[Applause]
people find out that I study coral reefs
and technical dives for a living they
always have a lot of questions usually
it starts something along the lines of
oh my god
sharks and then we go somewhere else
from there nowadays inevitably
we wind up going pretty much the same
place with everybody some people ask it
gently they tiptoe around the issue
other times they’re a little more blunt
but inevitably we wind up with something
along the lines of how can you do what
you do when everything you love is dying
it’s kind of a brutal question it’s not
really what I thought I’d be dealing
with when I was four years old
snorkeling with my grandfather and
decided this was going to be my life but
it’s really not hard to understand how
people get their 5 minutes on Google got
me these so pessimism
apathy a general avoidance of these
issues is all sort of understandable if
this is what you’re reading now the
thing is we have lost a lot of coral
reefs but this isn’t the whole story
tonight I’m not going to tell you that
we’ve found a silver bullet to fix the
problem or that we won’t lose more coral
in the future but what I am going to
tell you is a small part of this story
that that almost no one ever gets to
hear one that’s a little bit more
positive than the rest and one that I
get to work on every day by the end of
this you’ll know my answer to that first
question and just maybe you’ll have a
little bit of hope for the future of
coral reefs so to start off what is a
coral reef and why should you care in a
nutshell
reefs are food on our tables and roofs
over our heads the World Wildlife Fund
estimates that up to 1 billion people
throughout the world throughout the
tropics get their food their paychecks
or both from coral reefs so the fact
that we’re losing them is kind of a big
problem right coral reefs are created by
these fishy colorful looking rocks that
are actually an animal living with algae
and as they photosynthesize they lay
down layer after layer after layer of
skeleton make forming those rocks that
you can see in these videos and those
rocks provide habitat for one of the
most biodiverse ecosystems on the
planet as diverse as any rainforest
you’ve ever seen and more importantly
perhaps these provide habitat space for
some really tasty things things like
grouper snapper lobster and crabs
so as these ecosystems are dying it’s
really important especially in an island
like this where you can look around this
room and see people who make their
living off of these things it’s really
important that we find ways to just
study them and try to help protect them
now in the territory since about 2001
we’ve been undertaking the Virgin
Islands territorial coral reef
monitoring program part of the it’s a
organ that are it’s part of the national
oceanographic administration
administered through UVI once a year we
go to each of these thirty three red
dots which each represent a coral reef
and we measure the amount of coral
that’s there the health of the coral and
the fish that are living in those
ecosystems so a couple of things you can
notice from this st. Thomas and st. John
are in the north st. Croix is in the
south there is that sort of black hole
in there in between the islands that’s
called the N I got a passage that area
is actually over two miles deep and so
it means that the reefs in st. Croix are
a little bit different than the reefs up
here in st. Thomas and st. John so for
tonight I’m just gonna focus up here in
the northern islands everything I’m
about to say does apply in some way or
another to st. Croix but just keep to
keep things simple without having to
explain all the different environments
I’ll just focus up here so there are 19
red dots on this screen they each
represent a specific reef that we study
and what you can tell first of all is
that they’re all distributed everywhere
right we have some on the north side of
st. Thomas we have some close to shore
then there are a handful of them that
are way offshore of a South drop so all
these reefs are created equal and we
selected them to try and get a good
coverage and a good example
representative sample of everything of
all the reefs in the Virgin Islands so
you saw all those headlines right that’s
the big world well what’s happening here
this is the only graph I’m going to show
you tonight they promise so in 2003 when
the program really got going coral cover
was up around 26 27 percent on average
if you’ve been here since then you
remember that in 2005 and 2006 we had a
really really hot summer temperature is
what kills coral they can’t move and if
they get above a certain temperature
they get stressed out they get sick they
die so during that year we actually lost
40% of the coral in the northern Virgin
Islands st. Thomas and st. John but
again this is 19 reefs right and we show
I showed you that they were all in
different places some of them are
different depths some of them are close
to shore or far from shore and so this
average line is actually kind of hiding
something really interesting so what I’m
gonna do is just draw a line at a
hundred feet okay and the first line I’m
gonna add to this is all the reefs
shallower than 100 feet these are the
reefs that you can scuba dive on if
you’re a recreational diver they’re the
reefs that you snorkel on when you go
from shore they’ve been hitting much
harder than the rest of the reefs these
are 14 of those 19 reefs in the northern
b.i they started out lower in 2003 down
around 22 23 percent and they wound up
losing 60 percent of their coral versus
the 40 for the average so what about
those other 5 sites these reefs below
100 feet are called Mesa photic or
Twilight Zone reefs and this is really
the whole purpose of why I’m up here
tonight they look like this so not only
did they start up at 36 37% coral back
in 2003 they did lose a little bit in
2005 about 15% drop but even today
they’re up at 29% so those five reef
systems are still doing better than the
