excuse. The master and his deck officer were arrested, and they appeared, quite bewildered, in a local court—where they were promptly given bail and allowed to go back to the ship and head on home to China. The reef that was hit by the ship will need at least thirty years to recover, if it ever does. The Marine Park Authority solemnly promised it would issue sterner rules for dealing with such navigation errors. Yet three years later (memories being short when Chinese money is at stake) this same government body gave permission for yet more coal docks to be built nearby.

  Charlie Veron, already grieving at what he sees as the reef’s impending ruin, is angry and skeptical. On hearing about the Marine Park Authority’s approval of the Abbot Point dredging scheme, he remarked that the reef’s sole official local guardian and protector was “committing suicide.” In early 2015 the World Wildlife Fund further condemned the government for its indifferent stewardship, for bowing to commercial interests, and for placing the economy and the China trade before the wider needs of the planet.

  And ten thousand miles away, in Geneva, officials at UNESCO have been similarly exercised. They have the ability and the right to declare the reef’s World Heritage Site status under threat; and they also have the right, in extremis, to withdraw that status altogether. Australia, needless to say, would be publicly humiliated. But commerce being what it is, and reefs to some being merely pretty, Australia would undoubtedly also continue to sell its coal to China in ever-swelling tonnages. Business, in the new Pacific, is a powerful trump.

  The object I have long revered most in the world is contained inside a seven-foot-tall box made of mahogany and glass that stands toward the back of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Heavy velvet curtains shield its contents from the fading effects of sunlight; a button at the side allows artificial illumination, carefully timed, to bathe it briefly in a harmless glow.

  The object inside is very fragile, very old, and vivid with an almost unbelievable torrent of color: slashes of bright scarlet and yellow, and scimitar curves of the richest black. It is a ceremonial cloak from Hawaii, originally worn by a member of the islands’ royal family. Such cloaks, known as ahu’ula, are often worn with a curved, close-fitting feather helmet known as a mahiole. What makes the few that survive today so memorable and priceless is that each was hand-stitched from hundreds of thousands of exquisite bird feathers, and yet without a single bird dying, or so it is said, in the process of manufacture.

  The cloak was acquired more than a century and a half ago by the Pitt Rivers, a much-beloved Oxford institution currently housing half a million items of ethnological fascination, from bagpipes to shrunken heads, totem poles to war canoes, the tools of ancient Papuan dentists to the scalping devices from America’s Great Plains. It was brought to Britain by one Sir George Simpson, who for most of his career had been governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, based in Montreal. On his retirement, this majestic and autocratic figure decided to travel the world with a secretary, and in a leisurely crossing of the Pacific in 1842, he chanced upon the Sandwich Islands, soon to become Hawaii.

  The gorgeously colored ceremonial Hawaiian feather cloaks, or ahu’ula, are treasured relics of a time when birdlife on the islands was much richer than today. The red, yellow, and black feathers were taken without harming the birds; the demise of certain species is the fault of newcomers, not of the Hawaiians.* [Wmpearl.]

  Here he met the Hawaiian king’s daughter Kekauluohi, the young woman who, as the constitution of the day allowed, was running the country in her sickly father’s stead. Simpson was well aware that, at the time, and with the Pacific in a frenzy of imperial seizure, outsiders were busily trying to win the hand of the Hawaiian leadership—with a view, ultimately, to becoming their colonial masters. The Americans were most especially jockeying for influence over the islands, as were the French, the Belgians, and, naturally, the universal imperialists, the British.

  Simpson wanted none of it. From his viewpoint, and considering the commercial trading interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company, he thought it essential that Hawaii remain wholly independent of all foreign powers. He told the young princess this, and she, in a fit of gratitude, realizing that he shared views that she already had, promptly asked a servant to bring down from her private chambers the most magnificent ahu’ula cloak. She presented it to Simpson, though cautioning him that he was to give it to his wife.

  We do not know if Frances Simpson ever wore it. On her husband’s death, though, the cloak somehow passed to his acquaintance General Augustus Pitt Rivers, joining a vast amount of South Seas material already given by the family of Captain Cook. It was eventually mounted in its glass-fronted case in Oxford, and soon established its reputation as one of the best-known items in one of the best-loved museums in England.

  As an icon of early Hawaiian independence,3 the Pitt Rivers ahu’ula cloak plays its role with silent gusto. As a warning of the environmental perils that face the modern Pacific, it plays a role also—though mostly as a reminder of how mankind’s relationship with the natural world used to be, and how that relationship has deteriorated over time. Much as the aboriginals of Australia had long revered the Great Barrier Reef and the creatures it harbors—the white-bellied sea eagle, now threatened with extinction, was a powerful totem to many groups—so the feather cloak here recalls the reverence in which many Hawaiians held the natural riches around them, most notably the birds.

  The eight volcanic islands of the Hawaiian group, drifting above their hot spot, above their local upwelling of magma in the middle of the tropical North Pacific, are the most isolated archipelago in the world. For this reason Hawaii, much like the Galápagos, offers biologists a near-perfect laboratory (little contaminated by the influence of outside biologies) both for the study of evolution and for an examination of the flourishing or otherwise of endemic species. A survey in the late 1990s by Honolulu’s Bishop Museum showed the islands’ amazing fecundity: more than twenty-one thousand species of living creatures have been counted there—with fifteen thousand creatures living on the land, three hundred in the rivers, fifty-five hundred in the surrounding seas.

  Hawaii’s bird population, however, has suffered in recent years, with no fewer than sixteen of its three hundred island species rendered extinct since Captain Cook arrived and since Europeans began to settle amid this gorgeous assemblage of tropical flora and fauna. This loss was not due entirely to the poor stewardship of the newcomers, and it would be idle to pretend that Hawaii’s earlier inhabitants never had any adverse effect on the wildlife—in any contest between human beings and the natural world, humans invariably win, at least at first. But the Hawaiians’ assault on the local birds happens to have been very much more limited than that of the newcomers, and it is a most curious irony that it is the very existence of the famous feather cloaks that shows this to have been so. Because, to put it most succinctly, the making of these cloaks demonstrates just how assiduously most early Hawaiians actually cared for their wildlife.

  Maybe it was no more than
enlightened self-interest: a recognition that to produce ever more elaborate cloaks, thousands upon thousands of feathers were needed, and it was vital to keep the bird population thriving to produce them. Or maybe early Hawaiians did indeed have a real reverence for nature. Whatever the reason, the cloaks display a way in which humans managed to deal with nature in a kindly fashion. To do so in a sustainable way.

  The cloak makers traditionally gathered feathers from two main types of birds: the o’o and the i’iwi. The o’o (the name coming from its distinctively melancholy, bell-like cry) provided the cloaks’ black and yellow feathers; while the i’iwi offered up the scarlet. In both cases the methods of catching the birds were astute, quick, and entirely humane.

  Skilled bird catchers were sent up into the valleys where the birds were known to congregate. To catch the o’o, which have special tongues enabling them to prise nectar from flowers, the hunter would quietly extend up into the branches a stick smeared with very adhesive honey. An o’o would be tempted, would settle on the stick to dine—the birds are of a family generally known as honeyeaters—and it would be snared, its feathers firmly glued to the stick. The hunter would then gently reel his stick in, would carefully relieve the bird of perhaps a dozen of its most brilliantly yellow feathers (usually from the thighs, which were the best colored), and would take also a handful of the most richly black chest feathers. He would then clean the bird and release it, to flutter and soar back into the forest.