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An Underwater Genocide

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With only having read a textbook to prepare myself, I jumped in. Sinking quickly to catch up with a fast-moving current, me and the rest of my group diving with Splashdown Divers descended to 85 feet to complete one of our 30-minute dives just off of Boynton Beach.

 

For an entire weekend, me, ten other dive students, and three dive guides explored a reef on Florida’s eastern coast. It’s a unique sort of sight-seeing; one where most of your time is spent preparing tanks, attaching regulators, and waiting in the boat so your body can readjust from breathing out of a tank of compressed air. It’s a type of tourism where the sites won’t necessarily be found on Trip Advisor, and no matter how many times you go, the views will certainly never be the same.

 

The dives were all drift dives, meaning that my group’s tour of the reef was dependent on wherever the current took us. Despite the weekend being an 80-degree, cloudless, waveless pair of days in the middle of tourist season, we were alone at all three of the dive sites. First there was Briny Breezes, a 37-minute jaunt around a shallower part of the reef that barely touched 50 feet deep. The second was Gazebo, just north of Briny Breezes and 15 feet deeper. On the last dive, we were dropped off at Fingers, which is a branching part of the reef ranging from 40 to 85 feet. Once I had sunk to the bottom of Briny Breezes, I quickly inflated my buoyancy compensator, or BC. Hovering just above the seafloor, I saw something precious underneath me- a coral reef. At my first glance of the reef, it became clear that my group wasn’t as alone at these dive sites as I had originally thought. It was like driving through a neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon. Everyone was out to play.

 

Swimming in and out of crevices were bright teal and purple parrotfish. Gray angelfish swam in regal pairs above giant purple sponges, as if they were a king and queen looking over their kingdom. In a flash of yellow and almost fluorescent blue, schools of blue striped grunts blurred past my eyesight, making my drifting in a tank and fins look clumsy and even more out of place. Nestled in between the coral were Florida Spiny Lobsters. Their long antennae poking out of their holes gave up the otherwise indiscernible hiding spot. They’re a highly sought-after meal in the realm of fishing, and two dive guides made it their duty to try to lure them out of their dens.

 

Growing up near the northern Gulf of Mexico, coral reefs are something that seem to belong to a faraway land. The northern part of the Gulf is an ocean desert. White sand stretches for miles, devoid of any obvious abundance of life. It’s considered a part of the gulf coast dead zone, an area where too many nutrients from inputting rivers kills off fish and marine life. On the opposite side of the state however, the dive sites at Boynton Beach are still rarities, not only in Florida but worldwide. 50% of the world’s coral reefs have been damaged and 98% of Florida’s largest reef system has been nearly destroyed.

After being followed by a curious nurse shark for roughly 40 minutes, I surfaced. In between the steady hiss of pushing excess air from my regulator, and the thuds of students preparing full tanks of air on the boat deck, the dive guides spoke about everything new that they had seen despite visiting the site almost seven days a week.

The stalker of a nurse shark was of particular interest. Following dive groups was a recent yet increasingly common event for this shark. “People have been down there shooting the lionfish and feeding the nurse sharks,” said Libby, owner of Splashdown Divers. “People need to stop that because someone with a gun isn’t going to like all of the attention she’s giving.” A small lionfish was seen on my group’s dive. According to Libby it was too small to shoot, which is an unfortunate fact for the Atlantic Ocean, who can’t quite control the invasive species’ hungry appetite for nearly 70 different native fish. Like the lionfish, many of the Florida Spiny Lobster were too small to catch. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) sets a size limit for the lobsters. Their body, not including the tail, must be larger than three inches. “I try to lobster every time I go down there and it’s in season,” said Libby. “This one was too small to catch, I take a little plastic ruler down there to measure.”

 

With plastic ruler at the ready, Libby jumped in first to lead the second and final dive of day one. This time we were at Gazebo. At a maximum depth of 65 feet and still surrounded by coral, I began paying more attention to the finer details. I turned my gaze directly below me. Apparently, it didn’t matter where I looked. Even in seemingly empty patches of sand there was a life being sustained by the reef. Small invertebrates that were burrowed in the sand spread out their antennae like a Chinese folding fan. As I passed over, they shut and retreated to their homes as if they could not bear to see me. Tiny damsel fish flitted in and out of the edges of the coral, too busy to pay me any mind.

 

Briefly I looked up to a site that was more surprising than anything else I had seen that day. Dive instructors were grabbing and standing on the reef- something that even the students were desperately trying to avoid. As we continued the dive, Libby ventured onwards in her search of lobster. At one point she found one and the group paused, waiting for her catch. Staying still in a drifting current was not a part of the ocean’s plan for us. The guides had realized this and were already kneeling or grabbing on to pieces of coral. The students reluctantly had to follow suit. With an unsuccessful lobster catch, we released the coral. Small white pieces of it crumbled off and drifted away with us, just as the dying coral must have done in the other 98% of Florida’s reefs.

 

I began hopeful on the second day of diving. The reef was alive, I had seen it. It was teeming with fish, crabs, squid, and bursting with color, even at 85 feet deep. The color was a good sign. I hadn’t seen the porcelain white skeleton of the corals peeking through their brightly colored exterior. If I had, this would have been a sign of coral bleaching; a phenomenon that, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, has occurred in over 75% of the world’s oceans and has been deadly enough to kill 30% of them. The bleaching is caused by stresses to the coral, the most recent being warming ocean temperatures and damage from divers or swimmers. “I don’t always look at their color,” said Drew McDougall, another student diver. “Sometimes I look at what else is growing on them and that will tell you if they’re dying.” With that statement, I dove down into something that now felt like a premature invitation to a funeral.

 

The usual neighborhood residents were still out and about. Trumpet fish with their long bodies and flared mouths paraded around while a half-puffed pufferfish peeked at me from its crevice. Turning my attention once more to the coral, I looked for a sign that might tell me there was no reason to worry. Instead, I saw what Drew had warned me about. Algae was covering much of the coral’s branches, sometimes hiding the yellows and reds with a dull green. A green sea turtle caused our guides to stop the drift once more. The turtle was munching on one of its main food sources, the coral reef. As we watched, we again had to cling to pieces of the reef. We were damaging the very thing that was keeping this turtle alive. This time as we let go, I watched one of the dive guides kick up a path of carnage behind him. Large pieces of coral and sponges were breaking off under his fins and swirling like a looming storm cloud.

Celebrating the end of the dives, the group spent some time doing backflips off the side of the boat. Still in full wetsuits and dive booties, we floated above the deep blue. Even though the weather was considerably perfect, and the ocean had been kind to us during our dives, it was unsettling to think that we had not been so kind return. In a way it’s a murder, an underwater genocide. Millions of innocent lives are taken by the treatment of these reefs. It was predicted by scientists in the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting that by 2050, over 90% of the world’s coral reefs will be dead. I drove the three hours back home, only hoping to see a reef again before it too becomes a dead zone.

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