Big Pictures

A boy and a book

In 1998, with Katie principally living with Kirsty, and a friend offering to look after Eviie at Rivendell, Mary and I were able to organise a working holiday on Norfolk Island. From the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Norfolk Island had been a penal colony, among the worst of Britain’s notorious colonial prisons and a place from which suicide was the only escape. The history of that time is still everywhere to be seen, especially the old prison with its grand gates leading to hell: such a contrast with the peaceful natural beauty of the place.

Because of its isolation I knew that the corals there were likely to be a depauperate but interesting lot, and they were, forming communities with a species mix not found anywhere else. There was next to no reef, but with clear water and nothing to disturb them, the corals grew in profusion in a shallow bay protected from the waves that hammer most of the coast. I had already named a new species from the island, Goniopora norfolkensis, collected for me decades earlier. On this trip I took what time I had to work out what species were present, but it seemed that several more might be found with further work, something I still hope to do.

Mary could only snorkel with me, for a very welcome reason: she was pregnant. Our son Martin was born in June of that year, a beautiful baby boy born without problems. Could it be that I was leading a normal life? Kirsty was always happy for us, but of course I wondered how she must have felt with so much going smoothly for Mary when it hadn’t for her.

By the time Hermatypic Corals of Japan was published (1995), a single, broadly cohesive global taxonomy of corals was becoming reasonably well established. Most old species based on single specimens had been amalgamated, and many new ones had been discovered, mainly from the vast amount of field work my colleagues and I had undertaken. However, the amount of unpublished work we had completed after research in so many countries was getting out of hand. I felt there was little point in publishing accounts of the corals of each country; what was needed was a Corals of the World.

Scoping a book of this size turned out to be a discouraging business; the job just looked too big, too complicated, and needed too many photographs. There were plenty of publishers willing to take it on, but the price they’d have to sell it for would put it beyond the reach of most students, certainly those in developing countries. I didn’t want to write a book just for rich people, I wanted it to be for those who would use it.

At this gloomy point we got an unexpected helping hand from John Jackson, who’d organised my trip to Clipperton Atoll. John was the owner of Odyssey Publishing, a small company based in San Diego, and he used to come to Australia about once a year to catch up with his shell-collecting buddies in Perth. He always stopped off at Rivendell on the way home.

‘You know, Charlie, Mary could build this book,’ he said as I was taking him to the airport for his homeward journey.

‘Don’t think so, John. She’s never so much as made a postcard.’

‘No harm in asking.’

John didn’t know the first thing about computers, in fact I had only recently persuaded him to get one, but he did know a lot about people.

Mary, who was already working on the science, said she would think about it. Then she bought a copy of QuarkXPress, a publishing program which at that time was a beginner’s nightmare. A week later she was building page designs.

I managed to convince Russ Reichelt, then director of AIMS, that the project was doable. The AIMS council thought so too, and agreed to pay the printing cost – more than half a million dollars – on condition that sales recouped it. That cost made it one of the most expensive printing jobs in Australia’s history. Another condition was that AIMS’s logo be on the spine as ‘publisher’; it was a millennial celebration project that would impress Canberra and send an up-yours to the CSIRO, who were trying to gobble AIMS up. Building the book would be expensive but fortunately Mary and I had obtained a grant to build an electronic key to identify corals, and that had much the same content, especially photographs, as a book would have. Well, sort of.

Mary bought a new, high-end computer for the job, with a top-of-the-range hard drive – of 19 gigabytes. I had thousands of photos, taken during my travels, but these weren’t nearly enough. Many people offered to help, and did so generously. There being no digital cameras in those days, all the photos were 35-millimetre transparencies and all had to be scanned, corrected, and sometimes scanned again. In the end we had 70 gigabytes of photos, which had to be stored in a bank of hard drives and laboriously backed up on tape. Every hard drive eventually failed and had to be replaced, but the back-up process Mary strictly followed always came to the rescue. Today, photographers return from trips with thousands of digital photos, all checked and sorted. I used to return with rolls of Kodachrome, never quite knowing what was on them.

In late 1999 our small team – Mary and me, my assistant Laura Carolan and our can-do friend Gary Williams – finally popped the cork. The bottle had waited years for this moment, years of solid work that were hectic, often frustrating but always rewarding. It was a good team.

I took our book from Rivendell to the printer in Melbourne on our tape drive, still having no publisher for it. The coral bible, as it came to be called by others, was launched at the Ninth International Coral Reef Symposium in Bali amid a fair measure of applause.39 Later it attracted some awards, including the Darwin Medal at the following Coral Reef Symposium.40 Although the book was sold to students at not much more than the cost price, it recovered AIMS’s investment and went on to make a modest profit. That’s amazing considering I was its financial manager, and hadn’t even thought of such things as the cost of air-freighting a three-volume book that weighed 7.5 kilograms. John Jackson helped there, becoming our agent for most overseas sales.

The book went on to be a sellout, and would have been reprinted by a commercial publisher, but as I will relate, we had other plans: to replace it with a website of the same name. In the meantime, Mary and I followed it up with our long-planned electronic key to coral species called Coral ID. This was published on CD-ROM discs, now an outdated technology, but at the time it was much appreciated as it cost users little and enabled them to identify corals quickly and surely without having to trawl through endless printed pages. As with the book, this publication is now part of our Corals of the World website and is free to all users the world over, which was what we’d always wanted.

Paths of conscience

I had imagined, wrongly as it turned out, that publishing Corals of the World would be some sort of culmination of my work on coral taxonomy. It did serve to create a world view of corals, something I’d worked towards for a very long time, but I soon discovered that answering a lot of questions only begs the asking of a lot more questions. And so the book turned out to be more of a beginning than an end.

