The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (32 page)

Alfred also found his patron’s views on marine biology exasperatingly old-fashioned. True, he himself respected taxonomy and was proud to have contributed toward the systematics of medusae, but he disagreed strongly with Agassiz that it should be the zoologist’s only function. Trained in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, Alfred shared the view of a new breed of young American scientists that these three disciplines should become part of biology’s experimental repertoire. He was also powerfully drawn to the emerging science of “ecology,” which dealt with the way living things interacted with one another and with the environment. Charles B. Davenport, Alfred’s zoology professor at Harvard, had taught him that biology’s new mission was “to consider individuals, in mass or as species, as form-units bearing the imprint of environment and adapted thereto and as constituents of faunas.”
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Alfred was unusual, too, in linking ecology to the cause of environmental conservation. This idea, so pervasive today, was still relatively rare in the 1890s. Marine scientists at that time tended to think the new discipline’s greatest use lay in enhancing the exploitation of marine resources. While still a PhD student, Alfred had been shocked at how quickly pollution forced the closure of Agassiz’s Newport laboratory. For the same reason he would later campaign in the
National Geographic
magazine against “the wanton destruction of interesting animal life” and “the impending ruin of the forests” in the once pristine environments of Florida. Alex Agassiz might have shared such concerns privately, but he disliked the science of ecology, particularly since its formal originator was Ernst Haeckel, the “blackguard” he wanted to horsewhip for slandering his father.
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With the dawn of the new century, young Alfred Mayor exulted in at last managing to break free of Agassiz’s shackles. He and Harriet were married in August 1900, after four years of delay. Soon after, Alfred took a position as curator of natural history at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

But he continued to nurse a larger ambition. He’d earlier done some fieldwork at Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas, part of a cluster of tropical islands off Key West, Florida. As in the Barrier Reef region, he’d been exhilarated by the key’s fantasia of underwater corals: “I sail for hours … over the rippling waters,” he enthused to Harriet, “and look far down into the recesses of the coral caverns where the cool deep shadows invite one to plunge beneath our prosaic world into the brilliant enchanted one below.” Convinced that the Dry Tortugas would be a perfect spot to establish a research center for tropical marine science, he began lobbying senior figures at the Carnegie Institution of Washington to open a laboratory there.
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In January 1904, thanks largely to support from influential patrons, including the supposedly hostile Alex Agassiz, Alfred Mayor found himself director of the Carnegie Institution’s new department of marine biology at Loggerhead Key, the first tropical laboratory in the Western Hemisphere. Along with a substantial salary, he was given a beautiful sixty-foot yacht for marine work within the Dry Tortugas, and generous funds to build the facility.
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At thirty-six Alfred Mayor could hardly have imagined a more perfect fulfillment of his scientific ambitions, yet he still hoped to lead the Harvard Museum, particularly after “Little Billy” Woodworth had indeed proved a flop and was demoted from the position of assistant-in-charge in 1906. When Alfred’s subsequent application for the same position failed, he angrily blamed what he described as Agassiz’s “insanely jealous” attitude. At the International Zoological Congress in Boston the following year, Mayor was still furious at the knockback, claiming that Alex was as “mad as a lobster,” having made “a purile [sic] attack on modern zoology” in his presidential speech.
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Alfred, always blind to Alex’s past kindnesses, was determined that his laboratory at Loggerhead Key would focus primarily on those modern elements of zoology and marine biology that Alex had supposedly disparaged. He defined the laboratory’s mission as including “intensive studies … in the fields of physiology, ecology, heredity, evolution, animal psychology, variation, the geology and growth of coral reefs, the bacterial precipitation of limestone in tropical seas, the chemical constitution of sea water … the coloration of reef fishes in relation to environmental influences and natural selection … and the ecology and physiology of plants of the region.”
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He also itched to expose his former boss as a scientific dinosaur. In 1907 he’d read a paper by a rising coral biologist, Thomas Wayland Vaughan, that attacked one of Alex’s reef papers. Alfred had been delighted, crowing to Harriet that the brilliant Vaughan thought Agassiz’s work “not worth the powder required to blow it to H——!” Alfred therefore decided to entice Vaughan to bring his innovative work on coral biology to the Loggerhead Key laboratory. After persuading the prickly and temperamental Vaughan to work there as a visiting fellow in 1909, Mayor triumphantly secured agreement from the Carnegie Institution to fund their proposed new projects. Alex’s work would be first in the firing line.
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A few months later, however, on March 26, 1910, Alex Agassiz died in his sleep while returning by sea from Britain to the United States. His old friend Sir John Murray was saddened to hear that nobody could find the manuscript for Alex’s long-promised book rebutting Darwin’s theory of coral reefs. Alfred was secretly delighted at the news of the missing manuscript, but resisted gloating in a long survey of Alex’s life and work for
Popular Science Monthly
. Here he adopted a magisterial tone, praising Alex as “my master in science, and the greatest patron of zoology our country has known,” though he couldn’t resist sniping at Alex’s Bismarckian personality and antiquated belief that physiology and laboratory experiments were “beyond the scope of zoology.”
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Agassiz’s death did not put an end to Alfred’s resentment. When Harriet was diagnosed the following year with pulmonary tuberculosis, having suffered it throughout their delayed marriage, Alex made Agassiz the scapegoat, implying without foundation that the man’s obsessive reef campaign against Darwin had kept Alfred from his sick wife’s side. Within a few months of Harriet entering a sanatorium, Alfred Mayor decided to launch a crusade of his own, to prove that Agassiz and Murray had been wrong about coral reefs.