average reef was in 2003 so it’s a
pretty cool story now why is that so
these deep reefs they they’re below 100
feet and they’re generally far from
shore so it means they get less
pollution their damage less by human
activities like anchoring and things
like that but most importantly they have
an average temperature that’s about two
degrees cooler than all those shallow
reefs so when you go beyond the depth of
recreational scuba diving you wind up
with reefs that are just a little bit
more buffered from those hot summers
that can kill all this coral and so what
we found is that these these reefs out
here they’re huge they’re thriving and
they’re supporting endangered species
and
of tasty things for our islands so we
come back to this graphic now I’ve
changed a little bit the land is still
colored black but what I’ve done is the
colorful area outside of that land is
now only between one and 300 feet and
you can still see the 19 sites for the
territorial monitoring program up here
now you see those ones on the south drop
those are those really good ones but
with five reef sites we sort of we
wanted to ask the question well what is
this huge space around us what’s the
potential for these reefs out here
I mean it’s 435 square square miles so
studying that is a little difficult for
little old UVI with a handful of
professors a handful of staff and a
handful of graduate students so when I
moved here five years ago we set out to
develop a method that would allow us to
sample these reefs in a way that we
could manage and what we rested on was a
set of GoPros and really deep water
housings that would take pictures for us
the nice thing about this is when we
dived a 220 feet you have to spend hour
you spend over an hour getting out of
the water it’s dangerous and so using
this system allows us to check out reefs
before we go dive then you said that to
take pictures every 10 seconds throw it
into the water get a good one and lay
points over it
the ratio of coral points to the total
tells you how much corals at that site
it’s pretty simple we reduce the cost of
sampling a reef by 95 percent we’ve also
made our world a lot safer so we’re back
to this one right we’ve been talking
about these five breeders yeah these
five debriefs these 19 total reefs that
we’ve been monitoring up here since 2012
we’ve used that system that camera
system to sample four hundred and
sixteen reefs across the northern part
of the territory to do that diving would
have taken many many more days probably
tenfold the number of days that we put
into this work what’s even cooler about
this is that 85% of those pink dots 85%
of those drops had some kind of coral in
them that doesn’t mean they all look
like that last one that I showed you but
many of them do especially in this area
so if you know anything about the South
drop you know that we have two protected
reef areas out here in
purple box based on our data and a very
conservative estimate we believe there
are more than 200 million living coral
colonies right now in 2017 when all you
read are those headlines about reefs
dying it’s amazing these reefs are a
jewel of the Caribbean it’s one of the
only places out here where things are
still holding on and thriving it’s
pretty cool now I want to tell you a
tale a bit of a precautionary tale about
why we need to study these reefs and why
we need to do it quickly I’m gonna tell
you about Ginsburg’s fringe
it’s a reef on the last drop into the
Anegada Passage just south of the
Grammatik Bank closure it’s in 220 feet
of water to get down there and spend 20
minutes it takes us 70 minutes to
decompress on our rebreathers not only
that sometimes some big things come to
say hello but what’s amazing about
Ginsburg’s fringe is we really
discovered this reef started
understanding it in 2008 and we only put
it into the monitoring program in 2011
back then it had 44% coral cover higher
than just about any other known reef
that we’ve studied in the territory but
this reef sits just outside the
Grammatik Bank closure because when that
closure was made
nobody knew this existed so harmonic
Bank is a no fishing no anchoring zone
that’s a really well protected and
beautiful reef that’s part of that
really healthy system I showed you the
problem is this area not being protected
we’re starting to see these anchors
people are fully legally and but perhaps
without knowing throwing their anchors
onto this reef so they can fish outside
of the closed area and it’s looking like
this now since 2011 Ginsburg’s fringe is
dropped from 44% cover to 22 it’s lost
half of its coral not because of climate
change not because of illegal fishing or
illegal anything but because of
ignorance because we don’t know these
reefs exist and so the reason that this
is so important to me is because if we
don’t look for these things if we don’t
find them understand them and protect
them we’re gonna be losing reefs we
don’t even know we have
so that’s a bit of a bummer I know but
we still have 200 million coral colonies
in that space so it’s still alright
we’re doing really well
and like I said we’re one of the only
areas in the Eastern Caribbean that has
marine protected areas on these reefs so
all around it’s a really positive story
so we got us thinking we had gone from
these five deep reefs that were really
incredible
we’d expand it out to the northern VI
and understood hey there’s a lot of hope
here there’s a lot of stuff going on
that we don’t understand that aren’t
described and aren’t studied what does
that mean elsewhere so we went from home
and we went into the neighborhood so
this is something I’m working on daily
this is a map of Musa footik reef
potential in the Eastern Caribbean I
know that Barbados Trinidad and Tobago
should be on this map I didn’t forget
them I just they aren’t ready yet I’m
still working on it but what you can see
here I’ve left the colorful map we were
looking at first seeing Thomas and st.