The new millennium was also the beginning of a different relationship with AIMS. It started out well enough, with the appointment of a new director, but after a couple of years I felt that my time was being wasted. I decided to quit the executive, the internal governing body of the institute, a job I’d been embroiled in for more than a decade. I remained a troublemaker of course, I had no choice: the staff had good reason to be concerned about the way the institute was being run, including the composition of the council, none of whom knew anything about marine science.

Perhaps in retaliation, but actually to my delight, the director announced at a summit staff meeting that Coral Geographic, my long-standing mapping program, would not be accepted as an AIMS project. Somebody, not me, had proposed it should be, but it was my personal hobby and had been for thirty years. According to the director, I had no projects at all. The timing was perfect, so chuckling to myself I walked out of the meeting, up to my office, and phoned Mary.

We had been pondering the possibility of an extended stay in France. Mary had seen a lot of Europe as a child but I had never left Australia until I joined AIMS. Eviie and Martin had both travelled a lot, but only as sightseers or to visit Mary’s family in England; now they were of an age where they could absorb the language and culture of another country. Wanting to avoid cities, we looked for a place to live where the kids could go to small rural schools and get immersed in all things French. Katie, too, would come for part of the time. She had taken a particular interest in French and was keen to practise it.

After much hunting, Mary found the perfect house for us: an ancient, rundown but incredibly picturesque olive mill in a remote mountain region in the south. The mill, made of thick stone walls with a gabled slate roof, was perched on the side of a steep mountain slope, with a broad river at its feet and small streams on either side. I calculated that I could be away from AIMS for a year and a half if I combined my long-service leave with half-time work. Just what that work was I never specified but I reasoned that the director would approve anything to be rid of me. He did. After placing Rivendell and all our animals in caring hands, we left for France in July 2003.

Mary’s French improved rapidly but I didn’t give myself much of a chance. Most days, after driving the kids to school, I would spend a little time trying to chat to a villager and then seclude myself within the thick stone walls of a room at the bottom of our olive mill. With its own fireplace it was a cosy retreat that I turned into a study, complete with a very large crate of literature. The reading and writing I planned to do was much more important than learning a language.

For more than a decade I’d been worrying about the future of coral reefs, knowing that they’re as vulnerable to climate change as anything on our planet. There were dozens of theories and counter-theories surrounding this subject. Points of view were bandied about, some in scientific journals but most in the popular media, where so-called sceptics were having a field day. What was the real truth? I wanted to work this out in detail, and eventually did.

My first job was to undertake a vast amount of reading in every field of science that seemed relevant. As the months went by I read far more than I ever had for any university degree. I can’t say I enjoyed doing this at first; it reminded me of my PhD, where I seemed to be going ever deeper into a series of unconnected subjects. But gradually, like peeling the proverbial onion, I began to see what the cores of these subjects consisted of, how they were linked, and what this meant for the future.

On our return to Australia my head was full to bursting with climate change issues. Unlike in France, the media in Australia was still giving prime time to climate change sceptics, and now that I could evaluate their worth with certainty they made me angry. Foremost among the sceptics regularly appearing on television was a professor of geology from James Cook University, whom I’d known for decades. It was easy for me to debunk his views and I did so with careful precision, one after the other, when we met. To no avail. He was back on television at the next opportunity, wheeling out the same pseudo-science and undermining the efforts of so many scientists who knew their subject and were giving their time to help the public understand it. Nevertheless, the professor did me a good turn by showing me that I could no longer put my head in the sand. Throughout my time at AIMS, I had appeared in many science documentaries but had always avoided contentious public issues if I could. That now changed.

Before we’d left for France, the Howard government had issued instructions that Commonwealth agencies were to have nothing to do with climate change. When we returned, AIMS had another new director, who was not one to buck the system. He ordered me not to speak to the media about climate change, whereas I was determined to do so at any and every opportunity. I had much greater security than my colleagues, thanks to a council decision to make my tenure pretty much unbreakable, but I was unhappy that other senior scientists seemed to have done nothing to prevent bureaucrats taking over and running AIMS their way. That made a joke of my role as chief scientist, so I quit that in much the same style as I’d quit the executive a couple of years earlier. I also decided to leave AIMS altogether, but at a time of my choosing.

When I did finally walk out of AIMS’s front door for the last time, on a sunny afternoon in July 2007, I had cause to ponder. I’d been there when every other staff member first arrived. Throughout most of that time AIMS had been good at send-offs, giving people the opportunity to say things they thought should be said and spreading a little warmth around. Most departing staff were given a pretty piece of coral in a perspex box with a brass label; it had become a tradition. Thus armed, I had given farewell speeches on behalf of AIMS to about half its departing chairmen, most of its directors, and I don’t know how many other staff of all descriptions. It was something I enjoyed.

The day I left, I waved to Jim the gardener on his tractor, got into my car and drove off without so much as a farewell cup of tea. I missed the opportunity to thank all those who’d helped me over the years, especially the support staff, the people behind the scenes. They never seemed to get a mention when someone else gave a speech, yet they were the backbone of the institute as far as I was concerned.

I left because bureaucrats had won and AIMS had become just a building. My ignominious departure was not a personal rejection. Most of the old guard departed around the same time, and with a similar lack of grace. Some were more or less fired, others were asked to stay on and declined. For my part, I had no intention of working in a place where bean counters and an electronic key to doors controlled my life.

The saddest part was that although the more experienced scientists learned how to put up with it, or found another job, beginners seemed to think it was normal. Normal it might have become; necessary or beneficial it certainly wasn’t. I can’t think of a better way of killing off the creativity of a creative person than telling them what to work on, where to work, and when to work. People who do their job well need to be left to get on with it.

