rarest place

8/9/2019 Rarest Place

1/20

The Rarest Place on Earth

Archie Carr III


2/20

1

The Rarest Place on Earth

Shortly after sunup, I checked out of my room in Belize City, hailed a

bent and rusty taxi, and clattered the short distance to Municipal Airport,debarking at the busy little departure office of Tropic Air. From there, it

was a quick and, at that hour, invigorating, 20-minute flight out over the

water to San Pedro on Ambergris Cay. San Pedro lies just minutes by skiff

from the Belize Barrier Reef, and, during the past 25 years, has grown into

one of the most popular dive destinations in the Caribbean. San Pedro, now

beginning to sprawl out from its old fishing-town boundaries, was at the

southern tip of Ambergris Cay; so far south that engineers had recently

begun dredging and filling in the mangroves to build, oddly enough, both

cheap homes for the terribly poor, and luxury accommodations for the very

rich.

I had phoned ahead to charter a skiff to take me to the north of

Ambergris, to a place called Bacalar Chico, a national park with terrestrial

and marine components that also happened to rest on the Belize-Mexico

border. At Bacalar Chico I would find a site that I had come to think of over

the years as the rarest place on earth: a spot where the barrier reef came so

close, it kissed the mainland shore. I wanted to check the health of the reef

at this, its most northern extremity in Belizean waters. I wanted to witness

the shocking findings of my friend, Melanie McField, who had reported in

her recently completed doctoral dissertation that 48 percent of the corals ofBelize were bleached into oblivion.

The skipper of my painted mahogany skiff was a broad-faced San

Pedrano, a young man of Yucatecan extraction, who welcomed me aboard

with tremendous good-cheer. San Pedro town is a happy place because of

the hearty, wholesome, reef-oriented life, and because of all the tourist

money in circulation. Miguel, my pilot, took his place at the center-mounted

console, fixed his eyes on the horizon, pushed the boat quickly up to a plane,

and pointed her north. We would scoot up the coast on the inside of

Ambergris Cay, the lee side, over the shallow waters of Chetumal Bay,

through an early morning that was almost breezeless, and still sweet with the

damp of last nights showers.

I sat on a bench directly in front of Miguel's control console. I had

sunshades to cut the dazzle of the sky and water, and I reversed my cap to

save it from the wind. Lulled by the hum of the engine and the crackle of

the wooden hull on tiny ripples, I drifted into a pleasant trance. We had


3/20

2

more than an hour to run in this quick boat, and Miguel had brought a

thermos of coffee, so the morning was unfolding in an agreeable way. A

frigate bird passed high overhead hanging, as always, in a posture of casual

grace, gliding east, to cross the belly of the big island; I guessed to soar for

the morning above the barrier reef.

My mind, too, returned to the reef, to its plight. I had been at the

station out at Glover's Reef not long ago. My old friend, Jacque Carter had

been there, planning a grouper study. And Tim McClanahan had been there,

too. Good luck for me. Jacque (That's his name:Jacque, notJacques;

although he was named after Jacques Yves-Cousteau. His mother couldn't

see any use for the terminal "s," so she dropped it from her newborns

name.) Jacque had helped me and Janet Gibson start theWildlife

Conservation Societysresearch and conservation program on the barrier

reef 25 years before. Jacque and his wife, Judy, had raised 2 babies during

the long duration of Jacque's studies of Nassau grouper and their relatives.He had become a part of the Belizean family of reef aficionados, advocates,

and scientists. Jacque was now a dean at a small New England university,

but received grant support from WCS on a regular basis. Tim McClanahan,

on the other hand, was mainline WCS staff. Tim and his family lived in

Mombassa, Kenya, where Tim carried on long-term studies of coral reefs in

the Indian Ocean. Once theMiddle Cay research stationhad become a

reality, Tim had made it his habit to visit once a year to monitor the health of

the corals on the atoll.

The crisis faced by the Belizean reefs is not altogether easy to

comprehend. I had grappled with it for some time, of course, trying to

understand the problem better, always hoping for fixes, solutions---things

that we might try to do to improve the outlook. When we bought the island

on Glover's Reef, for example, our motivation was to help manage a big

marine park. Being so far at sea, we were confident ourreefs would be

entirely free of pollution and sedimentation from the mainland. We would

be able to focus on anti-poaching, monitoring, and environmental education.

And yet, as though flooded with fertilizer, an explosion of algae a rooted

or attached, fleshy, brownish form of algae of several species covered

the shallow-water patch reefs of the atoll very shortly after our field teamshad begun taking notes. Yes, the great banana, pineapple and oil palm

plantations of coastal Honduras were less than a hundred miles to the south,

but could the runoff from these farms have reached this far? Wouldn't we

have seen green algae, phytoplankton, suspended in the water, turning it

bleary, if the water was enriched with contaminants? There was never any
http://www.wcs.org/http://www.wcs.org/http://www.wcs.org/http://www.wcs.org/http://wcsgloversreef.org/http://wcsgloversreef.org/http://wcsgloversreef.org/http://wcsgloversreef.org/http://www.wcs.org/http://www.wcs.org/


4/20

3

evidence of that. Visibility for divers around Glover's was universally

memorable, except when storms raised sediments from the bottom.

