The Rarest Place on Earth

Archie Carr III

 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 of
Belize 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 night’s 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

1
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, not Jacques;
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 newborn’s
name.) Jacque had helped me and Janet Gibson start the Wildlife
Conservation Society’s research 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 the Middle Cay research station had 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 our reefs 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 teams
had 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

2
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 and
there, 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 Niño. And of course, the four crises aggravate one another,
yielding a cascade of difficulties for life on the reef.
The story of Diadema, 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 I
grew up. On the farm, my mother warned me: “Keep your eyes on the
ground.” I never got snake-bit, but Mother wasn’t with me on the reefs. I
had to learn to watch where my feet were by feeling the pain of the sea
urchin’s 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

3
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 the Diadema.
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

4
grip on the relationships among corals, algae, grazers, and ambient
conditions like nutrient abundance and water temperature.
The sea urchins are members of a very old phylum of animal life.
They have been tested repeatedly over the eons for survivability and found
by nature to be fit. How could such a successful life form be so nearly
annihilated? Humans are responsible for most such disasters, it seems, so
how did we manage to blitz the urchins? The discharge of the Orinoco
River envelops the island of Trinidad, where the sea urchin affliction was
first reported. That enormous tropical river, coursing lugubriously through
agricultural and urban landscapes of Venezuela, had always seemed to me to
be a potential crucible for a dread disease. But, recently, scientists in the
U.S. Geological Survey, working with NASA and the Goddard Space Flight
Center, have suggested another likely explanation for the epizootic. Dust!
Dust from Africa. Dust bearing pathogens never known in the New World.
Clouds of dust resulting from land abuse and desertification in North Africa,
and carried by the winds across the planet. An African soil fungus by the
name of Aspergillus is thought to have killed Diadema.
With the loss of one grazer, the sea urchin, from the ecosystem, why
didn’t another herbivorous species explode into the algae-rich void just
created? There were numerous candidates that might have done so,
especially among the large, diverse family of parrotfish. But it didn’t
happen. Not at Glover's Reef. The algae flourished, unchecked.
The answer is found in the second of the four afflictions suffered by
the Belize barrier reef ecosystem: over fishing. The discovery took me by
surprise.
We had known for years that the big predatory fish of the reef,
especially the groupers, were being fished heavily, and that the off-take was
having noticeable results. Monitoring of these commercial species had been
the interest of Jacque Carter, originally. Subsequently, Dr. Enric Sala, at the
time on the faculty at Scripps Institute, began making seasonal trips to the
Middle Cay station, especially to dive among aggregations of breeding
groupers, a spectacular event that happens on the 13th full moon of the year.
The 13th Moon. The first time I heard that phrase, coming from an old
Belizean fisherman, I thought I was dealing with witchcraft. It so happens,
however, that once in awhile, once in a blue moon, as a matter of fact, there
can be 13 full moons in a year. The 13th moon falls just before New Years,
and the fish come together to breed. Or so it is said. Jacque and Enric have
found that the fish breed several times during the full moons of the new year.
Stimulated by the moon, groupers congregate to breed. They come
from miles away to specific places, outside the reef, in water of 80 feet or

5
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 represent
a 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 didn’t 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

6
so many on some days, they couldn’t 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 can’t 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. He
spoke 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

7
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 the
sandflies 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 the people of Belize, and
the Glovers Reef Marine Reserve, now a World Heritage Site, would one
day be the result.
We sat on blocks of driftwood and hammocks outside a little
bunkhouse under the station’s 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.

8
 “That’s 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 I’ve never seen anyone catch a parrotfish here,” I protested.
“You just said Belizeans don’t eat the damn things. They’re 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.
That’s 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

9
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 dry
fish 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
didn’t 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 Niño, the Christ Child. It is a bad name: no
good comes of this niño. 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 Niño has to do with rising water

10
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 Niño 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 the
corals 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 Niño 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 Niño
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 Niño doesn’t 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 Niño, 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 Niño events had occurred every few years for centuries; for
eons, even.

11
 “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 Niño 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. “It’s hard to believe corals could recover from
this kind of devastation every 4 or 5 years.”
“Nope. It’s worse now; worse than it’s ever been,” Tim said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Global warming,” he answered, without hesitation.
The El Niño-spawned waves of warm water that periodically sloshed,
unwanted, into cool-water habitats, caused their share of damage in times
past. 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 Niño 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 Niño 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 Niño 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 the
rarest 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

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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 didn’t 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 the
engine, 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 it’s 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 I’m
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 a
Caribbean shore. That’s what it’s 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

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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 was people trafficking: coyotes guiding small gangs of desperate
Hondurans or Salvadorans into Mexico and on to the assumed opportunities
of 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 it
not 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

14
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 of
bubbles.
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, the
intricate 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.

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 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 at
me, 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 giant’s 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 a
spiny 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

16
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 of
rock 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, I
thought 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

17
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 the
enormity 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

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Sunup, Ambergris Cay, on the Belize barrier reef.

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