Dive Log 13: Getting Serious About Life and Death of Corals

Sunday, 1 May 2016

Dive Log 13:
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, FL

So yeah, this is the heart of it. I’m a diver. And it’s barely even the beginning. So much more to know.

Right as I was having some concerns about all the technical equipment challenges of being an astronaut I mean scuba diver, I began thinking seriously about freediving, which is athletic and much simpler. At the same time I randomly met Kareem from Antigua, who also wanted to learn freediving.

Right after we got our Freediver Level I Certification we both took a coral reef ID class, and then a “Bleach Watch” training from the Florida Dept. of Environmental Conservation, so we can serve as monitors of parts of the Florida Reef Tract, which runs some 358 miles offshore from the Florida Keys through South Florida. Gives us something service-oriented and cool to structure our freediving practice around.

As you know, 93% of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia recently bleached out, and a severe bleaching wave is expected to hit South Florida in late July or so as the Northern Hemisphere summer and last bit of a climate change-fueled El Nino come through.

There is that low gut panic again. Wait. I’ve just gotten started.

A new layer. Just as I’ve started a new personal relationship…  a terminal prognosis seems likely and guaranteed to speed up.

In addition to coral bleaching, which comes from hotter water temperatures, climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, is now rapidly dissolving corals in South Florida, as the oceans overload in their struggle to absorb excess carbon from the atmosphere. Last week in National Geographic they said we just lost another 35 years time.

 

“Florida’s Coral Reef Is Disintegrating”, National Geographic, 2 May 2016.

But… I’ve begun meeting corals and the underwater world in the last few months, and didn’t even know their names until recently. Most of them I still don’t know. (They take some getting used to!)

What sucks is that most people will never have even gotten a chance to know corals. And the fish around them.

[Bleaching doesn’t necessarily mean death; it means the stressed corals expel the symbiotic algae that make 95% of their food.

 

But it takes a long time for bleached corals to recover, sometimes years or decades, and in some cases, if the stressors don’t go away, the corals will die. Sometimes pretty quickly. It’s highly likely that most of our corals and reef systems will become extinct before the end of the century.]

Privately scared, but managing my feelings.

It’s that sense of being overwhelmed again.

We’re going to see and learn and know as much as we can.

Kareem and I just did a shore dive off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and explored the first reef. Three reefs run parallel to the shore off the coast of Florida, each one further out.

It’s still so early, still spring, but we found a couple signs of Palythoa bleaching, already!  This is not good.

I found a long stretch of fishing line, and neither of us could get it out. It was so harsh that it tore Kareem’s fin.

While the last few days were calm, the wind picked up overnight and was blowing pretty strong today.

Underwater the sand streamed against us like a desert plains sandstorm, and on the GoPro footage you can hear it hitting the camera housing like that dust storm in the movie The Martian.

We spent 2 hours out there.

Back on land I tilted for the rest of the day, even as I laid down for the night.

You know how the ocean’s wave action continues inside your bloodstream long after you’ve left the water.

Out West, in the heart of the Great Plains, you know they say: “How do you know when the wind stops? You fall down.”