I pause here to emphasise this because of its importance in today’s wider world. At a council meeting in 1995 the chairman, Ray Steedman, announced that he wanted me to produce a book about the institute’s first twenty-five years. ‘Warts and all,’ he said. AIMS: The First Twenty-five Years was published in 1998, with historian Peter Bell the principal author and me the editor. In the introduction I wrote: ‘AIMS is what it is because of close links among the people who work here. AIMS is isolated and has been a frontier organisation in many ways. It has always been full of prima donnas, factions, arguments, workaholics, sloppy dress, self-defensiveness, general infighting and non-hierarchical cooperation. Visitors in suits come from afar – mostly Canberra – and frown on all this and mutter about ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’. To which the staff can justly reply that our culture, despite their efforts, is alive and well. And at the end of the day, where else can you find a track record of so much achievement that is real? We have long been, and still are, doing it our way – and curiously enough this tends to keep us ahead of the game.’

Less than a decade on, that atmosphere had gone and with it the creative zeal of the institute. It had been the place for me for a long time, but it was no longer. On my return from France the place had the air of a prison, with the bars of bureaucracy at every door.

Reefs in time

The interlinking of many fields of science that I began in France continued on my return to Australia, finally culminating in A Reef in Time, published in 2008. This book delved into how and why reefs have changed over all time scales and what this predicts for the future. A big part of that delving concerned reef environments.

When you think about it, coral reefs are extraordinary. They have evolved to live and thrive at a perpetually changing interface of land, sea and air. Compared to the relative constancy of fully terrestrial or fully marine habitats, the coastal fringe is exceptionally forbidding, and yet over hundreds of millions of years corals have made it their own. Their success can be attributed to the control they impose on their environment courtesy of their tight symbiosis with algae. This relationship provides the energy needed to build their three-dimensional matrices of stone ‘trees’ that are homes for the herbivores that keep seaweed in check.

There is a downside, though.

To cope with the physical ravages of their environment, and to keep their symbioses in order, corals live on a knife edge. They and the reefs they build go through never-ending boom-and-bust cycles. The booms occur when the sea level is mostly constant and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are low; the bust conditions are the opposite. The role of sea level change is rather obvious: reefs are left high and dry when the level falls and they can die from lack of sunlight when it rises; it’s a matter of catch up or die in the latter. (I will return to this subject below.)

Carbon dioxide, a gas rarer than argon, is critical for life on Earth. It is the essential ingredient for photosynthesis in all green plants and it’s also essential for keeping our planet warm: if we didn’t have it our oceans would freeze over and life as we know it could not exist. The mechanism involved has been known for two centuries: carbon dioxide is transparent to the short wavelengths of sunlight and so lets the warmth of the sun in during the day but acts to block this warmth from being re-radiated out at night, as that involves long wavelengths. Moreover, carbon dioxide is the fast-acting currency of the carbon cycle, transferring carbon between living creatures, rocks and air, and around again. All this makes it the controller of a strange mixture of life-giving properties of our planet, regulating Earth’s temperature and being the major player in the chemistry of Nature’s cradle, the oceans.

This is the background I painted before turning to mass bleaching, one of the two target syntheses of the book.

Mass bleaching is now a permanent fixture of the ecology of all coral reefs. At first it was restricted to El Niño years – the natural weather cycles that usually come every four to seven years and bring abnormally high temperatures to reefs throughout the tropical and subtropical world. It wasn’t until 1998 that coral biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg put forward a hypothesis about how mass bleaching occurred, one that some scientists thought implausible when he first came out with it.

For hundreds of thousands of years, corals and their algae have lived together in symbiotic harmony. What Ove discovered is that if corals are subjected to too much temperature and light, their algae go into overdrive, producing too much oxygen, some of which remains as free radicals that damage their host cells. But corals can counter this by controlling the number of algae in their tissues. Most biologists believe they do this by expelling the algae, but it’s more likely that they slough off the affected cell layer and replace it with a new layer that has no algae. Either way, the problem is that zooxanthellate corals cannot live without their zooxanthellae, and if they get free of all of them they die. It’s all rather suicidal, and now corals are suffering the consequences, because they live in a world where temperatures increasingly peak above their precisely evolved limits of tolerance.

Not all mass bleaching is lethal. Sometimes enough algae remain to allow the coral to recuperate, but if no algae remain, death usually follows within months. Seeing entire coral communities turn white is a gut-wrenching sight, especially as it’s not just the corals that die, but also most other animals in the community created by the coral, paving the way for a seaweed or slime takeover.

With the reality of reefs dying en masse, I wanted to estimate the possible flow-on effects this would have for all marine life. This was prompted by the geological record, which suggested that the demise of reefs gives early warning of a global environmental collapse, even a mass extinction. Evidence for this comes from several quarters, including the links between carbon dioxide and the carbonates that reefs are made of, and the sensitivity of corals to ocean carbonate chemistry. I tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to rope others into helping me to estimate how much marine life would be affected by a complete collapse of coral reefs, but the job was too big and there was not, and still isn’t, enough scientific knowledge about our marine life to draw on. Taking this subject as far as we could, I was persuaded that about a third of all marine animals are dependent on reefs during at least one stage of their life cycle. If this is true, then the collapse of the world’s reefs would indeed trigger an ecological collapse of our oceans. The geological record, full of suppositions though it is, clearly shows that this has happened many times during our own era (the past 65 million years), and I now felt I had a good case for proposing that we are creating conditions for a re-run. One of many re-runs though it would be, the next will be different because we humans will be among the victims. Will we be prepared? Of course we won’t.

