An inaccurate recent BBC story: “It’s the rainforest of the sea’: These 1960s photos reveal Jamaica’s lost underwater paradise“, states: “A trove of snapshots from a 1960s diving expedition reveals stunning glimpses of Jamaica’s vibrant ecosystems of the past. This is transforming our vision of what coral reefs can be. In 1966, marine scientist Eileen Graham dived into the waters along the northern coast of Jamaica to study the lush, vibrant coral reefs.”
Thomas F. Goreau & Peter D. Goreau, 1968, by Eileen A. Graham
These photos, far from being a one-off “expedition” to Jamaica by a foreign visitor, are in fact a very tiny part of systematic documentation of the coral reefs by local marine scientists led by Professor Thomas F. Goreau, founder of the Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory of the University of the West Indies (UWI). This is the oldest and largest collection of coral reef photographs in the world, telling the true story of what we have lost. The Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA) is preserving these unique records of a vanished world.
Starting in 1951, Goreau, a medical researcher and ecological pioneer who led coral research at the Bikini Atoll Scientific Resurvey in 1947, started teaching doctors at the University of the West Indies Medical School, and began systematic documentation of Jamaican coral reefs, diving all alone with his home-made rebreathers. To train more divers to help his research he founded the Jamaica Sub Aqua Club, the first tropical dive club in the world, affiliated to the British Sub Aqua Club (Jamaica was at the time still a British colony). Many of these divers got spearguns and immediately wiped out the giant groupers that lived at the bottom of every reef, and we never saw them. But some became volunteers in the Jamaican marine labs and research teams that Goreau founded in Port Royal and Discovery Bay. One was Eileen Graham, who was assigned photographing green coralline algae in the mid 1960s. Her collection was apparently separated from the rest of the collection and donated to the British Museum of Natural History, which posted them on the web. It is of great value in understanding the ecology of these species, which provide most of the sand on the reef, in the mid 1960s. In most places they have been replaced by weedy algae that produce no sand.
The photographs on the BMNH web site are almost entirely photographs of different species of green coralline algae, but contain a few panoramic shots of opportunity showing Goreau’s team hard at work. Other than this set of her green coralline algae images, the entire Goreau collection, which goes back to 1946 and includes the oldest photographs of many coral reefs in Bikini Atoll, the Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, and other places around the world, is in the hands of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.
GCRA is seeking funds to scan the entire collection. They will be posted on the web as supplementary material to the book, Coral Reef Natural History From Beginning To End, now in preparation. They will be the oldest and best documentation of a vanished universe, driven to extinction by human greed.
A few hints of the richness of this unique collection are shown in:
2) Near complete recovery of these severely damaged reefs just six years later in 1957 in the world’s first known film of healthy coral reefs. This film will be posted on the GCRA web site only after there is a chance to show it for the first time at a meeting of the Jamaican Marine Park and Fish Sanctuary Managers. A planned showing was aborted by Hurricane Melissa, the strongest in history, which devastated Jamaica and washed away the beach Columbus landed on in 1494:
3) Coral Ghosts, A full length Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary film by Andrew Nisker about using the Goreau photograph collection to compare changes in reefs in Jamaica, Bikini, the Great Barrier Reef, and Indonesia. The short trailer clip of the movie is at the link above.
Information about showing the full documentary can be obtained from: Andrew Nisker