In 1911 Alfred unveiled an ambitious new project to the trustees of the Carnegie Institution. If their Loggerhead Key laboratory was to achieve its true potential, he argued, it had to undertake a major global mission. Its research needed to be tested on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the greatest coral constellation in the world. Impressed, the trustees agreed. Even the looming likelihood of war with Germany and the setback of having Vaughan pull out at the last minute didn’t check Alfred’s determination to mount the expedition. He persuaded Vaughan to draw up a detailed experimental program for him and he recruited able support: three other American marine biologists and the British coral scientist Frank A. Potts, from Trinity College, Cambridge.

When they eventually disembarked at Thursday Island on September 10, 1913, Mayor and his colleagues were chagrined to discover that currents had swamped the local reefs in mud and silt. Only a scattering of larger corals had been able to “raise their heads and thrive.” Determined to “die rather than fail on this expedition,” Alfred took advice from Australian reef biologist Charles Hedley to transfer the project to the purer waters and extensive fringing reefs of Mer Island, in the Murray group, close to the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef.

In order to sail there through the intervening maze of reefs, Alfred was forced to track down an elusive Islander captain, whose “weather-beaten face bore many a scar, and one eye seemed to have seen better days, but more perfect discipline one never saw maintained upon a schooner.” Before leaving Thursday Island, the scientists were pleased to locate some of the specific corals at Vivien Reef that William Saville-Kent had photographed and measured twenty-three years earlier. In the interim, most of the species had grown at the brisk rate of around two inches per year.
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Mer Island was a perfect site for a temporary laboratory. The local teacher-magistrate offered his courthouse and jail for an office and storeroom, and the Islanders proved welcoming, especially when they discovered that Potts was a friend of their famous ethnographer, Alfred Haddon. Geologically, Mer had been created by the bursting of a volcano through the limestone floor of the Barrier Reef plateau. It was a manageable 9,600 feet long and 5,600 feet wide, and hadn’t suffered the hurricane and silt damage that marred many reefs farther south. The island’s reef flats stretched for 2,200 feet on the windward and southeast sides, and were capped by a ridge at the far edge. This created a permanent, shallow tidal basin, 1,600 feet wide, 17 inches deep, and “densely covered with one of the most luxuriant coral growths to be found in the Pacific.”
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On the whole, the Mer reefs didn’t throw much additional light on the larger question of coral reef origins. The living coralline crusts seemed geologically recent, but the character and age of the limestone platform underneath remained uncertain. Only deep core drilling could ascertain whether Darwin or Agassiz was correct on that score. However, Mayor believed he could see confirmatory signs at Mer of an exciting theory recently expounded by a young Harvard professor, Reginald Daly.