Coal, the stuff that once powered the Industrial Revolution, is now powering climate change. This prophetic excerpt from a 1912 New Zealand newspaper speaks volumes, yet we are still mining coal with reckless abandon.

I turned to sea level rise. As I continued with my studies this made a welcome change from being so doomy and gloomy. It had been proposed in many quarters that sea level rise would destroy our reefs, but those who argue this should look at the rate of rise after the last ice age (up to 1.5 metres per century). That was much faster than is likely to occur in our modern world of high sea levels, short of a melting Antarctica, and reefs coped with that rate well enough. What sea level rise will do is lead to the shifting or removal of the colourful zonation patterns most reefs now have. However, seen in the context of geological time, these patterns are abnormal, brought about by the unusually stable sea level we have enjoyed for the past ten thousand years or so.

The final target subject of A Reef in Time was ocean acidification, which is not an aspect of climate change although it has the same cause: carbon dioxide. Of all the syntheses I made in that book, those delving into the geological past were the most challenging because I constantly found myself in uncharted territory. But I could not let the subject go; it’s critically important.

It’s quite a climb to the very top of the highest Devonian reef of the Canning Basin, near the coast of north-western Australia, because the limestone, looking like a giant cheese grater, has a karst surface carved into ridges so sharp that even a goanna would be well advised to tiptoe carefully. This reef has a spiritual feel about it. It’s so old that its years number as many as there are metres to the moon, yet 360 million years ago it was decimated, along with every other reef in the world, and they all stayed that way, home only to microbes, for more millions of years. What could have caused that? Ocean acidification and associated oxygen depletion (anoxia) from carbon dioxide could. Certainly, not all ocean catastrophes in the ancient world can be blamed on carbon dioxide, but in most cases I have searched in vain for alternative explanations, and I don’t know why the role of carbon dioxide wasn’t apparent to geologists long ago. The geological past has shown us many times over that the Earth has enormous reserves of carbon that can be converted into carbon dioxide and its chemical associates via a multitude of biological and geological pathways.

The chemistry of carbon dioxide when dissolved in seawater is generally understood and has been for a long time, although it is not straightforward because it is greatly affected by its concentration in the atmosphere as well as the temperature of the ocean. Like the gas in a bottle of soda water taken from a fridge and left in the sun, it does not stay dissolved when warmed. However, when it is dissolved it forms carbonic acid and that’s the problem. Our oceans can never actually become acid – with a pH of less than 7 – there’s not remotely enough acid on Earth to do that, but carbonic acid does make the surface of the ocean less alkaline, which increases the solubility of calcium carbonate, especially a form of it called aragonite, the stuff coral skeletons are made of.41

Corals are good at countering this, but as seawater gets less alkaline – meaning less super-saturated with carbonate, even slightly less – coral larvae will struggle to lay down the fine cementing layer that they use to attach themselves to rock, and if they do start growing, their skeletons will become brittle and then may cease to grow altogether. The bottom line is that corals will not grow in the seawater that will exist by the end of this century at the present rate of carbon dioxide build-up.

Devonian reef, Canning Basin, Western Australia.

When writing A Reef in Time I had to struggle to describe ocean acidification, because the whole process is easily shown by simple equations but not so easily expressed in words. ‘No equations,’ my editor insisted. I don’t think most of those who read my book would agree with that, but the book did carry the message, at least I hope so.

The year the book was published, and perhaps because of it, the Nature Conservancy held a workshop in Honolulu about the effects of ocean acidification on reefs. It was attended by Dick Feely, an expert on ocean carbonate chemistry whom I’d not met but knew well from his publications. I had many questions for him, but before I had a chance to ask any he said he wanted to talk to me about my book. I assumed I had gone wrong somewhere, but the following day Dick said that when he’d started reading he couldn’t stop, and had read on all through the night. ‘And the next day I started reading it all over again!’ I felt flattered, but the point he was making was that, as a carbonate specialist, he hadn’t realised the many ramifications of the subject. Ocean acidification is indeed seen in the geological record everywhere, and in coral physiology and in reef ecology. And I believe it will soon be a part of human history.

The cause of the mass extinction that finished off the dinosaurs is the most debated subject in the history of geology, yet curiously nobody recognised the role that ocean acidification might have played. As with so many sciences, all it needed was a little lateral thinking. Now acidification is taken much more seriously. It doesn’t have the many complexities of climate change and so it receives much less coverage in the scientific literature. It is also less immediate as it won’t be catastrophically affecting all the oceans for decades to come. Nevertheless, its consequences are irreversible on time scales far longer than those of climate change.

I fear that ocean acidification will be the ultimate evil of the Anthropocene – the only geological interval created by living organisms, us – and the primary cause of a mass extinction in the not too distant future.

One morning in June 2009 I had a phone call from a man who introduced himself as Paul Pearce-Kelly and said he was from the Zoological Society of London. He wanted to talk to me about A Reef in Time.

‘Sure, Paul, what do you want to know?’

‘I mean I want to come to Townsville to see you about it.’

‘Oh. When?’

‘Next week.’

‘From London?’

‘Yes.’

Paul certainly kept a tight schedule. The day after he arrived at Rivendell he was off somewhere else, having left me surprised by one of his questions. ‘Charlie, what would you say if I arranged for an emergency meeting at the Royal Society, had Sir David Attenborough chair it, and had your talk streamed around the world?’

This guy’s a nutter.

‘That’d be nice, Paul.’