If not pollution, then what? Why such an explosion of brown algae

overgrowing the corals?

Over a period of a couple of days, I interviewed Jacque and Tim about

the algae and about the all-too-numerous other problems confronting the

reef. I swam among some of the 700 reef patches strewn across the shallows

of the atoll. I dove and looked for the antennae of the spiny lobsters that our

colleague, Dr. Charles Acosta believed were rebounding thanks to better

protection in the park. I was gratified to see numerous conchs scattered here

and there over the bottom, but reminded of how pitifully vulnerable these

big snails are even to a novice diver. The conchs were back, but the reefs

themselves were like gardens ravaged by storms. The basic structure was

there, and fish, especially small fish, abounded; but a third of the flowers of

the gardens, the individual corals, were pale, covered with silt. Here andthere, healthy remnants could be found: The lower half of one arm of an

elkhorn; the backside of a massive brain coral; unexpected, warmly

luminous members of the former garden. This time as I swam, filled with

the notions of my talks with Jacque and Tim, I thought of myself as a doctor

peering at his patient, seeking by direct observation a clue, or clues, to this

trauma.

It was complicated, all right, but I finally saw that the whole mess

could be reduced to a narrative. The reef, the greater ecosystem, is suffering

from four distinct stresses. The four big problems are the virtual extinction

of the spiny sea urchin,Diadema; over fishing of major predators, like

snapper and grouper, and of herbivorous fish, like the parrotfish; ocean

warming; and El Nio. And of course, the four crises aggravate one another,

yielding a cascade of difficulties for life on the reef.

The story ofDiadema, the impact of its demise, the fact that the loss

of such a simple, and occasionally threatening, creature could have such

widespread repercussions, always surprises me. My reasoning might be a

little short of scientific, but I always felt that the sea urchins of the

Caribbean contributed to my upbringing. They trained me as a skin diver,

just as I was trained as a hiker by rattlesnakes on the farm in Florida where Igrew up. On the farm, my mother warned me: Keep your eyes on the

ground. I never got snake-bit, but Mother wasnt with me on the reefs. I

had to learn to watch where my feet were by feeling the pain of the sea

urchins spines. Famously agonizing, the black spines are 9 inches long,

brittle as glass slivers, and coated with an excreted slime. Diadema was

there, in great numbers, on every coral head throughout the Bahamas, the


5/20

4

Caymans, Cuba, the Florida Keys, to eat algae, and to train young divers to

keep their hands and feet off the substrate.

Today when I leap into shallow water in the Caribbean, I still flinch.

The training persists; but the threat, the danger, is absent. Vanished, almost

entirely. Once as abundant as cow pies in a crowded corral, now you would

be lucky to find two of the big, black, shiny urchins in a day of diving.

The urchins died of a fungus, it is said. By 1983, an epizootic had

spread among the urchins, beginning in Trinidad, sweeping north to the

Florida Keys, killing 90 percent of the ancient echinoderms throughout their

range.

As far as the reef is concerned, the urchin is a grazer. It feeds on

algae that are always trying to establish themselves on or near the reef; and,

to a limited extent, urchins eat sea grasses. In the old days, sea urchins

would graze all the turtle grass within about a 10 meter radius of the

protective coral head. Biologists used to call these bared circles halos.The diameter of the halo was measured by how far the urchins felt they

could safely graze. Just what the urchins had to fear I cannot say. It is hard

to imagine the crafty fish or crab that could defeat the terrible spines, but, if

you happen upon a freshly crushed sea urchin, you will see most every fish

in the reef rushing in to get a bite. No learning curve there. The entire

community of denizens seems to be aware of delicious fare concealed in the

hard shell beneath the waving needles of theDiadema.

As in other ecosystems, when a grazing species is eliminated from the

landscape, there will be consequences. First, of course, the vegetation that

was being grazed will very likely flourish. Secondly, one or more other

herbivores might grow in abundance in response to the newly available food.

In the case of the sea urchin ecosystem, algae were seen to explode in

abundance throughout its old range. Not only in Belizean waters. All over

the Caribbean, wherever marine biologists were investigating, reports came

in of a bloom of fixed or attached algae that tended to grow on the corals,

shading them, quieting surface currents, allowing silt to settle onto the

delicate polyps, choking them, and preventing larval corals from becoming

established. The algae seemed to obliterate the living corals, while making

good use of the coral rock as firmament for attachments.There was no doubt about a dearth of sea urchins at Glover's Reef, and

as an apparent consequence, there was indeed a plague of algae. The brown,

tennis ball-sized florets of tough, petal-like flesh were scattered over most of

the coral patches on the atoll. Tim MacClanahan had several of these

formations under close scrutiny, and was doing experiments to help get a


6/20


7/20

6

more in depth, usually near some geomorphic structure: A point of land or

projection from the barrier reef. It is believed that the current flow around

these points insures that newly fertilized eggs of the spawning grouper will

have a greater chance of getting clear of the land and reef, and into the deep,

pelagic environment, where they must be for a period of time for proper

early development.

