The World Without Us

^{J. E. MARAGOS, U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE.}

Two dozen scientists aboard the White Holly and their sponsor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, have come to this water-world-without-people to glimpse what a coral reef looked like before human beings appeared on Earth. Without such a baseline, there can be little agreement on what constitutes a healthy reef, let alone on how to help nurse these aquatic equivalents of rain forest diversity back to whatever that might be. Although months of sifting data lie ahead, already these researchers have found evidence that contradicts convention, and seems counterintuitive even to themselves. But there it is, thrashing just off starboard.

Between these sharks and an omnipresent species of 25-pound red snappers equipped with noticeable fangs—one of which sampled a photographer’s ear—it appears that big carnivores account for more total biomass than anything else here. If so, that would mean that at Kingman Reef, the conventional notion of a food pyramid is standing on its pointy head.

^{Two-spot red snapper. Lutjanus bohar, Palmyra Atoll.}

^{J. E. MARAGOS, U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE.}

As ecologist Paul Colinvaux described in a seminal 1978 book, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, most animals feed on creatures smaller and many times more numerous than themselves. Because roughly only 10 percent of the energy they consume converts to body mass, millions of little insects must feast on 10 times their total weight in tiny mites. The bugs themselves are gobbled by a correspondingly smaller number of small birds, which in turn are hunted by far fewer foxes, wildcats, and large raptors.

Even more than by head counts, Colinvaux wrote, the food pyramid’s shape is defined by mass: “All the insects in a woodlot weigh many times as much as all the birds; and all the songbirds, squirrels, and mice combined weigh vastly more than all the foxes, hawks, and owls combined.”

None of the scientists on this August, 2005 expedition, who hail from America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, would dispute those conclusions—on land. Yet the sea may be special. Or perhaps it’s terra firma that is the exception. In a world with or without people, two-thirds of its surface is that mutable one on which the White Holly lightly bobs to pulsations that rock the planet. From the vantage of Kingman Reef, there are no easy contours to define our spaces, because the Pacific has no boundaries. It stretches until it blends into the Indian and the Antarctic, and squeezes through the Bering Strait into the Arctic, all of which in turn mix into the Atlantic. At one time, the Earth’s great sea was the origin of everything that breathes and reproduces. As it goes, so goes everything’s future.

“Slime.”

Jeremy Jackson has to duck to take shade under an awning on the White Holly’s upper deck, where the stern of this former naval cargo hauler has been converted to an invertebrate laboratory. Jackson, a Scripps marine paleoecologist with limbs and ponytail so long he suggests a king crab that short-circuited evolution, springing straight from the sea into human form, had the original idea for this mission. Jackson has spent much of his career in the Caribbean, watching the pressures of fishing and planetary warming flatten the Gruyère-cheese architecture of living coral reefs to bleached marine slag. As corals die and collapse, they and the myriad life-forms that call their crevices home, and everything that eats them, get displaced by something slick and unpleasant. Jackson leans over trays of algae that seaweed expert Jennifer Smith collected in previous stops on the way to Kingman.

“That’s what we get on the slippery slope to slime,” he tells her again. “Plus jellyfish and bacteria—the marine equivalent of rats and roaches.”

Four years earlier, Jeremy Jackson had been invited to Palmyra Atoll, the northernmost of the Line Islands: a tiny Pacific archipelago divided by the equator and split between two nations, Kiribati and the United States. Palmyra had recently been purchased by The Nature Conservancy for coral reef research. During World War II, the U.S. Navy built an air station on Palmyra, opened channels into one lagoon, and dumped enough munitions and 55-gallon diesel drums in another that it was later dubbed Black Lagoon for its resident pool of dioxins. Except for a small U.S. Fish and Wildlife maintenance staff, Palmyra is uninhabited, its abandoned naval buildings half-dissolved into the surf. One semi-submerged boat hull is now a planter box stuffed with coconut palms. Coconut, introduced here, has all but vanquished native pisonia forests, and rats have replaced land crabs as the top predator.