Alan Weisman - The World Without Us

Jackson and Sala coauthored papers describing how our era’s perspective had deluded us into thinking that a coral reef populated by colorful but puny, aquarium-sized fish was pristine. Only two centuries earlier, it was a world where ships collided with whole schools of whales, and where sharks were so big and abundant they swam up rivers to prey on cattle. The northern Line Islands, they decided, presented an opportunity to follow a gradient of decreasing human population and, they suspected, increasing animal size. At the end closest to the equator was Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island, the world’s largest coral atoll, with 10,000 people on just over 200 square miles. Next came Tabuaeran (Fanning) and a 3-square-mile speck called Teraina (Washington), with 1,900 and 900 people, respectively. Then Palmyra, with 10 staff researchers—and 30 miles farther, a sunken island where only the fringe reef that once encircled it remained: Kingman.

Other than copra—dried coconut—and a few pigs for local consumption, there is no agriculture on Kiritimati-Christmas Island. Still, in the first days of the 2005 expedition that Sala eventually organized, researchers aboard the White Holly were startled by the gush of nutrients from the island’s four villages, and by the slime they found coating the reefs where grazers like parrotfish had been heavily fished. At Tabuaeran, rotting iron from a sunken freighter was feeding even more algae. Tiny Teraina, far overpopulated for its size, had no sharks or snappers at all. Humans there used rifles to fish the surf for sea turtles, yellowfin tuna, red-footed boobies, and melonhead whales. The reef bore a four-inch-thick mat of green seaweed.

Submerged Kingman Reef, northernmost of all, had once been the size of Hawaii’s Big Island, with a volcano to match. Its caldera now lies below its lagoon, leaving only its coral ring barely visible. Because corals live in symbiosis with friendly, one-celled algae that require sunlight, as Kingman’s cone keeps sinking, the reef will go, too—already its west side has drowned, leaving the boomerang shape that allowed the White Holly to enter and anchor in the lagoon.

“So ironic,” marveled Jackson, after 70 sharks greeted the team’s first dive, “that the oldest island, sinking beneath the waves like a 93-year-old man with three months before he dies, is the healthiest against the ravages of man.”

Armed with measuring tape, waterproof clipboards, and three-foot PVC lances to discourage toothy natives, the teams of wet-suited scientists counted corals, fish, and invertebrates all around Kingman’s broken ring, sampling up to four meters on either side of multiple 25-meter transect lines they lay beneath the transparent Pacific. To examine the microbial base of the entire reef community, they suctioned coral mucus, plucked seaweed, and filled hundreds of liter flasks with water samples.

Besides the mostly curious sharks, unfriendly snappers, furtive moray eels, and intermittent schools of five-foot barracuda, the researchers also swam through swirling shoals of fusiliers, lurking peacock groupers, hawkfish, damselfish, parrotfish, surgeonfish, befuddling variations on the yellow-blue theme of angelfish, and striped, crosshatched, and herringbone permutations of black-yellow-silver butterfly fish. The huge diversity and myriad niches of a coral reef enable each species, so close in body shape and plan, to find different ways to make a living. Some feed only on one coral, some only on another; some switch between coral and invertebrates; some have long bills to poke into interstitial spaces that conceal tiny mollusks. Some prowl the reef by daylight while others sleep, with the whole assemblage changing places at night.

“It’s kind of like hot-bunking in submarines,” explains Alan Friedlander of Hawaii’s Oceanic Institute, one of the expedition’s fish experts. “Guys take four-to-six-hour shifts, switching bunks. The bunk never stays cold for very long.”

Vibrant as it is, Kingman Reef is still the aquatic equivalent of an oasis in mid-desert, thousands of miles from any significant landmass for trading and replenishing seed. The 300–400 fish species here are fewer than half of what’s on display in the great Pacific coral reef diversity triangle of Indonesia, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Yet the pressure of aquarium-trade capture and overfishing by dynamite and cyanide have stressed those places nearly to breaking, and left them bereft of large predators.

“There’s no place left in the ocean like the Serengeti that puts it all together,” observes Jeremy Jackson.

Yet Kingman Reef, like the Białowieża Puszcza, is a time machine, an intact fragment of what used to surround every green dot in this big blue ocean. Here, the coral team finds a half-dozen unknown species. The invertebrate crew brings back strange mollusks. The microbe team discovers hundreds of new bacteria and viruses, largely because no one has ever before tried to chart the microscopic universe of a coral reef.

In a sweltering cargo hold below decks, microbiologist Forest Rohwer has mini-cloned the lab he runs at San Diego State. Using an oxygen probe just one micron across that’s hooked to a microsensor and a laptop, his team has demonstrated exactly how algae that they collected earlier at Palmyra are supplanting living corals. In small glass cubes they built and filled with seawater, they placed bits of coral and seaweed algae separated by a glass membrane so fine that not even viruses can pass through it. Sugars produced by the algae can, however, because they dissolve. When bacteria living on coral feed on this rich extra nutrient, they consume all the available oxygen, and the coral dies.

To verify this finding, the microbiology team dosed some cubes with ampicillin to kill the hyperventilating bacteria, and those corals remained healthy. “In every case,” says Rohwer, climbing out of the hold into the considerably cooler afternoon, “stuff dissolving out of the algae kills the coral.”

So where is all the weedy algae coming from? “Normally,” he explains, lifting his nearly waist-length black hair to catch a breeze on the back of his neck, “coral and algae are in happy equilibrium, with fish grazing on the algae and cropping it. But if water quality around a reef goes down, or if you remove grazing fish from the system, algae get the upper hand.”

In a healthy ocean such as at Kingman Reef, there are a million bacteria per milliliter, doing the world’s work by controlling the movements of nutrients and carbon through the planet’s digestive system. Around the populated Line Islands, however, some samples show 15 times as much bacteria. Taking up oxygen, they choke coral, gaining ground for yet more algae to feed yet more microbial bacteria. It’s the slimy cycle that Jeremy Jackson fears, and Forest Rohwer agrees that it could well happen.

“Microbes don’t really much care whether we—or anything else—are here or not. We’re just a semi-interesting niche for them. In fact, there’s been just a very brief period of time when there were anything but microbes on the planet. For billions of years, that’s all there was. And when the sun starts to expand, we’ll go, and it’ll only be microbes, for millions or billions of years more.”

They will remain, he says, until the sun dries up the last water on Earth, because microbes need it to thrive and reproduce. “Although they can be stored by freeze-drying, and do just fine. Everything we shoot into space has microbes on it, despite people’s efforts to not let that happen. Once it’s out there, there’s no reason why some of this stuff couldn’t make it billions of years.”

The one thing microbes could never have done was take over the land the way more complex cell structures finally did, building plants and trees that invited more complex life-forms to dwell in them. The only structures microbes create are mats of slime, a regression toward the first life-forms on Earth. To these scientists’ palpable relief, here at Kingman that hasn’t happened yet. Pods of bottlenose dolphins accompany the dive boats to and from the White Holly , leaping to snag plentiful flying fish. Each underwater transect reveals more richness, ranging from gobies, a fish less than a centimeter long, to manta rays the size of Piper Cubs, and hundreds of sharks, snappers, and big jacks.