Читаем The World Without Us полностью

No chance of that happening with all of Kingman’s resident sharks. Parrotfish, whose beak-like incisors evolved to gnaw the most tenacious coral-choking algae, even change sex to maintain their sizzling reproduction rates. The healthy reef keeps its system in balance by providing nooks and crevices in which small fish hide long enough to breed before becoming shark food. As a result of the constant conversion of plant and algae nutrients into short-lived little fish, the long-lived apex predators end up accumulating most of the biomass.

The expedition data would later show that fully 85 percent of the live weight at Kingman Reef was accounted for by sharks, snappers, and other carnivorous company. How many PCBs may have migrated up the food chain and now saturate their tissues is fodder for a future study.

Two days before the expedition’s scientists depart Kingman, they steer their dive boats to the twin crescent islets heaped atop the northern arm of the boomerang-shaped reef. In the shallows, they find a heartening sight: a spectacular community of spiny black, red, and green sea urchins, robust grazers of algae. A 1998 El Nino temperature fluctuation, ratcheted even higher by global warming, knocked out 90 percent of the sea urchins in the Caribbean. Unusually warm water shocked coral polyps into spitting out friendly algal photosynthesizers that live in tight symbiosis with them, trading just the right balance of sugars for ammonia fertilizer the corals excrete back, and also providing their color. Within a month, more than half the Caribbean reefs had turned to bleached coral skeletons, now coated with slime.

Like corals worldwide, the ones at the Kingman islets’ edges also show bleaching scars, but fierce grazing has kept invasive algae at bay, allowing encrusting pink corallines to slowly cement the wounded reef back together. Wading gingerly around all the sea urchin spikes, the researchers climb ashore. Within a few yards, they’re on the windward side of the clamshell rubble, where they get a shock.

From one end to the other, each isle is carpeted with crushed plastic bottles, parts of polystyrene floats, nylon shipping ties, Bic lighters, flip-flops in various states of ultraviolet disintegration, plastic bottle caps of assorted sizes, squeeze-tubes of Japanese hand lotion, and a galaxy of multicolored plastic fragments shattered beyond identity.

The only organic detritus is the skeleton of a red-footed booby, chunks of an old wooden outrigger, and six coconuts. The following day, the scientists return after their final dive and fill dozens of garbage bags. They are under no illusions that they have returned Kingman Reef to the pristine state it was in before humans ever found it. Asian currents will bring more plastic; rising temperatures will bleach more corals—possibly all of them, unless coral and its photosynthetic resident algal partner can evolve new symbiotic agreements quickly.

Even the sharks, they now realize, are evidence of human intervention. Only one that they’ve seen in Kingman all week was a behemoth longer than six feet; the rest are apparently adolescents. Within the past two decades, shark finners must have been here. In Hong Kong, shark fin soup commands up to $100 per bowl. After slicing off their pectoral and dorsal fins, finners throw mutilated sharks, still alive, back into the sea. Rudderless, they sink to the bottom and suffocate. Despite campaigns to ban the delicacy, in less remote waters an estimated 100 million sharks die this way every year. The presence of so many vigorous young ones, at least, gives hope that enough sharks here escaped the blade to revive the population. PCBs or not, they look to be prospering.

“In a year,” observes Enric Sala, watching their spotlit frenzy that night from the rail of the White Holly, “humans take 100 million sharks, while sharks attack maybe 15 people. This is not a fair fight.”

Enric Sala stands on the shore of Palmyra Atoll, waiting for a turbo-prop Gulfstream to land on the airstrip built here the last time the world was officially at war, to take his expedition team back to Honolulu—a threehour flight. From there, they’ll disperse across the globe with their data. When they meet again, it will be electronically, and then in peer-reviewed papers they will coauthor.

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