Adult groupers once congregated by the thousands, by the tens of

thousands, at each of 9 such sites, or banks, in the waters of Belize. They

mill around at first, gradually undergoing dramatic color changes, and then

begin energetic courtship behavior, spiraling upwards, and releasing milt and

eggs simultaneously into the sea. Hundreds of pairs of fish may be doing

this at a given moment, and the sea becomes a soup of piscine propagules.

It so happens that the gathered fish, which, during the rest of the year

are scattered far, wide and deep across the reef, become ravenous at the

breeding site. They are utterly vulnerable to a baited hook, and so representa bonanza to a commercial fisherman. Three or more hooks to a line is the

custom. The fish just keep coming in over the gunwale. They can all be

captured. The entire breeding stock.

Jacques Cousteau brought his ship, the Calypso, to Belize in 1972,

and did some exploring. He got his cameramen down on the Nassau grouper

bank off Cay Glory, a site on the main barrier reef, almost due east from

Belize City. This is not necessarily an easy dive. Because of the currents

that are so important to the fishes reproductive strategy, the diver is

confronted with the serious challenge of holding station and not being swept

away into the Caribbean. Cousteau and his men were up to the test, of

course, and the film was exciting. It showed a cloud of grouper. A column

of big, oddly colored Nassau grouper, suspended in a featureless, bluish

medium of open water. For me, it was a remarkable scene for a fish

normally so tied to the rocks of the reef; a fish known to defend a specific

sleeping rock for a year at a time.

Captain Cousteau could not make that film today. The grouper bank

at Glory Cay was fished out by the late-1980s.

They took the glory from Glory Cay.

There was another grouper bank at Rocky Point, up north on the reef.Fishermen in San Pedro told Jacque Carter about Rocky Point. They said

they didnt discover it until sometime in the 70s. They had been too busy

fishing lobster in the reef to notice the fish offshore. They said it might

have been the largest, most fish-laden of all the grouper banks. So many

fish, they set their gang-hook fishing lines aside and used dynamite. They

destroyed the fish with explosives over a period of a few years. They killed


8/20

7

so many on some days, they couldnt clean them all. Grouper rotted on the

docks in San Pedro.

Of the 9 original grouper aggregation banks in Belize, only 2 remain,

and they continue to attract artisanal fishermen on every 13th

moon, and for

2 or 3 full moons thereafter. One of these sites is off the northeast point of

Glover's Reef. We of the Wildlife Conservation Society have taken a close

interest in this bank, sending researchers like Enric Salas down to count the

fish, tagging some with sonic beepers, and, of course making overtures to

government to do the right thing: Close the banks; let the fish breed and

replenish the reef. WCS scientists have also made their voices heard in a

national grouper management council, whose terms of reference include

the entire barrier reef ecosystem.

Reduction in the numbers of big predators on the reef will have ---

must have --- an ecological impact. It is an inescapable outcome, but it is

not necessarily easy to identify that effect. In the absence of the big hunters,one or more prey species of fish or crustacean must be more abundant, but

we cant quite say which ones. There is an unidentified ecological

imbalance in the reef, and that is a scary thing. The conservationist cannot

sleep well with a mysterious distortion like that lurking in the system.

What is not uncertain is the visual silence on the reef. Not only are

the grouper scarce, but so are the other large creatures like sea turtles and

sharks. If the ecological risk is, at times, obscure, the economic risk is not.

Scuba divers like to see big fish, and lots of them. If the diving in Belize

looses its excitement, the economic impact could be staggering. It is a point

Jacque Carter harps on publicly a lot these days, because, oddly enough, the

lodge owners and dive masters of Belize appear, at times, timid: The

political clout of the organized fishermen remains intimidating.

Troubling as the decline of grouper may be, it doesn't explain the

explosion of brown algae on Glover's Reef. The grouper is a predator; algae

control requires an herbivore. Almost concurrently with the loss of the

grazing sea urchins, some grazing fish must have dropped out of the picture,

too, and Tim MacClanahan thought it was a parrotfish.

I had difficulty accepting this theory. I was quite sure no Belizean in

his or her right mind would eat a parrotfish. But, Tim had other ideas. Hespoke of a "missing herbivore," deducing that there was a species absent

from the reef. He had to prove a negative.

Tim's work on the east coast of Africa, where everything is eaten, had

made him suspicious about the Belize situation. Parrotfish were eliminated

from the reefs of Kenya, and the algae responded with vigor. Why not

Belize? I argued with him. I appealed to Jacque Carter, who had


9/20

8

inventoried the holds of dozens of fishing smacks. Jacque agreed that it

would be unusual for a Belizean to keep a parrotfish. These hearty, colorful

fish, of numerous species, spend a lot of time crunching coral with the

protruding, powerful teeth that give them their name. They ingest algae,

which would make them herbivores, but also probably sponges and

inescapably, the coral polyps themselves, which, I suppose, would make the

fish omnivores. What passes out the other end is coral sand. Parrotfish

recycle coral reefs, converting them into soft, creamy-colored sand. Because

of the encrusting organisms they eat, I always figured parrotfish would taste

like the devil, and probably carry ciguatera disease.

