One Ocean
A Mother, a Daughter, Marine Protect Areas and Sargassum
In January of 1992, 28,000 yellow rubber duckies spilled into the North Pacific from a cargo ship near the international date line. They are still landing on distant shores — Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Scotland, South Africa, Newfoundland, even the site of the Titanic. The friendly floatees crossed the Northwest Passage into the Atlantic. They revealed the gyres. They showed us what the ocean already knew: there is only one.
My daughter Irene was born a year after the rubber duckies, in January of 1993.
The bay is choppy. Irene paddles ahead of me in her kayak, her paddle raised, salt already in her hair. I watch her the way mothers watch daughters when they think no one is looking — with a love so large it blurs into the sky. A fear just beneath it: currents, the unknown. Her husband asked me and my husband to join them on Presidents’ Day weekend to snorkel with her after she paddled out on her own last year to where the reef stops the surf. Something older squelched the fear: the memory of her a toddler here, as ever present, as crying to snorkel with me before she could swim, a way she will never be again. I am hoping to find what I remember.
We are twenty minutes from shore on the Mayan Riviera, our kayaks loaded with snorkel gear bungeed to the stern. Ahead of us, slightly dark from the surface, lies the reason we have come: the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest reef system on Earth. We loop a lead line around our ankles so the kayaks will trail behind us. Nudge on fins, goggles and a snorkel. We roll into the Caribbean turquoise — that improbable, electric color that looks digitally enhanced. Once under its quiet. I see I’m in a shallow reflection of the sky above and white coral sand below. Coral grows in shallow bays.
I had not snorkeled in Mexico, on this very reef, since my children were young. The cartel violence of the 1990s kept us away for decades. This trip is different. She is grown now. We are two women in kayaks on a choppy bay, making our way toward something ancient.
Below us, elkhorn coral spreads across the ground broken in thick piles of antler rubble— a species listed as critically endangered across most of its range. Purple fan coral with blanched edges bend in current. Brain corals rise from the sandy bottom in deep purple domed masses. Lavender finger coral reaches up and waves. Their labyrinthine surfaces, the record of centuries of patient growth with each fold honoring a living animal’s labor—the polyp. One parrotfish — blue, green, its specialized lips graze on algae to keeps the reef from being overgrown. Where are the schools of parrotfish?
We snorkel towards the center of the bay where the waves are not blocked by the reef to an explosion of coral varieties and swirling schools of fish. Healthier untarnished finger and fan coral wave, boulders boast lilac, blonde and ruddy-red. This is just like the 1980s! This reef area must have more exchange with other spores that wash in to renew the coral.
The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System — also the Great Mayan Reef — runs for more than 1,000 kilometers, beginning at the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula and sweeping south along the entire Riviera Maya, past Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Cozumel, continuing through Belize, along the coast of Guatemala, all the way to the Bay Islands of Honduras. Four nations share its waters. More than five hundred species of fish live within it. Sixty species of coral. Four kinds of sea turtles. Manatees. Whale sharks.
Coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor but support twenty-five percent of all marine species. The Mesoamerican Reef alone provides food security and coastal protection to millions of people across four countries. Reefs protect the shoreline from more powerful waves.
Three hundred kilometers of this reef lie in Mexico. It was here, in the waters of the Yucatán coast, that I first saw the fantastic rainbows of neon fish. The coral had not occurred to me yet. Like they are the background in a garden of colorful movement, I focused more on the flitting and hiding fish. I snorkeled here with my family for a decade before the 1990s scared us away. Coming back now, with my adult daughter beside me, I am aware of what survives and what hasn’t.
Striving for Protection
In 1986, the Mexican government drew a line around what would become the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve — 1.3 million acres of coast, forest, wetland, mangrove, lagoon, and reef. In 1987 its inscription landed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Sian Ka’an’s name translates to where the sky is born in Yucatec Mayan.
The Tulum coastal waters received their own protection in 2016 with the creation of the Caribe Mexicano Biosphere Reserve. Inside its boundaries today: swimming, snorkeling, diving, birdwatching, kayaking, archaeological tours — all permitted during daylight hours. Motorized boats: banned. Artisanal fishing: tightly regulated. Lionfish — an invasive Pacific species wreaking havoc on Atlantic reefs — may be spear-hunted by divers.