A few weeks later he phoned me again. ‘It’s all arranged for July the sixth,’ he said. ‘David’s happy to chair it. We’ll have a conference beforehand. He’ll chair that too. What do you want to call your talk?’

‘Really? Um, how about “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?”’ I was thinking of Mary’s younger brother Clive, a lawyer who’d had spectacular success stopping Americans from executing their own.

‘Good,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about. I’ve booked you and Mary in at the zoo. They’ve got a nice flat there. Come as soon as you can. It’s interesting to be with the animals when everybody else has gone home.’

On arriving at the zoo a few weeks later, Mary and I discovered that Paul, far from being nuts, was a ball of energy, self-effacing to a fault, and totally committed to conservation. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority had helped build a rather slick PowerPoint presentation for me. All that was needed was for me to write some introductory notes about myself, as requested by the Royal Society, so that Sir David could introduce me. I did as asked, omitting mention of my first visit there, after the Stoddart expedition! But I needn’t have bothered – Sir David gave me his own introduction, and a generous personal one it was.

On the morning of my talk there was a large meeting of climate change and reef scientists at the Royal Society, with much of the debate being about what level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would give corals optimal environmental conditions. These views were subsequently published in a much-cited article, but at the time I said as little as possible as I had a threatening throat infection and was in imminent danger of losing my voice.42 Fortunately that didn’t happen: my presentation lasted an hour and a half, as arranged, and was followed by an hour and a half of questions, which only ended because the master of ceremonies called it quits. The conference, my talk and the questions had taken six hours; I was astonished at Sir David’s stamina, as by then he was over eighty.

Some scientists thought my predictions about future carbon dioxide levels were overly pessimistic: they were at the extreme end of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions. Now, nearly a decade on, one slide from my talk gets aired by the occasional investigative journalist. It was made from data I borrowed from oil industry reports and publications, and it said that by 2015 we would have 400 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide (we did). I extrapolated that this would cause major weather events (which happened), and severe bleaching, mainly during El Niño cycles (which also happened). This makes a clean rebuff for those denialists who claim that scientists make it all up, or (as I was sometimes accused) exaggerate. There is much to be said for such reality checks.

Naturally, I wondered how much difference my book, this symposium, and the spreading of what I had to say would make. For a long time, it seemed not much, but I later had cause to be more positive. As months turned into years I began to appear in more and more documentaries and interviews. I had made the effort to understand the many sciences involved with climate change and have been able to put that understanding to good effect.

Of all the articles, seminars, interviews and documentaries I have written, spoken and appeared in, one stands out in my memory. In 2009 Robyn Williams, who thirty years earlier at AIMS had recorded me talking about the first Australians living under coral reefs, asked me to do an item for Occam’s Razor, another of his science productions for Australia’s national radio. The production required a written script and had to be recorded in a studio. This was something new for me and I discovered how important speaking to a person is. I was in Townsville with only a microphone for company and the producer was in Sydney. He told me to take my time, and then proceeded to stop me about ten times in as many minutes.

‘How did it go?’ asked Mary, who had helped write the script.

‘I haven’t the vaguest idea,’ I replied in all honesty.

When Robyn introduced my talk a couple of weeks later, he said it was among the most important he’d ever recorded, which is saying something coming from the person who probably knows the pulse of Australian science better than anybody.43 It also says something about how times have changed, for what I said then would be old news today.

It was a plea from the heart, but trying to keep emotion out of it I had painted the future of coral reefs just as science said it would be, without spin or exaggeration. It’s an incredibly important subject, yet now I’m reluctant to talk about it at all, for it’s hard to see a bright side, and hope is an essential ingredient for just about everybody. Better to shut up and try to figure out why religions succeed when reason doesn’t.

Our French hideaway had turned out to be one of Mary’s great ideas for our family, but the outcome – my understanding of climate change – has robbed me of much of the enjoyment I once had in working on reefs, for I have a clear idea of what lies ahead, and wish I hadn’t. It’s an exceedingly sad thought that nobody will ever study the world’s coral reefs as I have because much of that world no longer exists.

A very big website

Not long after Corals of the World was published I started thinking that the world needed a website where anybody could find out about all corals from all points of view – could identify them, and see a lot of photos of them and maps of their distribution. Advances in computer technology made such a website possible, but doing something about it was another matter. There were two main jobs: getting the mass of taxonomic information and photos together, and doing the mapping.

The ideal way to build such an all-encompassing website would be to have all taxonomists agree about the taxonomy, then contribute all they know. Unfortunately that will never happen, for taxonomists are an independent lot and they tend to battle opposing views. Not overtly, but through synonymies. It’s a territorial thing, and can have its amusing side. But on a practical level, Nature’s fuzziness does not make consensus easy, particularly for work that has a restricted geographic scope. Moreover, often what we read is as much about the taxonomist’s personal biases as the actual taxonomy.

During the expeditionary work on the Coral Triangle, I’d come to know and greatly value Emre Turak and Lyndon DeVantier, field workers who excelled at recognising species underwater and who made careful collections for subsequent studies of species of interest. I asked them if they’d join Mary and me in building a website, which would be like the book Corals of the World but more comprehensive. Mary came up with the notion that users could get the website to build customised maps, which could be continually updated by us. It was a great idea and it worked in ways we never imagined, producing statistics and allowing all manner of interesting analyses to be made.44 At least, that was the happy ending; the road along the way was more a matter of dogged perseverance.

In 2008, about a year after the Coral Triangle Initiative was launched, I was asked to attend a supposedly high-level conference about it sponsored by the Australian government, which up to that time had contributed little to its establishment. Naturally, given Australia’s previous lack of interest, I wondered what the conference was all about, and am still wondering. I wasn’t alone there: a group of delegates from Indonesia asked me to bring a coral triangle to the conference, as they’d never seen one. I explained that I only had one and it was too big to move. They said they never realised that . . .