The solution to the missing herbivore came on a setting sun on Middle

Cay. I had arrived there bearing a bottle of spiced rum from the duty free

store at the international airport. Dinner had been served and eaten, the

abundant red beans and rice leaving us heavy in the belly, and ready to sit a

spell and chat. The breeze was light, but had been stiff all day, so thesandflies had been swept away. We sat, and we cut the rum with a fine

Belizean lime, and sipped it. Danny Wesby was there, a man whose store

of wry remarks was inexhaustible. Danny was our Number Two at the

station; Assistant Director, and stood in for the Station Manager as boss of

the island whenever called upon. He was a waterman. He was an ex-

commercial fisherman, and he and his family had worked Glover's Reef for

two generations. His home was in Dangriga on the mainland, directly west

of us, two hours by swift boat. Danny was a lean man, wiry, with a sly

smile. He was a master of the double entendre. And his knowledge of the

reef was mythical in the Stann Creek District.

It was for Danny and his kin and his water-bound countrymen that we

had committed ourselves to buying Middle Cay, and taking a stand for

Glover's Reef, the most magnificent coral atoll in the Caribbean. I had

certified as much to relevant ministries in Belmopan when we, WCS, were

seeking permits to own property in the country. One of our goals was to

help preserve the natural heritage of the reef for thepeople of Belize, and

theGlovers Reef Marine Reserve, now a World Heritage Site, would one

day be the result.

We sat on blocks of driftwood and hammocks outside a littlebunkhouse under the stations rustic laboratory; Tim and Jacque and Danny

and I. Sunset on Middle Cay can be a satisfying, mellow time, and this was

one of those moments. Having discussed sea urchins and missing herbivores

with Tim until I was sure he was fed up, I took the chance to clarify

something with Danny. I asked him if Belizeans ate parrotfish.

Not so much, you know, he said.
http://www.gloversreef.org/http://www.gloversreef.org/http://www.gloversreef.org/http://www.gloversreef.org/


10/20

9

Thats what I thought, I said. Tim works in Mombassa, and in

Mombassa, the people have eaten the parrotfish, and that helped wreck the

reefs of Kenya.

It can be, Danny said, a little enigmatically.

Tim thinks that the sea urchin is not the only algae eater missing

from Glover's. He thinks something like a parrotfish or a surgeonfish --- an

herbivore --- must be missing, too.

Yes man, it can be, Danny said again, drinking of the spiced rum,

something sly working into his narrow face. I began to think he was up to

one of his verbal ploys.

But Ive never seen anyone catch a parrotfish here, I protested.

You just said Belizeans dont eat the damn things. Theyre probably

poisonous, anyhow.

No, but Tim is right, you know, Danny said. It is the Midnight blue

parrotfish that is missing.I stared at Danny in the waning light. He stared back, his hazel eyes

steady; no mirth to be seen. I felt a surge of adrenalin.

Whadaya mean? I asked.

I had a faint memory of seeing the handsome, dark-bodied midnight

blues, with their lighter faces, in the Bahamas, grazing in and around coral

heads.

Danny Wesby said, I caught them all. My friend and I, we caught all

the midnight blue parrotfish. There are none left. They never came back to

Glover's Reef.

I was stunned, but intensely curious.

How in hell did you do that? I asked. I was certain Danny would

not have used poison or dynamite.

No problem, man. The school of midnight blues always has a

sentinel; a guard fish. Where the guard fish goes, the whole school goes.

Thats how we caught them.

Danny chuckled at the recollection.

The guard fish, he gonna head for a safe place, a cut in the reef. If he

get through the cut, he can hide in deep water. You see? So what we do, we

put the net right there. Right across the cut. Then we spook the guard fish.Where the guard fish go, the whole school goes. We catch the whole school,

man.

Tim, are you hearing this? I called out.

Tim and Jacque were talking in the growing gloom of evening.

Hearing the excitement in my voice, they ambled over closer to Danny and

me. I had Danny review the story of the midnight blue. Apparently, over a


11/20

10

season or two, he and his friend had continued using the fishes escape

behavior against them. They worked across all of the 75 square miles of the

expanse of the atoll, catching parrotfish, a school at a time.

Holy smokes, I said. But what did you do with them? Are you

telling me you sold parrotfish to Belizeans?

No, man, Danny said, with a touch of derision. To the

Guatemalans. They eats them for Lent. The Lenten season. Easter time.