A biosphere reserve is not a fortress. People live and work inside Sian Ka’an. Fishing cooperatives operate under sustainable quotas. The UNESCO framework asks for protection of human life as well.
Research consistently shows that well-enforced Marine Protected Areas can increase fish biomass tenfold compared to adjacent unprotected waters. The largest fish are also the most reproductively prolific — a single large female can produce as many eggs as hundreds of smaller individuals. Protecting breeding populations has cascading benefits far beyond the MPA’s boundaries.
I point out a cluster of conch shells — five of them — in the area where we snorkeled. On our swim in, I dove down and lifted one from the elkhorn shards to show her. An encrusted shell, ancient-seeming, coated in barnacles. A crab climbed out onto its surface. I let it go.
And then Irene grabs my arm.
A green sea turtle — enormous, unhurried, its shell the size of a coffee table — pulls itself through the murky churned water churned by waves to nibble seagrass two feet below us. It turns one ancient eye toward us, considers us briefly, and rises to take a breath.
We surface with it. She pulls her mask up. Her expression has changed completely.
“Mom,” she says.
I know.
The High Seas and Marine Protected Areas
The MPA journey extends far beyond any one nation’s coastline.
In 2011, visionary countries and civic groups began organizing around a gap in international law. On an ocean planet, the gap was so vast it is almost incomprehensible: the high seas — that vast blue beyond any nation’s jurisdiction — had essentially no legal protection. No framework for creating Marine Protected Areas. No way to access the environmental impact of deep-sea mining. No requirement to enable developing nations to equally share the scientific and medical benefits derived from the sea.
After nearly two decades of advocacy, five years of formal negotiations, and extraordinary political pressure led in particular by the small Pacific island nation of Palau, governments reached an agreement in March of 2023: the High Seas Treaty, the first global legal framework for Marine Protected Areas in international waters.
The high seas make up approximately 61% of the global ocean. As of 2026, less than 1% of those waters are formally protected — a staggering gap, given that the ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen, absorbs nearly a third of all CO₂ emissions, and regulates the climate for the entire planet. Compounds found in marine sponges and sharks have already contributed to pharmaceuticals used to treat COVID-19. The depths remain largely unexplored.
As of early 2026, 145 countries have signed the High Seas Treaty. More than 70, including the European Union, have formally ratified it — the legal process by which states agree to be bound by its provisions. The momentum is real. The target: 30% of the global ocean is protected by 2030.
We notice it first from the kayak, on our second morning out: clumps of ochre-colored algae, the color of old tea bags, spotting the surface. By the afternoon the beaches were lined with piles of it. Islands of it floated in while we goggled under water.
Sargassum.
The word itself sounds like what it is — something between seaweed and gas. It is a genus of brown macro-algae that has existed in the Sargasso Sea, within the North Atlantic held in place by four converging currents. Since before humans walked the earth it drifted there in ecologically necessary quantities. It made a floating nursery for juvenile sea turtles and fish. Christopher Columbus noted it in his logs. Sailors feared it was a trap. It was always a curiosity.
Then 2011 arrived, and the world changed.
The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB) made its first colossal bloom in 2011, driven by an unusual atmospheric pattern that pushed sargassum southward from the Sargasso Sea into warmer, nutrient-rich tropical waters. It has returned nearly every year since, growing in both volume and duration. By May 2025, scientists at the University of South Florida recorded a record-breaking 37.5 million metric tons of sargassum in the Atlantic basin — more than double the previous record set in 2022. The belt now spans more than 8,800 kilometers: more than twice the width of the continental United States.
The cause is people. Between 1980 and 2020, the nitrogen content of sargassum samples increased by more than 50 percent, the chemical fingerprint of agricultural runoff, sewage discharge, and Amazon River nutrient-rich outflow flooding into the Atlantic. The Amazon polluted water pours into the ocean and the bloom surges. When the Amazon suffers drought — as it did severely in 2023 and 2024 — nutrients accumulate in the watershed. Rains floods all of that stored fertilizer that rushes into the sea at once. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University call it the “first flush.” What came ashore in 2025 on the Riviera Maya was part of that flush.
A 2025 study from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry found another actor: cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that live on the surface of sargassum. It fixes atmospheric nitrogen and converts it into a usable form for the seaweed — enabling it to grow in parts of the ocean that were once too nutrient-poor to support it. The sargassum, in other words, has developed a way to feed itself. This is not a temporary problem. GASB as a permanent feature of the Atlantic.