There was also a mob from AIMS at the conference and they too seemed none the wiser, for they wanted to know why I was repeatedly mentioned whenever someone made a speech. ‘If this work was your doing, Charlie, why wasn’t it an AIMS project?’ asked one.

‘Well, someone suggested that but it got turned down. Remember?’

‘Vaguely. So why don’t we make it an AIMS project now?’

Why would I want to do that?

‘If you guys did the website building, maybe we could,’ I said.

Two years later AIMS’s lawyer finally put the finishing touches to a thick document which said that the building of Corals of the World Online, as they called it, would be a joint operation: AIMS would do the website engineering, Mary would design the whole thing, and Mary, Emre, Lyndon and I would do the coral work. AIMS and I would both seek funding for it.

All went well until the AIMS scientist responsible for managing the institute’s side of the bargain found another job; then their guy responsible for the mapping left also. We muddled on for a while, with computer technicians putting together a website with temporary text and photos from my book as placeholders. But AIMS was happy with this, corals not being high on their priorities, so we parted company.

Building the website we wanted would be a costly business; I screamed for help. Fortunately, Dave Hannan, the founder of the conservation foundation Ocean Ark Alliance and a character generous beyond belief, launched a financial rescue and Google Earth chipped in. By the end of 2011 we were up and running again. I also found a company who could engineer it all, with genuine skill and dedication.

The project just kept getting bigger, better and more complicated, and was soon costing much more than I’d anticipated, partly because it had no precedent and so didn’t fit any mould. That also made it look like a risky venture, but nevertheless more generous backers who believed in what we were doing heard my call, and hundreds of others helped in all ways possible. We felt very privileged; we still do.

Despite the complexity of the undertaking, anybody looking at the website now would be forgiven for thinking it’s all straightforward. It was designed to be this way, and to give instant answers. We still have a long way to go with it, for there’s nothing to stop it having the capability to track the fate of all species, endangered or not, thus giving the best scientific support for their protection. This is a distant goal but would be the biggest step forward in coral conservation ever. It would be another massive task on top of all we have so far done, requiring detailed information about coral habitats worldwide and the paths of ocean currents that connect them, along with mountains of information about the biology of each species.

For me, an all-abiding problem remains. The website gives each species a name and includes descriptions, photographs and a distribution map. Species are therefore treated as if they’re isolated units, even though, as I’ve explained, this is seldom the case. There are no options here, or at least none that I can think of, and it means that every point of information we have may not be exactly correct for a particular place. This may involve a minute error here, but a potentially larger one there. Such is the troublesome truth of reticulate evolution. I don’t know if reticulate patterns are the last frontier, as some have said, but the subject is something that must eventually be confronted.

On 20 June 2016 a preliminary version of our website was launched at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Honolulu, amid 2000-odd delegates.45 Having it ready was a cliffhanger: Mary flicked the switch at 4:30 am the day we left for Hawaii.

I pause to wonder what John Wells would think of our website. I hope he’d think his wall chart has been given a good future.

Names that matter

For more than two hundred years before the age of scuba diving, people had been amassing corals during expeditions of discovery to the tropical world; in fact, corals became one of the most popular collectables of all time. Naturalists collected them from reef flats at low tide, sailors who could swim collected them from deeper water, or they were purchased from natives with an eye for trade. By such means they accumulated in great quantities in museums across Europe and America, where they made contributions to natural history, especially when they were the subject of those big scholarly monographs that so defeated me when I first worked on corals.

Some corals in these collections were swapped or borrowed, sometimes returned and sometimes not. Inevitably, many specimens were lost, or given new labels when incorporated into another collection, commonly without any indication of their original source. No matter, except for type specimens, many of which were hard to track down if they weren’t distinctively marked. Others presumed lost may never have existed. Of greater concern, type specimens were often oddities because they were atypical growth forms found only in shallow water. Worse still, they did not represent any group or population – they were just different. This is ancient history but it’s a history we must deal with, because it has created so many problems for nomenclature.

Coral taxonomists of the remote past, not being scuba divers, had no idea how species appeared underwater, and as we’ve seen, specimens were sometimes proclaimed a new species and given a new name simply because they looked different. Scuba diving opened a door to another world, and quickly became essential for reef field work, something Cyril Burdon-Jones foresaw when he applied for the grant that supported my post-doc. No doubt my scuba background was the reason I was offered a post-doc at all, given I had no formal qualifications in marine biology. No complaints on that score; I had the best training a would-be taxonomist could ever have – none. This enabled me to see central issues afresh, without being burdened by the baggage of the past.

A coral taxonomist working in a museum or university without studying corals on reefs would be in the same predicament as a tree taxonomist shut inside a herbarium without venturing into forests. What would Henry Bernard, who described so many species, have thought if he could have spent just one day on a reef? His world would have been turned upside down. Instead, having never laid eyes on a living coral, he abandoned binomial nomenclature and took up religion. Another author, the Indian George Matthai who published a massive volume in the same monograph series that much of Bernard’s work was published in, ended up shooting himself. Maybe if those guys had spent a little time on a tropical island they might have lightened up a bit.

Seeing corals living on reefs allowed species to be identified with much greater certainty; it provided distinct criteria for separating closely related species that occur together, and revealed how variations in skeletal structures are linked to the environment in which the coral had grown. This reinvigorated coral taxonomy and led to detailed studies that, forty years on, are still progressing, providing a solid foundation for reef studies as well as overwhelming support for conservation. Nevertheless, we are still left with the legacy of the past, one which has more to do with the foibles of humans than with corals. This situation is far from unique to corals, but the ramifications seem particularly unfortunate in their case.