Oh, yes, the Catholics. I remembered now. I had studied fish on Lake

Izabal, in Guatemala. I had seen the racks of drying, salted fish. Seco-

salado, they called it. Dry and salted. Bails and bails of it were prepared,

bundled up, tossed onto the roof racks of rickety buses, and hauled off to the

cities of the interior. Seco-salado. I remembered lots of flies crawling

across the briny fillets as they steamed dry in the tropical sun. In this way,

they were stripping the stocks of snook from Lake Izabal.

So Danny had linked into the insatiable, if seasonal, market for dryfish in neighboring Guatemala. He had captured the midnight blue

parrotfish, cleaned them, dried them in the sun, probably right there on

Middle Cay, long, long ago, and hauled the redolent cargo down to

Livingston for sale to the needy Catholics.

Well, Tim, I said, toasting him with the rum, I told you Belizeans

didnt eat parrotfish.

My reverie about the midnight blues was checked as Miguel angled

the boat away from an approaching patch of mangroves; an incipient little

key being formed by the tangled roots of the mangroves themselves. We

were cruising over very shallow water. In fact, only a little closer in to

Ambergris, where the water was knee deep, were famous bonefish flats.

Anglers with fly rods could wade, or be poled about by sharp-eyed guides in

shallow-draft skiffs, looking for, and casting to, the exposed tail fins of

mudding bonefish; one of the greatest game fish in the world.

As for the midnight blue parrotfish, we on the staff of WCS have a

tentative plan. It might work, if we can get the money, of course. The

species can still be found on the main barrier reef. We think juvenile fish

can be captured, and transported to Glover's Reef for release. Translocation.

Restoration. We are hopeful.But, I reminded myself, suppose we do restore the herbivorous

parrotfish, and suppose fishing bans do allow the predatory groupers to

bounce back, there is still El Nio, the Christ Child. It is a bad name: no

good comes of this nio. The event bears that name only because, to

Peruvian anchovy fishermen, the warm water and the bad times come at

Christmas, every few years. El Nio has to do with rising water


12/20

11

temperatures at equatorial latitudes. It is the genesis of a thermal engine that

spins off foul weather across the planet, and alters marine currents the size

of the Mississippi. The thermal map of entire ocean basins is redrawn, and

habitats and biological communities accustomed to a cool-water ambiance

are suddenly flooded with warm water. It only takes an increase of a few

degrees, as few as 4 degrees, to wreak havoc among many types of marine

organisms.

When El Nio water temperatures strike Belize, it is traumatic for the

little coral polyps of the reef. They respond to the abrupt leap in temperature

by expelling the symbiotic plants, the algae, which live within their tissues.

The algae, or zooxanthellae, normally produce carbohydrates through

photosynthesis. The polyp happily accepts this food, and provides its waste

products to the plant in exchange. The zooxanthellae carry out other duties

as well for the curious little duplex, and they provide color. It is the

chlorophyll in the zooxanthellae that contains the pigments that give thecorals their reddish, brownish and greenish tones. Once the polyp casts out

the symbionts, the corals -- a single head, or an entire reef -- turn bone

white. This is known as bleaching, and it is usually the precursor to death of

the coral polyps. They can live for awhile, but if they are unable to recover

their zooxanthellae, they will die.

In 1995 there was a bad El Nio event, and in 1998, there was another

one, even worse. Marine scientists monitored what one writer called a

wave of heat spreading from the Peruvian coast, westward across the

Pacific and Indian Oceans. It was devastating to coral reefs right across the

IndoPacific. No one had ever seen anything like it. Eventually, the heat

wave worked its way into the Caribbean. In Belize WCS staff, along with

other workers up and down the coast, witnessed the terrible ghosting of the

great formation offshore.

Like most people, I suppose, I had only become aware of the El Nio

phenomenon in what I consider to be the last few years; during the last

decade, perhaps? The last two decades? I have studied marine science all

my life at various levels of intensity, but El Nio doesnt appear in my

recollections until fairly recently. Maybe that is another indication of the

newness or immaturity of marine biology, generally.Or maybe it is something else. Maybe El Nio, as the world has

experienced it recently, really is new. I asked Tim MacClanahan about this

once, out at Glover's Reef. There seemed to be suggestions in the scientific

journals that El Nio events had occurred every few years for centuries; for

eons, even.


13/20

12

Yes, Tim said, his face becoming thoughtful. We took core

samples in coral rock around Mombassa.

You did? I said, incredulous. "I thought you were a fish man." Tim

had become something of a one-man college of marine science.

Well, we have to make-do sometimes. So I did some geology and,

yes, in the cores of limestone, you can see the signs of these El Nio blights

very regularly, right on back through time

But was it this bad? I asked, waving my arm out toward the

perimeter of Glover's Reef. Its hard to believe corals could recover from

this kind of devastation every 4 or 5 years.

Nope. Its worse now; worse than its ever been, Tim said.

Why? I asked.

Global warming, he answered, without hesitation.