When sargassum reaches the coast it smothers seagrass beds when it sinks, blocking the sunlight that seagrasses need. It shades coral reefs from the sun that fuels their symbiotic algae. It creates oxygen dead zones where fish cannot breathe. As it decomposes on the beach in the tropical heat, it releases hydrogen sulfide, that smells like rotten eggs, along with ammonia, both of which irritate the lungs, trigger headaches, and can cause serious respiratory damage. Every morning and every evening crews pitchfork loads of sargassum into wheel barrels to compost elsewhere. If not a film covers the swimming pool.
In February 2026, Mexico’s Secretary of the Navy warned of a 75% increase in sargassum arrivals expected by Holy Week and in June when the World Cup visitors descend on Cancún and Playa del Carmen. In 2025 alone, Mexican naval and civilian crews collected 92,783 tons of sargassum from Quintana Roo beaches — an unprecedented figure. In 2026, the Navy has deployed sixteen surface vessels, four specialized amphibious sargassum collectors, and 9,500 meters of floating barrier to intercept the algae before it reaches shore. The colossal mass currently moving westward toward Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Cozumel weighs an estimated 280,097 tons.
There is something that happens when you travel with an adult child and the world opens for them in front of you. You see it happening like they are that toddler. The thing that was abstract becoming real. Protection is a policy until you understand that without it, the turtle would be gone.
She has known her whole life that the ocean is in trouble. She has signed the petitions, watched the documentaries, recycled the plastic. She is now chasing coral reefs before they are gone.
What can definitely be done — what is being done, imperfectly and expensively but with real effect — is protection. The reef we snorkeled is healthier than the reef would be without its MPA. The turtle we saw is alive in part because the fishing pressure around it has been reduced. The elkhorn coral growing in these waters is growing because the water quality here, while threatened, is better than in the north.
Protection is not a solution to climate change, but it gives nature a fighting chance. A reef with adequate fish populations and clean water can recover from a bleaching event. The MPA buys time.
One Ocean
The rubber duckies are still out there. Oceanographers track them. Children find them on beaches in Scotland and send photographs to researchers who plot their trajectories and update their models of how the ocean moves. The duckies have crossed the Northwest Passage, drifted down the Atlantic, washed up within a few miles of the Titanic’s resting place. They have been at sea for thirty-three years. They show no signs of stopping.
The ocean that carries them is one ocean. The current that brought sargassum to the beach below our hotel this morning is the same current that carries melt from Greenland past Newfoundland and down into the Caribbean. The water that evaporated to form the clouds above us fell as rain in the Great Lakes and ran off into the Atlantic and arrived here as nutrient-loaded runoff that feeds the bloom. The coral that built the Yucatán Peninsula under our feet grew from the same sunlit sea that now threatens to swamp it.
My daughter has swum in this one ocean for decades. She knows its gray green color in the Great Lakes, the deep blue of the Mediterranean, the impossible turquoise of this reef. She knows what it smells like at low tide and what it sounds like at midnight and what it feels like to roll off the back of a kayak into trusting the water will hold her. She knows, now — in her body and not just her mind — what it looks like when it is protected.
On our last evening, she is quiet for a long time.
I say, “I want to come back here with your nephew.”
That is everything. That is the whole argument for the MPA, for the High Seas Treaty, for the 30×30 target, naval vessels intercepting sargassum offshore, scientists mapping the bloom from satellites, lawyers negotiating text in Geneva, Maya fishermen reporting the conch counts to the cooperative, the community councils of Quintana Roo sowing peace from every neighborhood.
All of it is so that in twenty years, there will still be life here worth showing.
Margot McMahon
UNESCO-Ocean Decade Ocean-Literacy Certified
St. John Island Coral Restoration
Aubrey, in her NYU black visor-cap met Irene, in her foldable off white wide-brimmed hat, and me, in my knitted-blue hat with large black buttons at the St. Thomas airport. We were delighted to be together for Aubrey’s last Spring break of Graduate school. We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas and were pinching ourselves that this was even possible.
‘I’ve got a finals paper to write and a project,” said visor-cap. “This is not just a snorkeling trip.”
“Can I take a zoom call on the ferry?” knitted-blue said.
