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At times in recent years, the algae have caused the nearby beaches of Kihei to reek. Tourists have been leaving the area, and beachgoers and divers are reluctant to go into the murky water. In Maui, the problem was once the solution: injection wells. Sewage from homes and hotels was gathered and forced down pipe wells. This is a clean, intelligent idea on the mainland, but in Hawaii's porous volcanic soil, the waste seeps back up at the edge of the sea, where it causes riotous algae growth.
Next I fly to California to meet with Nancy Knowlton and her husband, Jeremy Jackson—two scientists on a shared mission to save the world's oceans. Nicknamed Drs. Doom and Gloom, they don't hesitate to make dire predictions about coral.
"As long as we continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, overfish, and contaminate our water supplies, we are heading for an environmental train wreck as far as corals are concerned," Knowlton tells me in her office at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. One of the world's leading coral experts, she also holds an endowed chair in marine science at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
"Coral, worldwide, is like a blighted city," Jackson says. "Some buildings are going up, but more are being taken down by the wrecking ball. So while the city persists, it's still dying."
Discussing the multitude of reasons for reef destruction, Knowlton makes a comparison to people who suffer heart attacks: "It's not one thing in particular that kills them. They're overweight, they smoke, they don't exercise, they eat a high-cholesterol diet. That's what coral reefs are facing. We've turned them into a 400-pound, smoking couch potato."
The couple met at Jamaica's Discovery Bay research station, and over three decades, they have witnessed the demise of the island's reefs, from a coral playground alive with polyps and parrot fish to a warm soup of tiny fish and dead rubble. In 2003, Knowlton founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps, where she and Jackson both conduct research, to inspire a new generation of scientists to look at reefs and oceans as interconnected systems. In this view, parrot fish are vital to reef health because they eat the algae that kill the coral. So is Kealakekua's white-tipped cave dweller, which weeds out fish that might eat too much coral.
Their mission now is to get people to realize that while the reef situation is dire, it's not hopeless. "There's a decade to go before true catastrophe strikes," Knowlton says. "We can buy time by treating coral ecosystems right on the local level."
Scripps assistant professor Jennifer Smith, the first to discover that bad Jell-O back on the Big Island of Hawaii, is buying time by finding ways to combat algae. In an ambitious project she's launching this year off the Caribbean island of Curaçao, divers will enclose 20-meter sections of hairy, seaweed-infested reef under circular cage nets. The local gardeners—parrot fish and tangs—will then be introduced, along with a scattering of sea urchins for bottom cleanup. "We'll buy the parrot fish from local fishermen, who would otherwise kill and sell them for a dollar a pound in the local market," says Smith.
"Working with local fishermen is of paramount importance," adds Ayana Johnson, a Scripps PhD candidate who is researching ways to stop the overfishing that's destroying so much coral—while still allowing fishermen to earn a living. She's developed an arrowhead-shaped fish trap that allows young snappers, groupers, and tangs to escape. A normal trap kills an average of 12 fish; Johnson's traps let six of those go. "If 100 traps are in use on the island 100 days a year," says Johnson, "that's 60,000 fish left alive to graze seaweeds and algae off coral reefs and to reproduce. That's a lot of fish, and it's a lot better than telling fishermen to quit fishing and go get a job in a hotel."
In Key Largo, Florida, researchers are involved in another hopeful attempt at saving the corals: reseeding them. Scientists and students are here for the annual spawning of the coral, which takes place two to three days after the late-summer full moon.
The event is as giddy and wild for visiting researchers as it may be for the coral. Scientists and students boat out to the reef at sunset, to be in place by midnight. Egg or sperm pops out of each polyp's calcareous skeleton until the surrounding sea looks as milky white as an underwater snowstorm. Divers (sometimes accompanied by thousands of hungry fish) gather up bundles of fertilized eggs, remove them from the water, and place them in collecting tanks.
"It's superfun, a magical event," says Tali Vardi, a graduate student in coral reef ecology—"the synchronicity of all these creatures knowing when is the right time to release their gametes. It's a real spectacle of nature." The researchers sort the eggs by species, a task that can go on all night. Although these baby corals will be taken to a lab for research, similar ones can be nursed along like seedlings and planted on rocks, where they can begin to secrete new homes.
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