Emily Jackson

Finished a Lizard-specific snorkeling and boating checkout with Lyle -I feel like I didn’t do myself any favors, being too confident with the throttle at the start and then too timid as soon as I was redirected- but I still got the nod to drive one of the groups out two coves over to Clam Gardens for snorkeling. The boats are the same style common in Panama and the Western Caribbean, metal panga-esque tiller outboards that get loaded at the beach and moored indestructibly in about four feet of water. Jumping into and out of the boat with the gin-clear saltwater and mountain of Cook’s Lookout in the background, I had to admit to myself I was living whatever dream people have when they see Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz marine biologists in adventure movies. Coming off of the gorgeous remains of Clam Gardens reef, I wished my problems were also plot-specific and could be solved with the intervention of a Matthew McConaughey to blow a few things up and tell me in a lazy drawl that I need to relax and let my hair down.

The reef was beautiful in its complexity; thousands of fractal spaces and blooms of coral species stacked and tessellated together, decorated with chromis and damsels like neon midges swirling through calcified cattails. The dark, more substantial ovals of larger fish -parrots and grunts and surgeons- moving in shy arches between coral heads, nibbling and twisting and staying just out of reach. Clam Gardens gets its name from the number and size of giant clams that have grown there. Some as big as a child, sitting like a boulder in the valley of the reef, but thousands more just the size of a human fist, planted within the coral matrix and visible only by their technicolor lips open to the current.

The reef has been damaged by bleaching, which I knew, but I hadn’t expected the specific extent. I had been braced for a bullseye of heat driven algae-dominance: with corals on the deeper edges of the reef still intact and alive while an inner and shallow center sat dead, skeletons of coral well-coated in algae. This is the sight I’ve gotten familiar with in the Florida Keys, and like a far-off conflict, it’s something you can get used to ignoring. I thought maybe it would be harder, that it would look like when my family visited Fitzroy seven years ago, and all the corals were newly bleached white. You could see their branches and calyxes perfectly, nothing had been eroded or covered yet, but it was all unerringly bone-white as if cast in perfect porcelain.

This was worse.

The bleached coral today still had tissue, but it was in various stages of sloughing, peeling, and stretching away. In bright fluorescent yellows and greens it felt like the reef was screaming.

I swam over a bank of yellow soft corals with wavy curled edges, I thought it was a Pacific species -something I hadn’t seen before. As I moved I realized my mistake; these were in Alcyoniina, one of my favorites to film because of their thousands of dynamic tentacles that wave and stream in the current. But the corals in this patch had lost their arms, leaving behind the bald, bright yellow stump. Swimming around I saw dozens of other Alcyoniinidae, some with tentacles, some without, and many in the process of losing them as the sherbet-orange tips turned creamy, then opaque white, then peeled away in stringy blobs.