“I’ve got a list of four snorkeling places we can’t miss,” said wide-brimmed hat. She called Yogi, the cab driver, for a lift to the ferry. He was booked. We were scammed into a van that brought us to the wrong ferry, over charged us while indicating it was our fault. Our fatigue of flying for five hours and diminished of cash was quickly left in our wake with our eagerness to get to St. John. We traversed between the Spanish, U.S. And British Virgin Islands over turquoise water for forty minutes to St. Johns. Somewhere over on the right was Epstein Island. Hauntings emanated from that Virgin Island that is not a territory of the United States but under its jurisdiction. Cooling spray soaked our clothes and triggered our laughter that presided over our four days on St. John. At the dock, Aubrey watched our luggage as Irene and I strode uphill to the car rental. I tapped the breaks downhill on our way back in a white Jeep to pick up Aubrey, backpacks, and our snorkeling gear.
With our Jeep, every beach was now twenty minutes away. Twenty minutes of hairpin turns, steep left turn onto vertical steep uphills, cresting at an asphalt road made invisible by the Jeeps hood.
“Where did the road go?” knitted-blue asked as she slowed to almost a pause at a peak. “I’m so glad these roads are paved. Reminder the potholes in Costa Rica?”
“Just another hairpin turn ahead,” said broad-brimmed tracking on her phone’s GPS. “I don’t know how anyone found there way around here before GPS,” Broad-brimmed learned to load the directions before leaving a wifi zone.
“It’s got to be bumpier back here, I’m trying another seatbelt on the way back,” black-visor said.
“We are on an expedition!” said knitted-blue. The hairpin turns, steep climbs only reaching the crest by gunning the engine. Broad brim navigated seamlessly, knotted hat drove the rugged terrain courageously, and black visor met every extremity with a cautionary slow down. By being together, each of us was home.
VIRGIN ISLAND NATIONAL PARK
The descendants of sugar plantation workers saw the over development that occurs on other US. Virgin Islands and gave their families property to the National Park District in the 1950s. Most of St. John Island is protected and sustained by the National pro District making it one of the best snorking destinations in the Mesa American Reef. The second largest reef is the world begins off the coast of Florida and journeys south through Mexico to Belize.
Our first snorkel was along a mangrove lined bay that smelled musty like how marijuana used to smell. From a sandy beach broad-brimmed, with a powder-blue snorkel, waved to view green sea turtles over a grassy area to coral along the edges. A spotted ray snuggled itself into a sand pit, sponges clustered like widening pottery, and purple sea fans waved as we slippered casually past. I, in a yellow snorkel, followed a tan flounder swimming above tan rocks until it settled and in a blush blended into the surrounding so effectively it was invisible. At the end of the bay the current was formidable. We three linked arms and flipped fast to reach the keye.
“Swim clockwise around the island,” our local friend Gray advised us. We floated with the current until peeling out and around the left side with stressed magnificent coral. Huge bright purple fans waving, brain coral in reddish brown, and finger corals tickling the current. Occasionally we linked hands while discovering the trace glory of what had been vibrant coral. And yet, though stressed this coral was sustained by the fast current and people’s efforts to preserve and restore as much as possible. In crevices I was tiny red coral buds reaching up with white tips on their crowns. They give me hope like spring concusses in my garden poking through the late snow. We weren’t ready to leave after our slow traverse of the island, but the current was stronger.
“Please help me across the current,” black-visor asked. After three hours of swimming, we linked arms and sprinted for the opposite shore feeling fruitless in our six-fin powered push. Black-visor in the middle pulled us forward they kicked to catch up. Somehow we made it past the current.
“Let’s go around the island again,” broad-brimmed asked.
“That current is only going to get stronger,” knotted-blue said. “Let’s come back fresh tomorrow.”
Once in the bay we followed our own discovery path past the sponges and waving fans. A flat of yellow flickered in my goggles. Must be my yellow snorkel catching the light. There again a tiny yellow fish hovered in front of my lens. A fish had not come this close before. It swam away. Then returned to swim right above my nose wriggling its tail fin. Energetically it quivered less than an inch before my mask. Maybe it likes my yellow snorkel. Whatever the reason we were a symbiotic sea life like the Goby and Pistol Shrimp, the anemone and anemone fish. I protected the little pilot fish from predators and she guided me safely to shore. Now and then she wandered off during my long flippering along the mangroves. In an instant there the was again eagerly wiggling, fins in a flurry to say ahead of me all the way to within six inches of our blankets and hats on the beach. It was time to go home for lunch. I will miss my fish friend but hope she finds me tomorrow when we return.
