When ancient forests are cut down, there's usually a big public uproar —
unless it's a coral forest at the bottom of an ocean. In those cases, hardly
anybody sees what's being lost. As a result, it's easy to forget what's gone.
But that's not what has happened to a set of ruined coral reefs found off the
coast of Florida, thanks to 70,000 underwater photos taken back in the 1970s and
1980s. For decades these pictures have been sitting in the office of John Reed,
a senior scientist of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. He and the
late Robert Avent found and mapped these deep water reefs 30 years ago.
"I was (swimming) at about 300 feet, and the water was grey and blue," Reed
said. "And all of a sudden, I saw this giant white structure looming up off the
bottom, 60 to 80 feet tall."
It was a ridge made up of several thousand years' worth of white deep-water
corals, known to scientists as oculina. At the time, these kinds of ridges
stretched for roughly 90 miles through deep waters off the east coast of
Florida. Reed says all these ridges were covered with corals that looked like
bright white leafless fruit trees. Fish and other sea life buzzed around them
like a cloud.
Thrilled by their discovery, Reed and Avent photographed "every square foot" of
the deep-water coral forest. Those photos helped convince government officials
to ban fishing near a few of the reefs. Unfortunately all the other reefs were
vulnerable to shrimp trawlers that dragged giant nets with steel doors on them
through the fragile coral forests.
"One pass would destroy several thousand years' worth of growth," said Reed.
By the late 1990s, it was clear that the reefs had been badly damaged by the
trawlers. But nobody knew what the damage looked like or what exactly had been
lost. Then, in 2001, Reed climbed into a tiny submarine, went back to the spots
where he had helped take all those pictures in the '70s and took a second set of
photos. Then he hauled the "before" and "after" pictures into his lab.
Reed spent a good part of the next several years putting before and after photos
under a microscope, trying to figure out exactly how many corals had been lost
since the 1970s.
"And what I saw devastated me," he says. "Instead of 60-foot reefs, I saw
60-foot mounds of rubble. Nearly every coral reef had been crushed to little
pieces the size of his finger.
"I almost cried," he said.
Reed discovered that the only reefs still standing were the ones that were put
under protection in the 1980s. His findings were reported in the Bulletin of
Marine Science. Coral reef experts say the findings are depressing, but not
surprising. They're aware that trawlers have done huge amounts of damage to
deep-water reefs in most of the world's oceans.
What's different here is the fantastic trove of photographs that show how
quickly reefs like these can be erased. They also show exactly what gets lost
when that happens.
"When you look at the untrawled areas, there are lots of little fish sticking
their heads out of the corals," said biologist Margot Stiles of the nonprofit
group Oceana. "And there are these cute mini-lobsters that are clicking their
claws at the camera.
But in the trawled photos, all you can see are "little bits of coral laying flat
on the muddy bottom that stretches out of your field of view into the darkness,"
she said.
Stiles says it's now illegal to fish near the oculina reefs. Scientists are
trying to reseed and re-grow them. But oculina corals grow extremely slowly, and
for that reason alone it is unlikely that anyone alive today will live long
enough to see the reefs return.