Mark Hay, a biology professor at Georgia Tech, writes from Fiji, where he is investigating coral-seaweed competition in the coral reefs.
Tuesday, Oct. 11
Despite my growing up in Kentucky, not having a passport until my early 20s and not seeing a tropical coral reef until I was in graduate school, whenever I step off a plane in the tropics, I feel like I’ve come home. The (organic), fungal smell of heavy tropical (humidity) is somehow comforting and “right” for me; I also associate it with coral reefs, and a wonderful, but disappearing, underwater world that has become a major focus of my life’s work.
After 28 hours of flying, layovers, slow (immigration) and customs lines and a long in-country bus ride, I finally arrive in Votua Village on the coral coast of Viti Levu, Fiji, where my group has established a small lab to work on the ecology of coral reefs. We chose Votua Village because the villagers here have been especially proactive in (establishing) and protecting an area of their reef (a Marine Protected Area). They welcomed us, wanting to know more about how to best conserve their reef and associated resources.
Reef preservation, much less recovery, is a daunting (challenge). In the 30 years I’ve worked on reefs in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, we have learned more about reef function and the processes that keep them healthy, but these processes are degrading rapidly and reefs worldwide seem to be in a biotic (death) spiral. I have two sons in their 20s and cannot show them an average Caribbean reef like the ones I worked on when they were born, much less a “good” one. Healthy Caribbean reefs have (disappeared) in that short time.