LIONFISH REMOVAL
Lionfish Scorpoenidae chromanorde red ,black, and white
One female lays 2 million eggs per year no natural predator for eggs or Lionfish. They have not predators.
Scorpian
*red lionfish in the green area of the photograph.
*came through the Suez canal from the Pacific ocean but have no predators in the Atlantic. They can be found from The Cape in Massachusetts through the Virgin Islands.
“Sharks are wary of Lionfish, says Frank Cummings, president of COREVI.ORG. “Sharks could be a natural predator. If they learned to each the Lionsfish face first.” Lionfish eat face down. When a shark eats them sideways they writhe in pain from the poisonous spikes If the sharks learn to eat them face first the spikes stay down and don’t sting. Spikes loose their venom when cooked.
If Ciquatera menotoxin enters a human system from Lionfish spikes there is no cure. The poison makes a person itch all over for the rest of their lives. People get nauseous from the venom.
Certified snorkelers and divers are allowed to spear a Lionfish with a certification from the DPNR’s Fish and Wildlife Service. The Core.org Lionfish Removal program began with four-hundred-and-thirty certified snorkelers and divers who speared them with a rubber wristband that is pulled back from the spear with two prongs and let go. Their hand guides the trident’s spring action into the Lionfish If you slightly miss, just pull back and thrust the spear into the fish a second time. Their stinger continues to release venom.Volunteers who daily swim coves of St. John offered to spot Lionfish. TOM CRAWL runs the Lionfish Hotline to notify where a swimmer has spotted a Lionfish- 833-774-CORE (2673) A new Lionfish Removal program was created to certify volunteers to spear them If you, or a park ranger, sees a spearer with a red shirted swimmer, it is a certified person. University of Virgin Islands students and citizens take a low key class for certification to reduce the Lionfish population.
The south drop of St. John island is 700 feet. Lionfish can live 600 feet feet down, deeper than divers go. They can live in brackish waters they will stay in an area until all the fish are eaten and then move onto another are one caught Lionfish had 14 fish in its belly. They have two fat sacks that allow them to live a long time while finding a new pocket of fish. The invasive predator likes structure. If threatened they back into a corner and strike. They eat face down. People have constructed four sided wired cubes where the Lionfish find safe. These wire cubes can be dropped to 700 feet to catch several fish in one pull.
CORE FOUNDATION
Frank Cummings, President of CORE.org, a U.S. Virgin Islands foundation formed to protect one of the finest snorkeling sites in the world, St. John of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Core’s mission is to inspire communities to be better stewards of the environment through marine awareness education and hands-on coastal programs. Core’s vision is that the values and benefits of the marine ecosystems that make up the Caribbean are understood, treasured, and preserved by all people and that the core Foundation has the resources to ensure the continuation of such benefits. They achieve their mission through the pursuit of special projects and activities.
TUSA scooters, at $4,000 each, can carry a certified fisherman for 5.4 miles for spearing Lionfish. At 12 miles/hour the fisherman steers, like superman flies, straddling the scooter so hands are free to spear the Lionfish. The fish are then put into long plastic tubes for carrying back to shore.
On May 16th Glen Harmon, CORE’s treasurer is spearheading an annual Lionfish Derby. The event challenges teams to spear the most amount of the invasive species for a prize of $1,500. Last year the winning team speared sixty Lionfish. All speared Lionfish will be grilled for a festive rejuvenate meal. I hear they taste like perch.
STONY CORAL TISSUE LOSS DISEASE SCTLD
SCLTD (pronounced Skittle) was released in 2014 during channel construction in Miami. Coral does many things but it hasn’t developed an advanced immune system Coral reefs feed 25% of sea life, protect shorelines throughout the world, provide sustenance for billions of people, and give medicine. Volatile storms break up the coral with shards going faster than planting coral plugs. The distrubance released a parasite that lives in human urine. It kills stony coral. Scientists found that amoxycillin mixed with a substate to make it creamy like peanut butter can treat the sick coral. Once treated, if they survive, the stony coral boulder doesn’t get sick again.
Coral reproduces two ways
- 1) Female and male release spores that mix to make a zygote. The zygote swims to find a place on a stony boulder to land and grow a colony If the zygote swims through sunscreen it gets coated, grows an exoskeleton that prevents it from attaching to a boulder and growing.
