The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (42 page)

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For several decades Charlie pursued this nagging puzzle of the divergences between the same species at different locations. His quest took him to hundreds of reefs in both hemispheres and across the vast Indian and Pacific oceans. He dived and collected in Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and then farther afield, in Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, and at remote Clipperton Atoll in the eastern Pacific, about 750 miles southwest of Mexico. Always he traveled by boat, always he worked with locals, and always he spent hours underwater, observing and memorizing.

The many comparisons he made led to a fresh discovery. When his records of species distribution and diversity were mapped, gathered, and interpreted—material that later became Charlie’s computer database, Coral Geographic—they confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef’s coral diversity, rich though it was, didn’t match that of Indonesia and the Philippines. It was clear that the greatest coral diversity in the world was centered on a roughly triangular area within the Central Indo-Pacific, known ever since as “The Coral Triangle.”
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Charlie Veron exploring coral species variations on Emre Turak Reef in Madagascar
(Courtesy of Charlie Veron)

The more Charlie ventured into these newly discovered regions, the less certain he became about his previous Barrier Reef observations: “My confidence faltered, not because the corals were different, but because most were neither different nor the same.” A trip to the reefs of Vanuatu, which were linked to Australian reefs by ocean currents sweeping through the Coral Sea, only intensified his anguish. When Vanuatu reefs featured species in common with the Barrier Reef, they proved “virtually identical,” yet not actually so. Despairing, Charlie teetered on the edge of giving up his twenty-year struggle to produce a unified taxonomy of coral species. “I can’t publish work on something that’s only half right,” he tortured himself.
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… a well-defined species on the central Great Barrier Reef might be a bit different at Vanuatu or the West Australian coast and be a bit different in other ways in Indonesia. In Fiji it might be a different species altogether but if it turned up in Papua New Guinea it might be seen to be a hybrid. These sorts of patterns recurred in one country after another and did so for most species. The more I worked in different countries, the deeper the problem became. It was an unhappy state of affairs because there was no way through; more work made the problem worse not better. There was no solution.
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One morning Charlie got up around 5:00 a.m. to begin work, and as usual made himself a cup of coffee. As the kettle boiled he had a flash of insight that gave him an answer. There was nothing mystical about this moment of intuition: he’d always believed that humans were “good at subconsciously synthesizing information, and that many ideas simply come of their own volition rather than as the intended outcome of planned research.”

At the same time, Charlie reflected, most humans were not so good at grasping aspects of nature that couldn’t be clearly defined or placed into hierarchies, even though nature’s products were “seldom organized into species at all.” Now he saw that, considered over vast geographical space and long swathes of geological time, coral species were malleable and temporary units, fluidly interlinked by their genes to other units, and forming ever-changing patterns. Corals had to be treated as continua, not as fixed, isolated units.
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If corals did become isolated and unable to interbreed for long periods, Charlie ruminated, then the fittest among them would, as Darwin had argued, be selected to survive and so eventually form a genetically cohesive new species. But the breeding of corals was one of those simple natural processes that produce inordinately complex results. While corals struggle with one another to survive and dominate within a particular area, the spectacular processes of mass spawning by which they breed hurls out gene-carrying larvae into the ocean, to be carried potentially vast distances by the chance actions of currents. Eventually the larvae might settle to grow and breed within a distant coral empire. Here they would, over geological spans of time, intermix to produce new variations, reconnections between former variations, or even “fuzzy” hybrids.

Realizing that in evolutionary terms corals behave a lot like plants, Charlie consulted a colleague at AIMS, who explained how his insight aligned with the concept of “reticulate evolution,” a process that plant geneticists, in particular, consider a convincing alternative explanation of how species change over space and time. The theory of reticulate evolution argues for the formation of a netlike skein of evolutionary threads, determined by environment, rather than the famous branching tree of natural selection sketched by Darwin in the
Origin
. Had Darwin known what modern geneticists know, he might well have agreed, for he was, in Charlie’s words, “a fabulous thinker, just a wonderful, wonderful thinker.” The irony was that Darwin, in his day, acquired a reputation as a heretic for denying the divine fixity of species, and now Charlie was at risk of making himself a heretic by dismantling the taxonomies of species altogether.
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Like his namesake, Charlie knew he would have to do a hellish amount of reading and research to make his controversial case. Beginning in 1992, he navigated a maze of different disciplines, from paleontology, taxonomy, biological oceanography, and ecology to systematics and molecular science. Darwin had been forced to do something similar, but disciplinary boundaries were neither as numerous nor as heavily patrolled in his day. Specialized traditions and terminologies were now often impenetrable to outsiders, an exasperating problem for Charlie because he wanted to simplify them in order to reach a general readership.