There are several types of coral taxonomists, the most prominent historically being the museum sort. Working on specimens collected by someone else, perhaps from unknown places and usually from unknown habitats, is not conducive to much original thought, so these people made the most of what they had by describing selected specimens in great detail and by constructing elaborate synonymies. In times long gone, such people tended to look to museum shelves for inspiration, but when all’s said and done, Nature hardly got a look in.

A typical synonymy (this one from the author), where species and the taxonomists who use them are listed to indicate that the species are all one and the same.

The field worker is a very different sort of taxonomist. Spending a great deal of time underwater rather than in museums or laboratories is a much more difficult undertaking, and not just from a practical point of view. On the one hand, field workers must depend on the taxonomy of people of yesteryear who had very different experiences, then blend that into what they see alive on reefs. On the other, they constantly see corals that are new or different from any that have been recorded. These are the people I like to work with, for they usually have original knowledge and of necessity know a great deal about corals.

Molecular taxonomists, who work with DNA, are another breed altogether and today outnumber all others many times over. The best of them combine significant field experience with molecular technology and knowledge of the morphological characters of the species they study, and they seldom fail to get interesting results. But in this approach, good work is sometimes mixed with bad, because many researchers who’ve mastered molecular techniques have little field experience. A lot of students are in this business, striving to get to the front of the pack, and it’s tough, with few winners and many losers. But there’s a big future here, when molecular results are well integrated with a thorough understanding of the species in the field, their life histories, physiology and taxonomic background.

Many scientists try to be part of a combination of these different approaches, and now we commonly see co-authored publications where one author may have no idea what their co-authors actually do. Such works often read like something put together by a committee; however, the combination may tick the boxes of the editors of science journals, and that, in the pressures of today’s academia, is usually the aim of the game.

Does it matter that the name changes these different approaches generate go ever on, with no end in sight? Yes it does, because it’s the name that links information together, whether that information is in the form of a map, photo, description, survey, or any aspect of science or conservation involving species. Of recent years, taxonomy has been a popular subject for PhD theses, a thin (apparently deficient) thesis being one that has re-examined all relevant problems and found little cause for change, and a thick (apparently good) thesis being one that changes everything possible. The same applies to many publications, where the main aim is often change for the sake of change. If it is the end user that matters, names need to be stable and dependable, and, most important of all, the species that the name represents needs to be recognisable in the field and distinguishable from all other species.

That said, the real crunch has yet to come: reticulate evolution says that species divide and merge over big geographic distances as well as over evolutionary time, yet most computer programs, as I’ve pointed out, do not allow lineages to merge, they can only make branches. That’s not something to ignore. Other problems are waiting in the wings, the most important being that some molecular results are clearly at odds with every other line of evidence relating to a species’ phylogeny, and have led to highly unlikely speculations on the part of their authors. Such results are now being found in most groups of animals and I’ve not yet heard a general explanation for them, except for a possible role for ancestral junk DNA. So now coral taxonomy is not just about corals and taxonomists, it’s also about molecular and information technology.

The whole subject has become so very multi-faceted, yet is still beholden to those collectors of ancient times and the specimens they deposited in museums. Type specimens and the name games they inspire were bad enough for field-going scientists like me, but are much worse for geneticists, whose primary expertise is in molecular technology and not the history of museum specimens. The DNA that molecular taxonomists use comes from living tissue, something not found in museum specimens.

Clearly this issue must be addressed: the old nomenclatorial system needs a drastic overhaul or it will become irrelevant. In the meantime, it’s likely that chaos will prevail, which is fine for students keen to publish, but not so fine for anybody requiring names they can rely on.

Taxonomy in the minds of most people conjures up images of old museums, long boring monographs and even more boring people. But what is taxonomy? It is a description of how Nature is organised, one of the deepest and most complex subjects of all biology. Hardly boring, at least to my mind, but then I don’t often think of myself as a taxonomist.

Pat Mather, who, you might recall, was aghast at my becoming involved in taxonomy, gradually changed her mind and eventually became my staunch supporter. But sometimes I think she might have been right in the first place, given the problems I’ve come across with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

Since its formation in 1895 the ICZN has produced, among other publications, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which proclaims what taxonomists should, shouldn’t, can and can’t do – in some areas but not in others. This code gets revised every couple of decades or so, but it seems to me to be out of touch with taxonomy. Issues with the ICZN are critically important for natural scientists, although some don’t realise it, or don’t want to know about it. Certainly, these problems are not adequately aired. Like the frog that doesn’t notice the warming beaker, we become acclimatised; we even think there’s something normal about it, until it’s too late.

It’s true that the ICZN has done much to tidy up the chaos it inherited more than a century ago, but that tidying was done at a time when the central axiom of all taxonomy was that name changes should only be made if they increased certainty. That notion still exists in theory but has too often fallen by the wayside in practice, leaving us with many problems that should have been resolved long ago. These problems belong to every taxonomist, not just the ICZN, and all biologists who rely on species names would do well to be aware of them. Here are the most conspicuous:

Problem one: when a species name is changed (the old ‘priority versus stability’ argument), much of the information that goes with the old name gradually fades away. And as I’ve said, linking information about a species is what names are good for. Worse, the older the name, the less clarity it usually has. In many cases the oldest name is not even based on a type specimen, but on only a drawing or vague description, as with Pocillopora damicornis. Even today, taxonomists will triumphantly change an old, well-known name for an even older name that has never been used, and there’s nothing to stop them doing this.

