Diving in Bonaire was different from past Caribbean dives in many ways. I don’t think I have made any dives from shore in this part of the world, we have always needed a boat to get to the reefs. Simply walking down a set of stairs into the water and swimming out for a minute or two to the reef edge was quite a revelation. Much of my diving on coral reefs in this part of the world focused on the Florida Keys and to a lesser extent the Bahamas. In both places, you could swim from shore out to what is called a patch reef. These are, as the name suggests, small patches of coral reef that exist surrounded often by sandy areas. Little oases amid a metaphorical desert.
I like swimming in these sandy areas surrounding coral reefs as you often find rays or small fish in burrows that you wouldn’t see on the reef. One of my favorites of these is the garden eel. These are eels, as the name suggests, and they do gather in large numbers often, again as the name suggests, resembling a garden planted in rows. These animals keep their tails in their burrows and flee into them at the approach of a larger fish or diver. The feed on plankton passing through on the currents and you can come across fields of them.
The water surrounding reefs is also a desert – or at least was in times past. Iconic photos of coral reefs show crystal clear water in various shades of my favorite color turquoise. The reason the water is clear, though, is that there is nothing in it! Or at least very little. Corals are carnivores, eating plankton or other creatures that they can catch with their tentacles, but this forms a very small part of their diet, at least in shallow water. The coral polyps which grow together in these amazing colonies have a symbiotic relationship with a type of algae called zooxanthellae. These algae live inside the coral tissue and as plants, gather sunlight and transfer that into energy which it passes on to the corals in exchange for a safe place to live. There is much more symbiosis in the world than we know and that old adage about nature red in tooth and claw was a bit of an exaggeration in some ways. Cooperation is also very important for life to flourish, not just competition.
Zooxanthellae are not just one species, but made up of many types which have small, but important genetic differences. This can include tolerance to heat. Coral seems to be adapting to increases in temperature in some places through the type of zooxanthellae they incorporate into their bodies. While rising temperatures are causing major problems for coral reefs, there has been a long line of impacts over many years. Many of the coral reefs in the Caribbean were gone or declined significantly before recent bleaching events.
Bonaire is seeking to protect its coral reefs through strong management in a marine protected area (MPA). These are, as the name suggests, areas that are marine that are protected 😊 Some MPAs are more protected than others. Maybe we need a new acronym for these – MpAs. Of course, you can only control certain threats in MPAs – the non-human-caused coral disease (as best scientists can tell) that is currently killing off certain species of coral in the Bonaire marine park arrive on the currents and don’t respect park boundaries. Rain runs off the land into the park not respecting park boundaries and bringing with it nutrients which reduce the desert-like water quality that reefs need favoring algae growth. Yet, search on any SCUBA diving online forum for the best places to dive in the Caribbean and Bonaire is often at or near the top of the list. One could think of these protected areas as spatial sabbaths. Rather than protecting them at certain times of the week or year (which is also an important conservation tool), we set aside areas where God’s amazing creatures on coral reefs can flourish in abundance with reduced threats to that flourishing. You only have to dive in one of these well-protected MPAs to know the difference.