Daly argued that previous ice ages had cooled the oceans to below the survival point of reef corals, and had simultaneously dropped the sea level in tropical regions to 120 feet below the present surface, which then also exposed the reefs to wave erosion. When the glaciers later melted and the waters rose again, corals had resumed growing along the outer edges of the platforms. In short, barrier reefs and atolls had been shaped primarily by the climate-induced rise and fall of ocean levels.
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It was an ingenious and important idea, and one that even Darwin had missed. Ironically it was also one that Alex Agassiz would probably have welcomed. The theory that geological environments were shaped globally during ice ages had originated with his father, who’d specifically addressed glacial sculpting. Daly had simply adapted Louis Agassiz’s idea to the aquatic world of reefs.

The acrimonious debate over reef origins, then, turned out to be the least important aspect of Alfred’s expedition. More important, as he later boasted to Harriet, was the fact that he’d undertaken the first-ever quantitative ecological study of a coral reef by performing systematic grid counts of coral distributions, as well as extensive tests of their temperature and silt tolerances.

To his surprise, Pacific corals proved no more tolerant of increased water temperatures than did their Atlantic counterparts. In this respect, natural selection seemed not to have improved their adaptability. Among tropical corals there was also considerable variability. Close to shore, the very warm waters killed all species of Mer corals. Within the cooler mid-zone area of the Reef, species like
Seriatopora hystrix
outcompeted all others. Yet these in turn were unable to survive within the agitated waters and pounding breakers at the reef’s edge, where several rival species managed perfectly well.
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Alfred Mayor also made the discovery that water temperature was a prime factor—even more important than the smothering effects of silt—in determining the survival of most coral species. At the same time, “those forms which are sensitive to high temperature are correspondingly affected by being smothered under mud, or subjected to the influence of CO
2
.”
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Like all coral scientists, Mayor didn’t yet understand why sharp changes of temperature could prove so lethal to corals, though he did note the crucial related point “that corals might be nourished in some measure by their commensal plant cells.” Neither did he nor any other scientist in the world yet realize the extent to which reef-growing corals were fed and powered by what Alfred thought to be an “algal infection” of some sort in their tissues. This mystery—as we shall see—was to be investigated by a Cambridge scientist, Charles Maurice Yonge, on a later expedition to the Great Barrier Reef, at which time he would praise Alfred’s Mer expedition as “the starting point in the modern study of living hermatypic [or reef-building] corals.”
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After returning to America, Alfred Mayor continued his pioneering ecological experiments on two Samoan expeditions in 1919 and 1920, where he also initiated what was possibly the first scientific study of reef corals using diving apparatus—a cumbersome, eighty-pound brass “diving hood.” But observing corals more than forty feet underwater exacerbated the tuberculosis that had made a recent appearance in his lungs, at a time when Harriet’s disease was in remission. On June 25, 1922, Alfred Mayor staggered from his laboratory at Loggerhead Key in a tubercular delirium. He was found by colleagues some hours later, lying dead on the edge of the beach, face down in the seawater shallows that he’d come to love so much.
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In the end, Charles Darwin’s theory of coral subsidence was proved substantially correct, although it took a combination of technical advances in drilling and American war-chest money to demonstrate it. During the 1950s, after American scientists had exploded a series of nuclear tests equivalent to seven thousand hydrogen bombs at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. Geological Survey set up two high-powered drills to cut through the atoll reef to investigate its resilience.

Although the deep cores did look like “old marine limestone,” as Alex Agassiz had called it, they proved to contain coral fossils that could only have grown in shallow waters. Eventually, at 4,629 feet, the drillers reached a base of olivine basaltic rock that had been pushed up from the bowels of the planet. They concluded that, in accordance with Darwin’s theory, Enewetak’s coral reefs had begun to grow during the Eocene epoch, and for thirty million years or more had continued to scramble upward on a sinking volcano, thickening as the lava subsided. During that time, as Daly argued, the sea level had fallen and risen with the ice ages, the water temperature changing accordingly. This in turn helped to explain the different appearance of the crust of coralline limestone on the surface, compared with the much older platform beneath it.
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