- 2) Females alone can release gametes.
Core.og is treating 17,000 stony coral with 80% success
Algae give coral its color amoxycillin is pushed into the coral grooves started to treat with horse syringes but now use a caulk gun to push amoxycillin ibno the coral grooves, Domy know if cloned coral is treated can it reproduce?
TOXIC SUNSCREEN,
The mineral type of Sunscreen is less dangerous: use zinc or titanium sunscreen.
Tom Crawl of Core.org worked to engage Senators to back a law change for no sales of damaging sunscreen throughout the U.S. Virgin Islands. Core Foundation is leading to the 2020 legislature that banned the retail sale or offer for sale, and the distribution or importation for retail purposes of topical sunscreen products containing Oxybenzone, Octinoxate and/or Octocrylene in the territory. Oxybenzone , and endocrine disrupter, and octinoxate is the chemical which are used in more than 3,500 of the world’s most popular sunscreen products, including Hawaiian Tropic, Coppertone and Banana Boat, are now prohibited. Of over 2,500 urine samples of people six and older, nearly everyone had oxybenzone. Even a small drop of oxybenzone is enough to damage delicate corals. Add octinoxate, homosalate, octisalate and octocrylene to that list. They leach the coral of its nutrients and bleaches it white. The chemicals work like hormones to set off a domino-effect that interferes with fish development and other wildlife as well as the food chain. Brooding coral releases sperm that fertilize eggs in the water. Eggs develop into larvae that “brood” in the polyps for several weeks before releasing them to settle on hard surfaces. In the presence of oxybenzone, the coral skeleton grows around the larvae basically burying the coral alive. The zygote cannot attach to a boulder to grow. It is Fascinating that sea life protect themselves from the sun’s UV rays. Manufacturing molecules of mycosporine amino acids (MAAs) that accumulate in tissue that is most vulnerable to exposure to the sun: sea cucumbers skin, sea urchin’s eggs, and the lenses of fish eyes. Some animals acquire MAAs when they eat algae, a producer of the nutrient. UVA damages DNA and causes melanoma. MAAs absorb part of the sun’s UVA spectrum with antioxidant properties.
Craig Downs, an eco-toxicologist with the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia has found the coral exposed to octocrylene, octinoxate, homosalate, and octisalate looks nothing like its old self: It recedes. And what’s left is whitish, dying from bleaching, or already dead. In Outside Magazine reports that 50 nangrams of oxybezone can cause toxicity in a variety of marine organisms Craig Down has found the chemicals all over the world. They has diminished the populations of coral, algae, sea urchins, algae-eaters and fish. Non-nano unscreen brands that contain zinc oxide and titanium oxide are reef friendly. If a visitor brings damaging sunscreen onto any Virgin Island they will be fined $1,000. Please spread this information to people enjoying outdoor activities everywhere. We live on an ocean planet. Every freshwater lake, wetlands, stream came from and flow into the ocean. Good sunscreens: Blue lizard, Bone Republic, Stream to Sea, Raw Elements are all reef safe. Why, if we can make sunscreen that is safe for people, the ocean, lakes and streams, do people make anything else?
The next day, my daughters and I swam the other side of the bay where the CORE nursery restores and sustain coral. A long very shallow sandy beach with seagrass gave way to a reef that was better than any I’d seen this year. Gorgeous healthy purple, tan, and ochre fans clung to colorful boulders. Finger and stag horn corals reached for the surface. We were mesmerized by the reefs getting more and more populated as we swam further from our shore and along the peninsula bay. One sea turtle at a time swam deep below. The strong current from yesterday brings fresh nutrients and zygotes to this side of the large bay. Here we saw a nursery.
NURSERY: FUSE FRAGMENTS OF OPPORTUNITY
Dr. Gibble, a Virgin Island marine scientist, says, “Those corals are stressed in our nursery. They need shade. (to keep cool) Coral carries stress for a year.”
“Any genetic material you save is a good thing,” says Frank Cummings, president of COREVI.ORG. One year ago there were five large mother brain boulders that sourced fragments for propagating new growth. Core.org applied for a National Park District permit that took one year to clear. By that time four boulders had bleached and were dead.
