Goat Island: Caves in the Dark
The student had already started pulling the two sea hares apart when the purple ink began to flow. The creatures excrete the colorful substance to deter predators, explained the professor. Was that also the reason these two congregated together, another student mused?
Oh no, he said, they're probably mating.
It's not my habit to interrupt the sex
acts of invertebrates, but it's not like I could prevent others from
doing so. Besides, the rich purple color was intriguing, and taking pictures beats stumbling around trying to take notes in the dark. We continued to ruin the sea hares' Saturday night attempts at wild times. They're hermaphrodites, so I didn't feel too bad -- their dating pool is twice the size of yours or mine.
I was tagging along with Dr. Robert Bolland's marine biology class at the University of Maryland's Asia campus here. An extreme minus tide would allow us access to nooks and crannies previously unnavigable. Dr. Bolland, a well-regarded biologist that I'd briefly interviewed for a story, took us to the south end of Onna flats. That's site six on this map, and it included a wet slog through a sequence of caves along with a trip to the small island Americans call Goat Island.
Dr. Bolland's been out here for decades. We walked across the flats, pausing occasionally. He pointed out a head of live coral that looks sadly out of place amongst all its the dead, petrified cousins.
“It wasn't so long ago – 10 years, maybe – that I'd come out here and all of this would be alive,” he said.
What are the problems? Elevated water temperature from global warming and red clay runoff from development on land. The silty, sticky soil seeps into the ocean after trees and grasses are removed. This chokes out the coral and helps spread disease.
That's not the only problem from development out here. As the tide pulled back, we saw this sewer pipe from one of the local hotels. Stories abound about the big resorts -- which are owned almost exclusively by big corporations from the mainland -- playing fast and loose with their waste.
Bolland is not one to softplay his take on environmental issues. “The tidelands are a disaster,” he said. “It's more than a little bit depressing.”
Yet there are still wonders here.
The glowing orange tubastrea, a stony coral known as cup coral, shone in the night. Most coral has symbiotic algae content that helps supply it with nutrients, but not tubastrea -- it has to rely on directly drawing nutrition from the water. Hence, it is found in the caves, where more edible plankton is found.
Outside the caves brought different sights. This sea cucumber uses sticky emissions to hamstring a crab's attempt to pinch of bits of it. If you get some on your hands, be sure to pick up a bunch of sand to abrade the gunk off of yourself – if you absentmindedly touch an eye, it can harm your sight.
A small pencil slate urchin moved around slowly but perciptibly:
Then there were the dangerous beauties, such as this diadema urchin, whose long spines contain dangerous venom.
A cone shell is toxic, too, but some researchers believe its venom will ultimately be used to treat diseases. For now, though, don't pick one of these up.
A vermillion sea star, which one sees out here only at night:
I asked Dr. Bolland about his prognosis for places like this. Can the coral recover? Maybe, the answer came, but slowly. He doesn't expect to see coral like a decade ago again, at least not in his lifetime. The Japanese are using this as a resort island. Since development is such a problem already, and there's more to come, well ...
"There is no real good news. It just makes you sick," he said.
After meandering through the darkened caves and miraculously making it out without my ninth (yes, ninth) concussion, I strolled home to transcribe my notes and think about what he'd said. In the second miracle of the night, my hastily scrawled recordings were legible. Stranger still, a large mosquito had somehow managed to fly into my notebook during the evening and -- without successfully biting me -- become pressed perfectly flat between the pages.
The ecology is rich out here, it flies into your notebook and dies before you even notice. Notice what I said: before you even notice.
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