human development, run-off and cyclones (or hurricanes as they are
known in the Florida Keys).
I am visiting Magnetic Island following the two wettest months in
North Queensland’s history. Big gum trees and foliage are still down
from Cyclone Tessa that struck 2 weeks earlier.
My second evening in town I’m invited to the Magnetic Island
Film Festival where the friendly, beer-drinking crowd of more than one
hundred is mostly costumed, in bathing suits or in drag. Here I learn
that the island’s two thousand residents are divided over a proposal to
revive a failed harbor project. The real-estate development would add
six hundred new housing units to the community and its over-stressed
septic systems. To date, Queensland, like the Florida Keys, has not
allowed climate-enhanced storms, increased rainfall, sea-level rise, or
dying reefs to stand in the way of its beachfront development schemes.
The island’s once-healthy Nelly Bay, a kind of neighborhood reef
where kids first learned to snorkel, is one of Hough’s seven study sites.
“Unfortunately the cyclone following repeated bleachings was the final
nail in its coffin,” he tells me. I decide to visit it anyway, to see for myself.
I head down to the beach past stately banyan trees, hoop pines,
coconut palms, and a sign reading: “Warning: Marine Stingers Are
Dangerous... Emergency treatment [for] severe box jelly sting: Flood
sting with vinegar. If breathing stops, give artificial respiration.”
Luckily I have borrowed a stinger suit (what we Yanks call a rash
guard or dive skin) from Tager. I swim out to the black buoy that marks
Hough’s research site and begin free diving. The bottom is a rubble
field of broken branch corals, dead bleached and gray silt-covered hard
corals, and a few small fish. A burrowing clam is encased in the lime-
stone skeleton of a dead rock coral. Its blubbery mantle is striped and
spotted with the blue, purple, and green colors of healthy symbiotic
algaes, giving it the look of a fashion model posing in a cemetery.
The Australia Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) is located 40
minutes south of Townsville. To get to it, you drive out Cape Cleveland,
a wetland and wilderness peninsula full of storks, egrets, cattle, and the
occasional wallaby bouncing off into the brush. Eventually you arrive at
a metal gate with a speakerphone in the middle of nowhere. The
remote gate opens. On the other side of a grassy hill is AIMS’ low-rise
132 David Helvarg