“Coral is truculent and fragile,” says Frank Cummings. CORE Nursery in Virgin Islands national park grows new coral from fragments attached to domed rebar frames. All protected species are hot water coral in the Leinster Bay, St. John’s nursery. CORE’s coral restoration dome nursery is located in Leinster Bay, St. John, US Virgin Islands. In the waters of the Virgin Islands National Park, CORE Scuba Team members salvage broken pieces of Elkhorn and Staghorn Corals, re-plant them in the “nursery” and tend to them weekly with hopes of eventual out planting to reefs that are in need of these corals. Core.org pays people to clean coral fragments. High school students learn that coral shards wired to rebar frames needs to have the algae brushed off so the coral can can grow large enough for fish to feed on while cleaning the surface of access coral. St. John students are descendants of the sugar plantation workers. Their ancestors were taught to fear of the ocean. They were told the sea was dangerous with deadly sharks and currents. These young people are overcoming stories handed down and learning to be one with the ocean. The are feeding coral shards are fed coral dried shrimp from ketchup bottles Most if the shrimp nutrients float away in the current, some feed the coral and help it grow. They are going onto University of Virgin Islands to become marine scientists, some earning phDs.
Best Practices include 1) stabilizing reefs by direct-planting of endangered coral colonies. NOAA and CORE,org utilize direct-planting keeping stag horn and elk horn coral fragments near the reef they snapped off. cement mixed with silicone sticks to the clean rock stick coral in th substrate to allow it to grow,.Coral shards are cemented (mixed with silicone) or epoxied to the reef, wedged in to allow the adhering agent to set and allowed to grow. Fragments from the same reef are more likely to fuse together making a polyp crown. Coral from another colony is likely to compete for space in the sun. If the crown has white tips, the coral fragment is rooted and is growing. Core.og wants to scale up to a tennis court size nursery.
“Coral here (St. Johns and Virgin Islands) are different from Florida.” Says Frank Cummings.
On the Florida Keyes, Dr. Vaugh micro-fractures stag-horn coral. “Fragmented stag horn coral grow 40-50 times faster,” says Frank Cummings. I find some peace with Dr. Vaughan’s Mote Marine Lab discovery of micro-fracturing coral. Micro-fractured coral grows faster than transplanting coral plugs or waiting for an algae friendship to bond. Micro fracturing is caused by storms and high waves from hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis. Tiny bits of coral scatter on other parts of reefs and grow quickly. “Coral polyps, filled with algae, attach their limestone skeleton to a rock that buds into thousands of clones over hundreds of centuries until a colony forms and joins with countless species to become a dynamic reef,” says Dr. David Vaughan at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory (Mote) in Summerland Key, Florida. “Greenhouse effect warming causes the algae in the coral polyp to leave the limestone skeleton or bleaches the coral. “We have lost twenty-five to forty percent of the corals in just our lifetime.” Dr. Vaughan says. Dr. Vaughan discovered that micro- fracturing coral speeds its growth for reef restoration. Coral is interdependent with ocean life; currents, sundry polyps, and fish clean and nourish coral while the reef edifice protects shorelines from battering breakers. Michael Timm, National Assistant Director of STEM Programs of Florida Sea Base explains, “Of the different genetic strains of each species there are many types that are much more resistant and tolerant of higher temperatures and therefore diseases. We cross a Curacao staghorn coral with a Keys’ staghorn to develop a genome more resilient to withstand higher temperatures and lower pH. Micro-fractured (snipped or cut) genome polps grow forty-sixty times faster than in the wild.” In the lab, the diamond cut polyps are grown to one centimeter in ceramic plugs and marine epoxied onto dead coral skeletons with like genotypes to fuse more quickly together. These are monitored monthly, then annually until they fuse.
“Most of the restoration work is mid-channel (5-6 miles off the keys) with fifteen-to-twenty-one centimeter plugs in ceramic casings. Of fifteen-to-twenty-two corals, with a two percent coverage, we have a ninety-percent survival rate in the first three years.”
“Carbon dioxide reacts with sea water to produce two positively charged ions, lowering the pH for a more acidic ocean that weakens corals and causes zooxanthellae to leave,” says Lauren Camden of Broward College. “Without the algae, the coral loses its major source of food and often cannot survive. The zooxanthellae photosynthesis process absorbs carbon molecules and releases oxygen that escapes through the water surface membrane into the air.” Unlike fast-growing branching corals, massive species like brain, star, boulder and mounding corals naturally grow less than two inches a year — so slowly they are nicknamed “living rocks.”
