It’s our sea to save, in all its still living color

December 06, 2009|Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Staff

This is a plunge into both wonder and worry. I have snorkeled and gone scuba diving in the waters of Virgin Islands National Park off and on for nearly 30 years. I can string together my encounters with the Caribbean’s most colorful creatures like a National Geographic special. A brilliant green male stoplight parrotfish gives way to a red-bellied female. A school of jacks whizzes by in mid-water as a nurse shark slowly patrols the bottom.

Southern stingrays and spotted eagle rays flap in aquatic flight past coral ledges where schools of orange-red and pinkish-red blackbar soldierfish hang motionless, all pointed in the same direction. Pancake-thin gray angelfish and black- and yellow-spotted French angelfish swim through narrow openings while the glowing yellow-and-blue queen angelfish darts in and out of holes in the coral reef. On night dives, startled pufferfish blow up into porcupine balls while moray eels slither, lobster wave their antennae, and hawksbill turtles rest without a care about the curious humans hovering.

But no matter how thick the schools of yellowish grunts, goatfish, and snappers - and they remain thick - there is something they cannot disguise. The coral reef that is their home, their protector, their food, is far more bleached and far more broken today than three decades ago. Large green brain corals I marveled at in the early 1980s, in the middle of Cinnamon Bay on the backside of St. John, are now gouged and look as ghostly as if in a jar of formaldehyde. Stands of golden elkhorn coral that rose from the sandy bottoms of the bay are a clump of rubble now.

The combination of runoff from development, overfishing, and rising sea temperatures, on top of natural disasters like hurricanes, are pummeling the corals with unprecedented force. Last year, a research report from five sites by the US Geological Survey and the National Park Service found a “profound’’ 61 percent decline in live coral cover between 2005 and 2007 alone. In total, the average coral cover on Virgin Islands reefs has declined from 21 percent to 8 percent.

Similarly, a 2008 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “State of the Reefs’’ report rated the condition of living coral in the Virgin Islands as “poor.’’ The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council last month listed Virgin Islands National Park as one of the 25 national parks most vulnerable to climate change, citing how half the parks’ corals have been lost from higher water temperatures. Their report stated that “we could lose whole national parks for the first time,’’ and the Virgin Islands in particular “could lose all its coral reefs.’’

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