The name Pocillopora damicornis, for one of the world’s most common and most studied coral species, is based on this rather doubtful drawing.

Problem two: one size fits all. Corals are not sponges, salamanders or parrots. These animals have almost nothing in common except the rules by which they are named. Corals have a special need here because so much work on them is becoming DNA-based. We need new type specimens with living tissue preserved: an essential case of ‘out with the old and in with the new’. Certainly there are difficulties in doing this, but that doesn’t mean they can be left in the too-hard basket.

Problem three: Latin! Latin was once firmly entrenched in the language of international law, religion, history, astronomy, anatomy, taxonomy, and heaven knows what else. Now, as far as I can see, it’s only entrenched in the Roman Catholic Church and the ICZN. My book Corals of the World (not to mention many of my other publications and those of other authors) has descriptions of a large number of new species. All, says the ICZN, must be in correct Latin, whatever that is, for I don’t know Latin grammar but am reliably told it has several forms. But I do know an old Catholic priest, unlikely though that seems; however, he confessed he didn’t know any Latin either. So, heretic though I am, I did try, but for what reason? After all, we’re only dealing with two words.

As things now stand, ICZN rules require a species name to be changed if that species is reassigned to another genus that has a different gender: how’s that for creating a snag in today’s world of electronic information searches?

Problem four: ancient junk. A long time ago, a German naturalist by the name of Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) devised an elaborate though mindlessly pointless system of nomenclature that included names of seven common coral genera we use today. The problem was that he didn’t believe in binomial nomenclature, so the ICZN ruled them invalid (‘unavailable’, in their lingo). Six have since been approved, but poor old Turbinaria remains out in the cold. Who, besides me, knew that? Who, including me, cares? This matters because coral taxonomy is riddled with such cases, the fate of Favia, one of the world’s most commonly used coral names, being the latest.

When I first visited John Wells, back in 1975, I complained that the type species (the species a genus is based on) of Favia was obviously not a Favia at all. He agreed and commented that Thomas Vaughan (1870–1952), John’s autocratic mentor, thought so too. Let sleeping dogs lie, John advised. And so I did, that is until Favia was given another name, one nobody had ever heard of. Why? Because Favia, one of Oken’s once invalid genera, did not have a designated type species. A.E. Verrill, always on the lookout for something to do, gave it one, in another instance of Verrilliana – he got it wrong. So one may well ask: should an obscure 200-year-old publication, supposedly corrected by a hundred-year-old mistake, matter when the name Favia has now been used unambiguously in more than a thousand publications? Obviously not. I am not the complaining sort, but this time I couldn’t resist publishing a complaint, using the politest phrases I could muster.46

I have been grumbling about the role of technical trivia for a very long time, my point being that the ICZN has done little or nothing about it. The account of Favia is an example but of these there are many, all contributing excuses for making changes ahead of reason.

Problem five: The multiple needs of molecular taxonomy. Enough already said, especially about the usefulness of old type specimens that don’t have any DNA.

ICZN technical trivia reached a low point for me a year or so after Corals of the World was published, when a curator at the Smithsonian wrote to the journal Science claiming that all the new species I’d included in my book were invalid because I’d only nominated type specimens in a subsequent monograph, rather than in the book itself. As it happened, that same year (2000) the ICZN published a revision of their Code, which would indeed have left my new species invalid. The issue according to them was: which came first, my book or their code? After months of deliberation, which was actually between the commission and a friend of mine on the commission who took my side, it was finally agreed that my book did, but only because the contract I had with the printer was signed in December 1999, whereas the new code came into effect in January 2000. That is to say, had the contract to print my book (a matter involving a lot of time and money) been delayed a month, the commission may well have declared all the new species in it invalid. In the end the commission couldn’t help writing to me, noting with approval ‘my’ use of their language (ha!), but also giving me a lesson in Latin grammar. What a lot of bunkum.

Decades ago the ICZN had essentially done the job it was originally created to do. If it can now shape up to future needs, excellent, for that will mean giving more attention to forward-thinking young people and less to worn-out history. Perhaps the tiger should give itself a new set of teeth.

The ICZN’s rules pale into insignificance compared to the problems created by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES was established in 1973, and a very good move it was. All was well until 2002, when CITES’s Animals Committee produced a list of coral genera that they considered unidentifiable. They further decided that it was bad to collect corals for the aquarium trade: what if endangered species were being collected? As corals were too hard (for them) to identify, they simply classified all scleractinian corals as endangered species. The precious deep-water coral Corallium, which is not scleractinian but is threatened, having been harvested without control for centuries, did not make the list – that was blocked by commercial interests. The aquarium trade, which does immeasurably more good than harm, is battling on with uncertain success, but not so the scientists who need to collect corals for their studies, and to do so in all countries where the species they are interested in occurs.

The people who manage CITES in Australia and the US found ways to bolster their regulations, the most effective being that an export permit from the country of origin must be obtained before an import permit can be issued. That seems straightforward, but when I first applied for an export permit some countries that have corals had never heard of CITES. Still, customs officials learned how to exploit that quickly enough.

‘You want export permit? Export permit take lot of work. Cost extra for quick processing.’

‘How much extra?’

‘Forty American dollar. One hundred dollar better. Cash only.’

At first Australian Customs were not too concerned about corals. I would just explain who I was and what the corals were for. Then they tightened up. Now they will pounce on anything that looks like a coral.

Corals are not made of ivory and corals are not white rhinos. Certainly they are endangered, due to mass bleaching caused by climate change, but the CITES charade has done enormous damage to coral research everywhere while doing nothing meaningful for conservation.