The El Nio-spawned waves of warm water that periodically sloshed,

unwanted, into cool-water habitats, caused their share of damage in timespast. Analyzing core samples like those Tim had collected showed that

some corals in a given reef system were killed outright during these events,

and, almost certainly the entire reef had suffered stress. But, in those days

the consequences of El Nio were more like an interruption, a hiccup, in the

exuberant life of the reef. The trauma was always tolerable, in the long

term. On the whole, the organisms were able to protect themselves from the

thermal assaults, and recover from them. The reef community was adapted

to occasional, moderate, thermal blasts.

However, today, as Tim explained it, with the ocean temperature

already elevated by human-induced greenhouse effects, the increment added

by El Nio waters is beyond the evolutionary experience of the coral

organisms. The polyps cast out their algal partners and die, turning eerily

white. The peaks in temperature, occurring about every 4 years, are much

higher than in ancient times; El Nio effects are additive, and the threshold

of tolerance to thermal stress is being exceeded among reefs throughout the

world.

My glossy blue and white boat was slowing as Miguel sought the

mangrove channel that would take us across Ambergris Cay, into Bacalar

Chico National Park and Marine Reserve. We were getting close to therarest place on earth.

The park was a good sample of coastal land and sea. Our boat cruised

through mangrove channels that opened into broad, very quiet lagoons. The

park service had set out stakes as markers to help navigate through the maze.

Tarpon rolled in the still water, their silver backs seeming very broad in the

confined waters of the channels. Bordering the wetlands I glimpsed patches


14/20

13

of a low, bushy forest; a plant community of tough, hearty species, able to

survive on sandy soil, and be regularly assailed by tropical storms. Back in

1991, the year Janet Gibson and I boated up here to advocate in favor of

declaring a Bacalar Chico National Park, tracks of interesting game could be

found at this end of Ambergris Cay: jaguar, puma, peccaries, deer. But, the

oceanside of Ambergris was becoming developed quickly, and I didnt know

if the wildlife was holding on. I would have to ask the wardens.

Bacalar Chico, the park, also included a section of the barrier reef, and

it was possible to reach it by boat. The channel we were in led to the sea; it

was a man-made cut, dug by the Maya. Its purpose had been to facilitate the

passage of trade goods coming by large, sea-going canoes down the coast of

the Yucatan and destined for the interior, perhaps for the great city of Tikal.

It was an interesting place, and this morning, it was free of people. As

we drifted into a little dock adorned with a park service sign, I enjoyed a

healthy sense of frontier, of wilderness. The only sounds, as Miguel cut theengine, were the soft slush of the low surf on the reef, offshore, and a faint

slapping of a palm leaf striking another in the light breeze. At the moment,

not even birds were calling. There were neat little clouds in the sky. The air

was cool under the seagrape tree leaning over the dock. The seawater,

beyond the opening of the Maya canal, was Santa Fe turquoise; an almost

artificial tone. I never get used to it; I never tire of it.

Wilderness, if its a Caribbean shore, makes me sort of... nutty. It is

never daunting, as wilderness sometimes can be, but splendid and inviting. I

was in Bermuda, once, and encountered an unusual metaphor for what Im

talking about. As I was leaving a hotel, going through the glass doors for the

outside, a small car swung up to the stoop to discharge a passenger. A large,

brown-skinned man unfolded himself from the automobile, stood, and for a

moment, faced in my direction, waving at someone he knew behind me. He

had on glossy, light-brown shoes, navy blue socks that reached his knees,

Bermuda shorts, chartreuse in color, and a sky-blue button-down Oxford

shirt. His smile was broad and brilliant white. The apples of his cheeks

gleamed. And his head was crowned with pure white, tightly curled hair,

like a cloud at noon-time. It suddenly dawned on me that the hearty, clashy

colors, and the warm, embracing demeanor of the man, reminded me of aCaribbean shore. Thats what its like: mellow and sublime.

A slim young woman in uniform came onto the dock. She had

appeared from a small building that I took to be a park field station. Her

badges and embroidered names and emblems confirmed her as an officer of

the Fisheries Department, serving as a park ranger at Bacalar Chico. We

clambered onto the dock to say hello, and talk. She said one of her two


15/20

14

partners, men I gathered, was out on a morning patrol. The other was

watching over a construction gang building a new park headquarters, the San

Juan Station. The new structure was sponsored by the Mesoamerican

Barrier Reef System project, or MBRS. The MBRS enjoyed the financial

support of the Global Environmental Facility, and was the most promising

regional conservation initiative in history to come to the aid of the reefs of

Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.

As we chatted with the park ranger on her dock, we learned she had

an unusual assignment. The park service staff were the only governmental

personnel stationed up here where the borders of Mexico and Belize were

joined. What a park warden might witness in a place like this might not be

covered in conventional park management manuals. The most worrisome

incident, because it was so dangerous, was drug trafficking. The second

spookiest waspeople trafficking: coyotes guiding small gangs of desperate

Hondurans or Salvadorans into Mexico and on to the assumed opportunitiesof the North. The Bacalar Chico staff had protocols prepared to handle, in

non-confrontational ways, these oddball exigencies.