John up there and all the other colorful
areas are shelfs like ours that could
have coral reefs like ours so for
instance we know ceiba if you know that
island that area is full of coral like
ours but there are all these other
systems like the Anguilla Saint Maarten
st. Barts shelf the Antigua of our
beauty shelf Saint Vincent and
Grenadines and Grenada shelf that have
huge potential areas for these coral
reefs where corals could be clinging to
life in this changing ocean of ours the
thing is nobody’s looked at it if just
5% of the space that I’m showing you
right now looks like our reefs that’s 2
million acres of healthy living coral
reef that’s not known not talked about
not protected so there’s work in that
but there’s also a lot of hope and
that’s what I get to work on every day
so when people ask me that question how
can you do what you do when everything
you love is dying I don’t sugarcoat it
I tell them yeah we’ve lost more coral
in my lifetime than the past ten
lifetimes but we haven’t even looked at
half of the seafloor that could have
coral reefs on it and where we have here
in the VI
the coral reefs are unlike anything else
that you can see diving snorkeling
recreationally and they’re still doing
really well
and for me that’s hope for me that’s a
chance for the future so it’s about this
time in the conference in the
conversation that people asked me their
final question what can I do how can I
help and what I tell them is you have to
take stock of every part of your life be
mindful of the way that your choices the
things you consume the waste you produce
how that affects the world around you
and that that goes for anybody living
here on an island surrounded by reefs in
the ocean or if you live up in the
States in the middle of the country your
choices matter where you throw your
anchor what food you eat what ways do
you produce think on those things and
you might help help out thank you very
much
[Applause]
people find out that I study coral reefs
and technical dives for a living they
always have a lot of questions usually
it starts something along the lines of
oh my god
sharks and then we go somewhere else
from there nowadays inevitably
we wind up going pretty much the same
place with everybody some people ask it
gently they tiptoe around the issue
other times they’re a little more blunt
but inevitably we wind up with something
along the lines of how can you do what
you do when everything you love is dying
it’s kind of a brutal question it’s not
really what I thought I’d be dealing
with when I was four years old
snorkeling with my grandfather and
decided this was going to be my life but
it’s really not hard to understand how
people get their 5 minutes on Google got
me these so pessimism
apathy a general avoidance of these
issues is all sort of understandable if
this is what you’re reading now the
thing is we have lost a lot of coral
reefs but this isn’t the whole story
tonight I’m not going to tell you that
we’ve found a silver bullet to fix the
problem or that we won’t lose more coral
in the future but what I am going to
tell you is a small part of this story
that that almost no one ever gets to
hear one that’s a little bit more
positive than the rest and one that I
get to work on every day by the end of
this you’ll know my answer to that first
question and just maybe you’ll have a
little bit of hope for the future of
coral reefs so to start off what is a
coral reef and why should you care in a
nutshell
reefs are food on our tables and roofs
over our heads the World Wildlife Fund
estimates that up to 1 billion people
throughout the world throughout the
tropics get their food their paychecks
or both from coral reefs so the fact
that we’re losing them is kind of a big
problem right coral reefs are created by
these fishy colorful looking rocks that
are actually an animal living with algae
and as they photosynthesize they lay
down layer after layer after layer of
skeleton make forming those rocks that
you can see in these videos and those
rocks provide habitat for one of the
most biodiverse ecosystems on the
planet as diverse as any rainforest
you’ve ever seen and more importantly
perhaps these provide habitat space for
some really tasty things things like
grouper snapper lobster and crabs
so as these ecosystems are dying it’s
really important especially in an island
like this where you can look around this
room and see people who make their
living off of these things it’s really
important that we find ways to just
study them and try to help protect them
now in the territory since about 2001
we’ve been undertaking the Virgin
Islands territorial coral reef
monitoring program part of the it’s a
organ that are it’s part of the national
oceanographic administration
administered through UVI once a year we
go to each of these thirty three red
dots which each represent a coral reef
and we measure the amount of coral
that’s there the health of the coral and
the fish that are living in those
ecosystems so a couple of things you can
notice from this st. Thomas and st. John
are in the north st. Croix is in the
south there is that sort of black hole
in there in between the islands that’s
called the N I got a passage that area
is actually over two miles deep and so
it means that the reefs in st. Croix are
