It was about 10 years ago that Candice Jwaszko fell in love with reefs.
She was scuba diving in Mexico, she recalls, and visiting her first coral reef. All was silent, save for her breathing.
All around her was a forest of coral — a strange, rainbow-coloured world full of alien geometries. There were things like giant, flat, pink, cream and red flowers; flows of what looked like yellow, once-bubbling, now hardened lava; and purple horns that jutted out like the branches of a crystalline tree, reaching up towards the light.
Stingrays soared through the water alongside rainbows of tropical fish. Crabs and lobsters scuttled below. "It's like a glimpse into another world."
And it was a world in trouble. Many of the corals she saw were grey and dead, their centuries-old skeletons slowly crumbling beneath the waves.
And when she went diving in French Polynesia last month, what she saw was much the same: not the rainbow-coloured wonderland of a Disney film, but a vast plain of white, grey and death. "It's not like Finding Nemo."
Last month, Jwaszko, a teacher at Paul Kane High School in St. Albert, was in French Polynesia as part of the Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition — a five-year mission that is taking researchers around the world to figure out why coral reefs are disappearing.
Andrew Bruckner is the chief scientist on the expedition, and worked closely with Jwaszko. "Coral reefs around the world are declining at an accelerated rate," he says, with some researchers predicting their complete destruction within 50 years.
Research is just part of the solution to this crisis, he says. "You need to get the message out." As part of the Coral Reef Educator on the Water (CREW) program, he and his team are taking teachers on their expedition so they can help the world understand the state of coral reefs.
Jwaszko was the second teacher and the first Canadian to join the CREW program.
Flying into Raiatea Island near Tahiti — a place of white sand, palm trees and crystal blue waters — on Oct. 1, Jwaszko says she took a small boat to the ship that would be her home for the next 13 days: the Golden Shadow, a 67-metre yacht equipped with 50 scientists, 20 crew members, several boats and an airplane. "It was like a little city."
The crew put her to work as soon as she arrived. "I had lunch and I was diving that afternoon." She and the researchers would do three-hour-long dives a day, counting corals, filming fish, collecting core samples and more. "They were busy."
Jwaszko's job was to act as an extra pair of hands in the water, hauling heavy air tanks and scientific equipment. It was exhausting work that got her sunburnt, seasick and stung by jellyfish, she says.
Still, she says it was amazing to work with real reef researchers. "It was really awesome to see all those passionate people."
A coral reef is a mass of tiny animals called polyps, says Bruckner, each no bigger than your small fingernail — "basically a mouth that's surrounded by tentacles with a big stomach."
These polyps exist symbiotically with algae in their bodies, Jwaszko says, which produce food for them during the day. At night, when the water fills with plankton, the polyps extrude their tentacles and gobble everything within reach.
Polyps form a calcium carbonate skeleton around themselves that produce the strange shapes we know as coral. Get enough polyps together, and you get a reef.
The polyps keep building new skeletons on top of the old ones as they reproduce, Jwaszko says, creating a lattice that grows at about 10 centimetres a year. "Some of them are thousands of years old." Algae grow on the skeletons, giving them their wild colours and attracting fish and other creatures. "It's kind of like a tropical rainforest."
Although much of the reef she explored looked grey and dead, Jwaszko says, there were patches of purple, pink, yellow and red, too. Some of the corals resembled clusters of long, beige dimpled thimbles, while others were like the flabby folds of a human brain. Others looked like slimes, bracket fungi, calcified pines or cantelopes.
There was life everywhere. Moray eels and box-shaped boxfish swam about, while clownfish cowered in flowing anemones. Other divers spotted giant blue-lipped clams, crimson-spotted sea cucumbers, sea turtles and a humpback whale.
It was a beautiful place, Jwaszko says, and it needed help.
Paradise in peril
Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, Bruckner says, providing food and shelter for countless creatures. Millions of people depend on them for food, building material, and storm protection, while others rely on them for pets, tourism and life-saving medicines, such as the anti-HIV drug AZT.
Most research suggests that coral reefs are in serious trouble. About a quarter of the world's reefs are considered damaged beyond repair, according to the World Wildlife Fund, with another two thirds under serious threat.
There are many reasons for this decline, Bruckner says – dynamite fishing, pollution and sedimentation, to name a few – but the big one is climate change.
According to the Global Carbon Project (an international scientific group that tracks greenhouse gas emissions), just 45 per cent of the carbon dioxide we emit by burning fossil fuels actually stays in the air to warm the Earth – the rest is sucked up by the land and the ocean, the latter of which takes in about 26 per cent of our emissions.
Since CO2 and H20 combine to form carbonic acid, Bruckner explains, this absorption is making the oceans more acidic. "If it becomes too acidic, the coral can't deposit a skeleton," he notes, and no skeleton means no coral reef.
The oceans are also getting hotter. Coral reefs live within a very narrow temperature range, Bruckner says. If the ocean gets too hot, the algae in the reefs becomes toxic to the coral polyps, so they spit them out, die, and turn white. These mass "bleaching" events are becoming increasingly common, he notes.
A study published this September in Nature Climate Change found that 98 per cent of the world's reefs would be subject to lasting damage from bleaching if the world warms by two degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. The world has already warmed by about 0.76 degrees, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is set to warm an additional one to six more this century based on current emission trends.
Corals have survived hotter, more acidic waters before, Bruckner says, but not within human history. "If we can tease out which of these human impacts are the most egregious to the reef, by removing those, we think coral reefs may be able to adapt to climate change."
There's been a surge in the creation of protected areas for corals in the last five years, Bruckner says, as well as many steps to reduce ocean pollution and destructive fishing practices. "By applying these things, we are on the way to saving coral reefs." But we'll need to reduce our emissions and address climate change to finish the job.
Jwaszko returned to Alberta on Oct. 13, having spent almost all of her trip on or in the ocean, exploring the reef. She's now taking her experiences and turning them into lessons others can use to learn about coral reefs.
Scientists and teachers need to team up to make people aware of these threats to coral reefs, Jwaszko says. "They say in 30 to 40 years, up to 40 per cent of the reefs will be gone. This world I fell in love with won't even exist."
