麻豆传媒

AROUND the world, coral reefs are dying as warming waters cause the polyps that build them and their live-in algal partners to part company. In some cases, once things cool down, reconciliation occurs, the partnership reforms and things become nearly normal. In others, the separation is permanent and, deprived of its algae, which provide energy and skeleton-building calcium carbonate, the coral dies.

This phenomenon is called bleaching, and it first occurred reef-wide in the Caribbean in the 1980s. But a rise in tropical ocean temperatures makes it so common and widespread now that few reefs remain untouched. In the space of an academic career, coral scientists have gone from monitoring to mourning, as what is regarded as serious damage for a reef has gone from 10 per cent to 60 per cent bleached.

Since reefs host an estimated 25 per cent of all marine species, how do scientists react to such a cataclysm? How do you change focus from understanding the majesty of these places to simply ensuring enough of them remain for your grand-students to study?

Luckily we have Irus Braverman of the University of Buffalo in New York, a professor of law and a social anthropologist. As a coral enthusiast rather than coral scientist, she can not only explain biology to all, but also examine an academic discipline in crisis with a neutrality that gives access to different camps and viewpoints.

The result, Coral Whisperers, flips between the objective and the subjective. We have the facts about coral biology, reef death and the technologies used to monitor and save something of their branching, stony splendour. Braverman is lucid, which is just as well: the polyp-algal link is really the tip of an iceberg so complex, and involving so many bacterial and viral symbionts, that scientists now consider a coral a holobiont, a micro-ecosystem of which we see just a part.

Then there is the book鈥檚 astute and empathetic analysis of the mindset of coral scientists which emerges in her interviews, the result of hundreds of hours with the leading experts, plus numerous site visits and conferences. Braverman quickly identifies two schools of thought: hope and despair. Representatives of the former want to rebuild by seeding reefs with algae that are either naturally more resistant to bleaching or tweaked to be so. The despair camp, however, thinks this is useless without first solving the root problem: climate change.

Braverman sees a split not only in attitude, but along the lines of gender and geography too. Those given to despair and belief in the primacy of a political solution tend to be older, male and Australia-based. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg at the University of Queensland, for example, insists CO₂ levels must come down before hope can go up: 鈥淎 lot of what we are doing in terms of conservation actions is futile unless we stabilise climate,鈥� he told Braverman.

鈥淭he author quickly identifies two schools of thought on the loss of reefs: hope and despair鈥�

The hope camp is often female and studying Caribbean reefs. One, Nancy Knowlton, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, says positive ideas are vital: present problems and no solution, and people 鈥渏ust go to the bar鈥�.

Braverman鈥檚 highly readable, deeply informative and insightful account also serves as a trope for how science adapts to a situation in which reflection must quickly give way to dynamic, focused and effective action. This scenario is likely to be played out and replayed as other ecosystems begin to collapse, and experts find they must leave their academic comfort zone and use their hard-won data and experience to save the natural world they so very clearly love.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎 climate of change鈥