Mary Stafford-Smith, a colleague, coral scientist, and gifted editor, gave him vital help. She had no compunction about sending him grumbling back to the writing desk, from which he would usually emerge with a clarified text and an improved humor. The resulting book,
Corals in Space and Time
(1995), was revolutionary by any standard, for it contained the dual discoveries of the “Coral Triangle” and “Reticulate Evolution in the Scleractinia.” The magisterial journal
Science
devoted a full article to its contents, and Charlie was in 2004 awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal by the International Society for Reef Studies.
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Yet even now Charlie feels that the full acceptance of reticulate evolution within the scientific world has been slow. More than a decade on, young marine scholars refer to it as “the final frontier,” rather than a proven approach for understanding the evolution of corals. The high degree of difficulty of working with genetic continua and the challenge this poses to some versions of natural selection make for strong forces of resistance.
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*   *   *

Charlie was conscious that the seeds of a different and graver problem also shadowed
Corals in Space and Time
. His realization of this new conundrum had personal as well as intellectual roots. In the midst of his long, testing labors on coral evolution, a family tragedy drove him to think intently about mortality and survival. Just as Charles Darwin, struggling to finalize his theory of evolution, had been shaken by emotional loss, illness, and domestic strain, so it was with Charlie Veron.

Charlie’s tropical equivalent of Down House—Darwin’s residence in the peaceful hamlet of Downe—was Rivendell, named after the elves’ abode in Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
: “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling, or just sitting and thinking best.” Charlie’s Rivendell was situated on a five-acre bush block with tree-edged river frontage, twenty minutes’ drive from Townsville. He and Kirsty had bought the place in 1976, and their effervescent little daughter, Noni, had hammered a stake into the ground thirty-two feet from the riverbank to mark the house’s future entrance. It was an ideal environment for a free-spirited, dreamy, nature-loving child like Noni. Charlie built her a tree house in the branches of a large eucalyptus that overhung the river. They called it Gum Leaf, and Noni, at the age of six, resolutely insisted on sleeping there alone on the first night. For her, Rivendell’s relative isolation was compensated for by the pleasures of books, dogs, horses, a piano, and, after 1978, a little sister, Katie.
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Yet much of Charlie and Kirsty’s domestic life had proved grindingly tough, just like it had been for the Darwins. Among other problems, Katie’s infancy was haunted by acute respiratory and feeding problems. For eight months, as her life guttered, she had to be watched continuously. For six of those months Charlie and Kirsty slept only on alternate nights. Inevitably, Noni felt the brunt of her parents’ distraction and exhaustion, and began to show bursts of discontent at home and school. Yet “always [she] would respond to reason and always she would accept what was just.”
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But nature knows nothing of justice. In April 1980 Charlie was working in Hong Kong when he received a phone call from Kirsty to say that Noni had drowned while playing in a creek with a friend. A light went out in Charlie’s life. Somehow he got himself back to Townsville the next morning to see Noni lying in her coffin. “I kissed her face, it was frozen. This is the worst memory of my life.” She was cremated on her tenth birthday.
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One hundred and twenty-nine years earlier, almost to the day, Charles and Emma Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie also died. Desperate to keep her with him, Darwin wrote: “Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running downstairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving.” With tears streaming down his face, he concluded his short memoir of Annie in utter desolation: “We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.”
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Similarly stricken, Charlie Veron survived in a haze of sleeping pills, and Rivendell became a refuge for memories. He was frantic to keep those memories alive: “I was always talking to Noni, even when I was actually talking to someone else.” Over time, though, these vivid conversations grew muffled and Noni’s voice began to fade. For Charlie, this was “almost a second dying.” As always in his life, he found consolation in the redemptive energies of nature. The spot where Noni had kept her ducks and geese became a memory garden filled with plants and trees donated by friends. In it was one special tree: “at the edge of the garden is a tall umbrella tree, the last present that Noni ever gave to me. It was for my birthday, and was decorated with coins stuck to the leaves with sticky tape to show me that ‘money grows on trees.’”
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Weighed down by “such unrelentingly bad times,” life for Charlie and his wife dragged, and although they remained close and supportive of each other, they eventually agreed to divorce. “I think the death of a child is the biggest thing someone can live through, it takes away almost everything,” Charlie later told a friend. And it is surely true, too, that when you have faced the death of someone inconsolably dear, nothing else can defeat you. Charlie survived this dark night of the soul thanks to Rivendell, the solace of diving on the Reef, and his much loved dogs. Sometimes he simply took the phone off the hook and lived the life of a recluse and an automaton. Looking back, he sees himself then as “a cot case.”
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He was redeemed by the chance of a second romance, with Mary Stafford-Smith, the scientist who edited
Corals in Space and Time
. Mary was working on Lizard and Orpheus islands, on the effects of sediment on corals, and became the companion of his heart as well as his mind. She left behind her birth family in England to revitalize Charlie and Rivendell with her own energies and values. As well as being a stepmother to Katie, she and Charlie started a new family. Two young children brought life, laughter, and love back to the house on the river.

Charlie’s intense personal reminder of the contingencies and fragilities of life found echoes in his research. Writing
Corals in Space and Time
, he was forced to investigate the fate of the world’s corals in the past and present. He studied paleontological analyses of previous reef extinctions and accrued more and more evidence of the effects, on the Great Barrier Reef in particular, of changing sea levels, temperature stresses, predation by crown-of-thorns starfish, and human-influenced changes in nutrient levels. All this sharpened his long-gestating concern about the health of the Great Barrier and other world reefs.

In the aftermath of the book’s publication, he and Mary began discussing the idea of a glossy, coffee-table book about world corals for a general audience, “not just to produce another book, but to open the eyes of the world to what was emerging as an urgent need to conserve corals.” It was the crystallization of a new joint mission: “to win some hearts as well as minds.”
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