a little bit different than the reefs up
here in st. Thomas and st. John so for
tonight I’m just gonna focus up here in
the northern islands everything I’m
about to say does apply in some way or
another to st. Croix but just keep to
keep things simple without having to
explain all the different environments
I’ll just focus up here so there are 19
red dots on this screen they each
represent a specific reef that we study
and what you can tell first of all is
that they’re all distributed everywhere
right we have some on the north side of
st. Thomas we have some close to shore
then there are a handful of them that
are way offshore of a South drop so all
these reefs are created equal and we
selected them to try and get a good
coverage and a good example
representative sample of everything of
all the reefs in the Virgin Islands so
you saw all those headlines right that’s
the big world well what’s happening here
this is the only graph I’m going to show
you tonight they promise so in 2003 when
the program really got going coral cover
was up around 26 27 percent on average
if you’ve been here since then you
remember that in 2005 and 2006 we had a
really really hot summer temperature is
what kills coral they can’t move and if
they get above a certain temperature
they get stressed out they get sick they
die so during that year we actually lost
40% of the coral in the northern Virgin
Islands st. Thomas and st. John but
again this is 19 reefs right and we show
I showed you that they were all in
different places some of them are
different depths some of them are close
to shore or far from shore and so this
average line is actually kind of hiding
something really interesting so what I’m
gonna do is just draw a line at a
hundred feet okay and the first line I’m
gonna add to this is all the reefs
shallower than 100 feet these are the
reefs that you can scuba dive on if
you’re a recreational diver they’re the
reefs that you snorkel on when you go
from shore they’ve been hitting much
harder than the rest of the reefs these
are 14 of those 19 reefs in the northern
b.i they started out lower in 2003 down
around 22 23 percent and they wound up
losing 60 percent of their coral versus
the 40 for the average so what about
those other 5 sites these reefs below
100 feet are called Mesa photic or
Twilight Zone reefs and this is really
the whole purpose of why I’m up here
tonight they look like this so not only
did they start up at 36 37% coral back
in 2003 they did lose a little bit in
2005 about 15% drop but even today
they’re up at 29% so those five reef
systems are still doing better than the
average reef was in 2003 so it’s a
pretty cool story now why is that so
these deep reefs they they’re below 100
feet and they’re generally far from
shore so it means they get less
pollution their damage less by human
activities like anchoring and things
like that but most importantly they have
an average temperature that’s about two
degrees cooler than all those shallow
reefs so when you go beyond the depth of
recreational scuba diving you wind up
with reefs that are just a little bit
more buffered from those hot summers
that can kill all this coral and so what
we found is that these these reefs out
here they’re huge they’re thriving and
they’re supporting endangered species
and
of tasty things for our islands so we
come back to this graphic now I’ve
changed a little bit the land is still
colored black but what I’ve done is the
colorful area outside of that land is
now only between one and 300 feet and
you can still see the 19 sites for the
territorial monitoring program up here
now you see those ones on the south drop
those are those really good ones but
with five reef sites we sort of we
wanted to ask the question well what is
this huge space around us what’s the
potential for these reefs out here
I mean it’s 435 square square miles so
studying that is a little difficult for
little old UVI with a handful of
professors a handful of staff and a
handful of graduate students so when I
moved here five years ago we set out to
develop a method that would allow us to
sample these reefs in a way that we
could manage and what we rested on was a
set of GoPros and really deep water
housings that would take pictures for us
the nice thing about this is when we
dived a 220 feet you have to spend hour
you spend over an hour getting out of
the water it’s dangerous and so using
this system allows us to check out reefs
before we go dive then you said that to
take pictures every 10 seconds throw it
into the water get a good one and lay
points over it
the ratio of coral points to the total
tells you how much corals at that site
it’s pretty simple we reduce the cost of
sampling a reef by 95 percent we’ve also
made our world a lot safer so we’re back
to this one right we’ve been talking
about these five breeders yeah these
five debriefs these 19 total reefs that
we’ve been monitoring up here since 2012
we’ve used that system that camera
system to sample four hundred and
sixteen reefs across the northern part
of the territory to do that diving would
have taken many many more days probably
tenfold the number of days that we put
into this work what’s even cooler about
this is that 85% of those pink dots 85%
of those drops had some kind of coral in