We learned, however, that the most recent event to alarm the park

rangers had not been an encounter with contrabandistas, but with carnage in

the sea. Some weeks before, dead fish and sea turtles had come floating, all

bloated and stinking, down from Mexico into the waters of Bacalar Chico.

The staff made inquiries, and learned that the Mexicans had blasted a

passage through their segment of the barrier reef. They had dynamited a

channel to allow boat traffic from a resort town to reach the open sea. This

was done, said the official explanations, to facilitate naval defense of the

Yucatan coast. The Belizeans figured it was to allow new business with

cruise ships.

I leaned toward the Belizean point of view.

Miguel had broken out cold drinks from the cooler, but before he got

too comfortable with the ranger and the salubrious surroundings, I had him

run me the short way down to the rarest place on earth, Rocky Point, where I

waded ashore with a canvas bag of snorkeling gear. Miguel would dash

back after 30 minutes.

I chose Rocky Point as a place to reconnoiter for reef health because itnot only represented a segment of the Belize Barrier Reef, but it touched the

land. At Rocky Point, you could practically leap from shore to the verge of

a continental shelf; from the edge of a dry forest to the wall of a barrier reef.

To the north and south of this spot, the reef drew away from the mainland.

Down at Sapadillo Cays, the southern tip of the reef in Belizean waters, the

reef was 40 miles out from the beach. Here at Rocky Point, a headland


16/20

15

derived from an uplifted fossil reef, the dry land was perched almost on top

of the coral reef, and would cast shadows upon it during a late afternoon.

It is not that Rocky Point is so unusual, ecologically. From what I can

tell, being so close to shore doesn't make for unique biological patterns

beneath the water. There is no pollution, no unusual sedimentation ---

because it's a park. It is mainly that Rocky Point is the site of this curious

geomorphological situation: no barrier reef in the world does the same

thing. Most remain purposefully offshore, breastworks against typhoons and

high seas.

So, there is the geology of the place; and there is, for some people, a

more whimsical aspect to Rocky Point. To be able to jump from one biome

into another --- kiscadee flycatchers squawking one second, stoplight

parrotfish scuttling away, the next--- is a fine experience for a naturalist.

Having the transition punctuated by the splash of the dive is a dandy bonus.

Air to water; birds to fish: a happy evolution, wrapped in a shroud ofbubbles.

I donned my bathing suit and diving gear, and waded out. In fact, you

can't really jump to the edge of the reef. There is a narrow apron of sand and

coral rubble to cross. I lay out on the water and began to kick my flippers,

sucking in my gut to get over the sharp corals, and slid into the deep water

beyond the forereef; the wall that faced the sea and waves and currents.

Then I settled down, crossed my hands over my back, and slowly kicked

back up the reef, watching the craggy scene below. It is a bit like watching

Manhattan from the porthole of an airliner descending into LaGuardia

airport: A three dimensional colony of fixed and moving figures slides by,

teasing you with sights whose meaning you cannot resolve before you have

moved on to another, tantalizing, situation.

The signs of bleaching were everywhere. My eye, perhaps my soul,

sought to dwell on the living structures down there, the 50 percent that was

still okay; but I was here to bear witness to the morbidity at the rarest place

on earth. Dead or dying coral is first white, as I have said; a very pure

white, with a brilliance to it; and it is indeed exactly like coral cleaned with

chlorine bleach for sale at the trinket shops on the interstates. It crossed my

mind that the corals die beautifully. With the tissues of the polyps gone, theintricate structures of the underlying, deposited, stone are visible, the

calcium carbonate matrix that the corals and their helpers, the zooxanthellae,

have worked to lay down over years; decades. It is beautiful, but chilling. It

is a forbidden sight, these skeletons. Only dead corals can reveal this pearly

infrastructure.


17/20

16

But, after a time, without the energetic work of the polyps, the dead,

quiet stones take on a dirty appearance. Silt settles on the branches and

boulders of the coral, taking the reflectivity out of the scene, and actually

dulling the sharper edges with layers of mud. The light goes out of a dead

reef, even though the physical relief may persist.

There were fish still there, in considerable numbers. The changes in

the composition of the fish community would probably be subtle and gradual

if the reef continued to die. For many of the species, the structure itself was

what was important. The hidey-holes and tunnels and shelves of rock.

Shelter from predators; concealing ambuscades; nursery cubicles --- so long

as the fortifications remained, it didn't matter if the coral polyps were alive.

Until the rock itself was turned to sand.

On a sandy bank, out from a spur of coral rock, a Spanish hogfish was

working; patiently probing the sand with his peculiar telescopic jaws. The

three stringy pennants of his dorsal fin rose when the fish rolled an eye up atme, but he kept on working. A blue headed wrasse was out there with him,

zooming around the larger fish, looking for a freebie morsel, playing the

Jack Russell terrier to the hogfish's phlegmatic basset hound. The hogfish

was perhaps 15 inches long; a youngster, still growing, but ideal for a baking

dish. It was a good sign because among Belizeans, as among most

experienced consumers of Caribbean fish, the hogfish is the most delectable

of all. They are notably passive fish, easily speared, and are quickly

removed from the coral reef habitat if spear fishing is permitted. I took this

fish's appearance as evidence that the Bacalar Chico park was working. The

hogfish, and, presumably the snappers and groupers, had a refuge here from

the incessant pressure of commercial fisherman.

