The Reef Survey

The transects are eleven fifty-metre lines on the north-eastern edge of Rakau Reef and they were laid by Dr Moana Teariki in 2003 when she was twenty-nine.

A transect is a line on the seabed with permanent markers. You swim it, at the same depth, at the same time of year, and you record what is under the line at fixed intervals. Coral cover, genus, bleaching, algae, fish counts.

It is not glamorous work. It is the marine equivalent of standing in a field counting daisies, and it is the entire evidentiary basis of everything anybody knows about what is happening to reefs, because a photograph proves nothing and a memory proves less.

Twenty-two years. Eleven lines. Four surveys a year.

The numbers

In 2003 mean hard coral cover across the eleven transects was sixty-one per cent.

In 2016 it was forty-four.

In 2020, after the second mass bleaching, it was twenty-six.

It is now nineteen.

On what those numbers do to a person

Moana is fifty-one and has been asked this in every interview she has given and has never answered it honestly, because the honest answer is not usable by a journalist.

The honest answer is that it does nothing on the day.

You go down. You swim the line. You record what is there. The work is absorbing in the specific way that careful work is absorbing, and while you are doing it you are thinking about the slate and the depth and the current and whether that is Acropora or Isopora and whether your buddy has drifted.

You are not grieving. You are counting.

It arrives later, and not reliably, and almost never on the boat.

For Moana it arrives, four or five times a year, at her desk, entering the numbers — which is a clerical task, which takes about ninety minutes per survey, and which is where the whole thing has always caught up with her since about 2017.

Transect 7

There is a reason she has never moved the lines.

People have suggested it. Repeatedly, and reasonably, and with good intentions: move the transects to a healthier section, or add new ones further south where the cover is better, so that the dataset is not entirely a record of decline.

She has refused every time and it is the only professional matter on which she is known to be difficult.

The reason is that a transect line that is moved is a new dataset. Twenty-two years cannot be transplanted. The value of these eleven lines — the entire value, the thing that makes them cited in the literature — is that they are the same eleven lines, unmoved, through two bleaching events and a cyclone, and that no one can say the decline is an artefact of where somebody chose to look.

She has said in a meeting, and it is the most quoted thing she has ever said: "You do not get to choose where the evidence is."

What is also true about transect 7

Transect 7 crosses a small bommie — an isolated coral outcrop — at about the thirty-metre mark.

In 2003 it was a mound of Porites roughly the size of a car, several hundred years old, with a resident population that Moana logged in her first survey and every survey since.

It bleached in 2016 and recovered. It bleached in 2020 and recovered, partially.

It is currently, at the thirty-metre mark of transect 7, alive.

It is the only large Porites colony left on the eleven lines and Moana has photographed it four times a year for twenty-two years, which is eighty-eight photographs, and she has never once included it in a paper.

It is not scientifically significant. A single colony is an anecdote.

She has the eighty-eight photographs in a folder and she does not show them to anybody.

The students

There are three PhD students now. The youngest is twenty-four and was born after the transects were laid.

Moana has thought carefully about what she is doing to them.

She has decided that the honest thing is not to protect them from it, and she tells them in the first week the thing that was not said to her: that they are going to spend their careers producing a very high-quality record of a loss, that this is worth doing, and that it will do something to them that they should watch for.

Two of the three have asked whether she thinks it is hopeless.

She gives them the same answer, which is not comforting and which she believes: that the reef in 2003 is gone and is not coming back in her lifetime or theirs, and that the difference between nineteen per cent and eleven per cent is enormous and is still available to be fought over, and that people who need the fight to be winnable in order to fight it are not much use.

Last month

The November survey. Transect 7, thirty-metre mark.

She logged the bommie. Live, some partial mortality on the northern face, consistent with the last two years.

Then she did the thing she has done four times a year for twenty-two years, which is to take the photograph.

Then she did a thing she has never done, which is that she took her hand off the line and put it flat on the coral for a few seconds.

You are not supposed to touch coral. She has told several hundred people not to touch coral.

She has not mentioned it to anyone and she has not decided what it was.