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I’m a coral-reef ecologist at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in Barbados. Every five years, as often as our funding allows, my team and I survey coral reefs for the government. I was born in Spain and earned my PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. But I decided to work in the Caribbean, where I think I am more useful.
We monitor the abundance and diversity of corals, algae, sponges and fish. Barbados no longer has populations of large fish, such as groupers and snappers, because of overfishing. The populations of parrotfish, Barbados’s most important species ecologically and economically, have seemed stable for the past decade.
Reefs are under threat globally, and the biggest losses of corals here occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, the shallow reefs have stabilized, but the deeper reefs have continued to deteriorate. And numbers of sponges and algae, which can damage corals when too abundant, have gradually increased in the deeper reefs. Still, there are positive signs. Staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis), which nearly went extinct here in the 1970s, are making a slow comeback.
This photo was taken in early September and the water was 28 °C or 29 °C. But I still wore a wetsuit with a hood, because after 90 minutes of scuba diving, you get cold.
We survey 43 sites in two months, doing one or two dives a day, three times a week. Four of us dive together; we are like a well-oiled machine.
I wish we could do surveys more frequently; in a rapidly changing environment, we need to know what is happening. But there’s not enough money. Still, new technology can model reefs in 3D. Those tools are becoming more affordable, and I think we’ll be using them in the next decade. Then, we could monitor more sites more often with the same resources.
I’ve wanted to be a biologist since I was a young boy. And it doesn’t get any better than studying coral reefs in your backyard.
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