I saw a barracuda hovering over a large, solitary brain coral, and I

swam toward it. The barracuda receded as I approached, but kept me within

his severe gaze. The big brain, maybe 10 feet across the middle, was

showing some disease on top, as though scalped with a giants knife, but at

least 2/3 of it was glowing a soft, healthy green. I took a breath and dove

down its side, reaching for the sandy bottom. I grabbed a big chunk of loose

limestone to help me stay down for a moment, and glanced under the shelves

at the base of the brain coral, hoping to see wavy tell-tales; the antennae of aspiny lobster.

What I saw instead made me choke on my snorkel in excitement.

Hanging upside down, I kicked harder to get my nose down again to peer

under the shelf. There were at least 25 black sea urchins under there; little

ones, golf-ball sized...babies! Somewhere, upstream, up current, an adult

male and female urchin had found one another at the right time, on the right


18/20

17

moon, and had had reproductive success, releasing eggs and sperm into the

moving water, so that fertilized eggs could be carried into the deep, pelagic

environment. After a period of weeks, the relatively helpless urchin larvae

had been cast into the shallows of the reef here in Belize at the precise

moment when the little ones were ready to "settle out" and survive on a solid

substrate.

I wondered, fleetingly, if perhaps that rare, successful pair of adult sea

urchins, up current, in Mexico, had been sacrificed to the blasted cruise ship

channel in the barrier reef.

I didn't dwell on that. Instead, I mutely wished this little band of

spiny pioneers good luck. Their return to the reef meant that an era, an

epizootic, of ocean-basin dimensions, was coming to a close. As their

numbers grew, the urchins, simply by devouring algae, could help restore

the reef.

I swung to my left, trying to navigate back toward the big chunk ofrock where I had left my clothing. I approached the reef crest again, and

poked along looking for a notch wide enough to swim through to the shallow

lagoon inside. I found a gap in the branches of a large, dead, elkhorn coral

formation. A golden glow caught my eye, and I stopped my paddling. In

the shallows here, the swells, low as they were, threatened to shove me into

the rocks and appendages of the reef. I took hold of a dead, chalky coral

limb, and studied the bright slab of coral that had beckoned me. A part of

one of the branches of the old elkhorn itself was still alive. A flattened

section, about like an English cricket bat, was luminous, golden and clean of

silt. I looked at the leading edge of the live tissue, and instead of the now-

common, dreaded, ring of the lethal white-band disease, the edge looked

healthy. It seemed as though the veneer of coral polyps was expanding; as

though it might try to recolonize the entire, six-foot branch of old, remaining

substrate. For some reason, some maddeningly inexplicable reason, this

little patch of coral polyps was defying the odds, challenging the theories,

ignoring global warming, and vibrantly seeking to cloak the reef crest in

living tissue.

I didn't know if it was possible. I didn't know enough biology. As I

stood naked in the sun, drying before changing to my traveling clothes, Ithought about the young hogfish, the baby sea urchins and the vigorous

smear of growing coral. One of my pet, if homely, maxims is: "If you give

nature a chance, she will work with you." The recovery power of natural

systems is often awe-inspiring. As a conservationist, I have to cling to that;

believe in it; count on it! With some active protection from poachers, the

hogfish and other edible denizens were recolonizing the reef. Owing to God


19/20

18

knows what set of circumstances, the sea urchin was recovering from a

fungal blight, and might soon resume its critical grazing role on the coral

reef. The bright patch of elkhorn coral, striving away near the rarest place

on earth, indicated that there might be a strain or strains of coral organisms

that could tolerate the new thermal regime to which the planet was being

subjected.

Or maybe, the ocean warming wasn't as bad as we'd thought...

Or maybe the current inter-glacial period would come to an end and

the world would get colder, overwhelming the acts of man, cooling the seas,

saving the reefs, just in time. Maybe hell would freeze over, in a manner of

speaking.

I gazed out over the reef crest to the horizon. I tried to visualize the

outcome; tried to divine solutions, other things we could try. I thought of

the strong young organisms I had seen, attempting to reclaim their places on

the reef. I thought about the magnitude of "global warming," of theenormity of the thermal load already here. When we were kids, if the soup

was too hot, my mother would say, put in a silver spoon. It would draw out

the heat. Could we do that for the "ocean planet"? Put in a silver spoon?

I gazed out there, but this time, I could not see well. In the distance,

where normally I could find the whole of a thing, where I could pull together

fragmented thoughts and ideas into a rational architecture, a story, a plan, it

remained obscure. I could not see through. It looked dangerous.

It was midnight blue.

Archie (Chuck) Carr III, PhD

Senior Conservationist

Wildlife Conservation Society


20/20

19

Sunup, Ambergris Cay, on the Belize barrier reef.

rarest place

Documents