The Paris Agreement’s target of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” offers the only opportunity to prevent coral reef decline globally. “The major stressor for coral is the elevated temperature of our ocean’s sea waters and the ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the water that makes it more acidic,” says Dr. Vaughan. In addition to growing coral to restore reefs, Dr. Vaughan is growing coral polyps in tanks “that simulates different temperatures and different PH levels of the water from what we forecast to maybe in place fifty-years or one-hundred-years from now,” Dr. Vaughn explains in The Atlantic interview.
For a morning swim along sandy beach my daughters and I swam in the sea in the rain. A good drizzly day is a good time to leave a tropical paradise. We dreaded the long flight home, the TSA dilemma ahead, and the end of our long weekend together. Floating and kicking barefoot, surrounded by a horizon of islands and each other making this home, we relished the moment. Plastic and aluminum lawn chairs already were lining the mangroves with people seeking shade. It wasn’t a long swim but a great farewell to each other and our time together.
Our suitcases and backpacks were in the rental. We were at Cinnamon Beach with showers and changing rooms. Within the hour, the rental was returned. We rolled our luggage onto the ferry that was filled with visitors ending their Spring break vacations. Broad-brimmed scheduled Yogi’s taxi waiting for us at the port to take us to St. Thomas Airport for the two hours we had before boarding our plane. We took the seats near the door not knowing what TSA delays would be like and wanting to catch Yogi’s scheduled taxi.
The airlines phone recording said, “Expect a thirty-five minute line before boarding your flight. With a shortage of staff this message is not updated.”
I sat behind my daughters: one with brighter copper highlights curling over her shoulders under an off white broad-brimmed hat, the other with longer black hair falling over her shoulders like mermaid’s under a black NYU visor. Yes, we had fun and laughed but this weekend was more about three independent women coming together with differences that were aired and heard. It was more important that just our laughs and dinners together. We found we could make home by coming together anywhere on earth.
Then we passed the blunt-tipped reptile shaped island the locals called, “Pedafile island.” The map labels it Little St. James. A developer bought the island but can’t get a permit to develop it. It’s web of tentacles reached so far a girl who swam off the island to a fishing boat was not saved by the captain. She had to swim back to the island. The locals watched young girls go there from boats and planes for years.
As Yogi turned into the entrance of the airport to a swarm of cars and buses in utter chaos. Thousands of people in various lines with a few pink-shirted guides occasionally sharing information. We walked along a several block long line to the back. The line crawled as we waited for an hour Until a switch flipped.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” broad-brimmed said.
“This is not your fault,” blue-knitted said. “There is one man sitting in the oval office who is to blame. And thousands of votes standing in this hot line–some standing for hours with canes for support. The senators invested last week and will make millions this coming week.”
“You have to go!” blue-knitted told broad-brimmed. “You have to be at work tomorrow.”
“I can’t leave you here,” broad brimmed replied. She glanced at other flights. Each flight today was $2,500. Each hotel was $2500/night. Black-visor had four hours until her flight to NYC.
“Let’s go!” blue-knitted said. They moved cross-wise through the lines to find a pink shirted person. They directed us to the Global Entry lines. There were four. About ten people at a time were let through the alternating lines. We were in our line’s third group to be released. Then a pause for security-they checked I.D.s. We were directed to a TSA Pre line and passed through a security check there. Along the way a security guard asked if we had any apples or sandwiches in our luggage. Thats when my phone flashed our flight was boarding.
“No,” we said together. As we were feeding out luggage through the scanners, broad-brimmed got a call from the boarding gate attendant. She asked if we were close, the flight was boarded and they had only one-minute before the door would close.
“I’ve got to go through the Leidos scanner for my hip replacement,” blue-knitted warned.
“I’ll run ahead and hold the plane,” broad-brimmed said. She cleared blue-knitted’s luggage and made her way through the crowded waiting area. Knitted-hat grabbed her suitcase and wound down narrow passages of people standing in aisles, men asleep with outstretched legs, baby seats, and children in mother’s laps. Broad-brimmed was up the stairs, hat in hand. Blue-knitted ran out to the tarmac and up the plane’s stairs. All the passengers were seat belted in. The attendants had held the plane a few minutes for us.
“I still wouldn’t have missed that swim,” blue-knitted said.