them that doesn’t mean they all look
like that last one that I showed you but
many of them do especially in this area
so if you know anything about the South
drop you know that we have two protected
reef areas out here in
purple box based on our data and a very
conservative estimate we believe there
are more than 200 million living coral
colonies right now in 2017 when all you
read are those headlines about reefs
dying it’s amazing these reefs are a
jewel of the Caribbean it’s one of the
only places out here where things are
still holding on and thriving it’s
pretty cool now I want to tell you a
tale a bit of a precautionary tale about
why we need to study these reefs and why
we need to do it quickly I’m gonna tell
you about Ginsburg’s fringe
it’s a reef on the last drop into the
Anegada Passage just south of the
Grammatik Bank closure it’s in 220 feet
of water to get down there and spend 20
minutes it takes us 70 minutes to
decompress on our rebreathers not only
that sometimes some big things come to
say hello but what’s amazing about
Ginsburg’s fringe is we really
discovered this reef started
understanding it in 2008 and we only put
it into the monitoring program in 2011
back then it had 44% coral cover higher
than just about any other known reef
that we’ve studied in the territory but
this reef sits just outside the
Grammatik Bank closure because when that
closure was made
nobody knew this existed so harmonic
Bank is a no fishing no anchoring zone
that’s a really well protected and
beautiful reef that’s part of that
really healthy system I showed you the
problem is this area not being protected
we’re starting to see these anchors
people are fully legally and but perhaps
without knowing throwing their anchors
onto this reef so they can fish outside
of the closed area and it’s looking like
this now since 2011 Ginsburg’s fringe is
dropped from 44% cover to 22 it’s lost
half of its coral not because of climate
change not because of illegal fishing or
illegal anything but because of
ignorance because we don’t know these
reefs exist and so the reason that this
is so important to me is because if we
don’t look for these things if we don’t
find them understand them and protect
them we’re gonna be losing reefs we
don’t even know we have
so that’s a bit of a bummer I know but
we still have 200 million coral colonies
in that space so it’s still alright
we’re doing really well
and like I said we’re one of the only
areas in the Eastern Caribbean that has
marine protected areas on these reefs so
all around it’s a really positive story
so we got us thinking we had gone from
these five deep reefs that were really
incredible
we’d expand it out to the northern VI
and understood hey there’s a lot of hope
here there’s a lot of stuff going on
that we don’t understand that aren’t
described and aren’t studied what does
that mean elsewhere so we went from home
and we went into the neighborhood so
this is something I’m working on daily
this is a map of Musa footik reef
potential in the Eastern Caribbean I
know that Barbados Trinidad and Tobago
should be on this map I didn’t forget
them I just they aren’t ready yet I’m
still working on it but what you can see
here I’ve left the colorful map we were
looking at first seeing Thomas and st.
John up there and all the other colorful
areas are shelfs like ours that could
have coral reefs like ours so for
instance we know ceiba if you know that
island that area is full of coral like
ours but there are all these other
systems like the Anguilla Saint Maarten
st. Barts shelf the Antigua of our
beauty shelf Saint Vincent and
Grenadines and Grenada shelf that have
huge potential areas for these coral
reefs where corals could be clinging to
life in this changing ocean of ours the
thing is nobody’s looked at it if just
5% of the space that I’m showing you
right now looks like our reefs that’s 2
million acres of healthy living coral
reef that’s not known not talked about
not protected so there’s work in that
but there’s also a lot of hope and
that’s what I get to work on every day
so when people ask me that question how
can you do what you do when everything
you love is dying I don’t sugarcoat it
I tell them yeah we’ve lost more coral
in my lifetime than the past ten
lifetimes but we haven’t even looked at
half of the seafloor that could have
coral reefs on it and where we have here
in the VI
the coral reefs are unlike anything else
that you can see diving snorkeling
recreationally and they’re still doing
really well
and for me that’s hope for me that’s a
chance for the future so it’s about this
time in the conference in the
conversation that people asked me their
final question what can I do how can I
help and what I tell them is you have to
take stock of every part of your life be
mindful of the way that your choices the
things you consume the waste you produce
how that affects the world around you
and that that goes for anybody living
here on an island surrounded by reefs in
the ocean or if you live up in the
States in the middle of the country your
choices matter where you throw your
anchor what food you eat what ways do
you produce think on those things and
you might help help out thank you very
much
[Applause]
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