A bubble-tip sea anemone, Entacmaea quadricolor
This is the link to my Out on a swim blog with the 20 most recent posts. If you want the complete index of all the articles, go to the Out on a swim index page.
By discovering nature, you discover yourself. I certainly have. It has given me lifelong learning, a new way of seeing this island, and – unexpectedly – a new career in my mid-60s. Today also happens to mark a small milestone in that journey: five years ago, on 3 December 2020, I published my first Out on a swim blog post.
But none of it has happened in isolation. Every step has involved other people sharing with me what they know. This post is my way of acknowledging that five-year mark and saying thank you.
The dedication
Keeping our knowledge close and not sharing it, scared that what we love will disappear if we tell others, is a sure way to lose it. Nature can only be protected if we teach others to love it like ourselves. So this post is dedicated to the sharing of knowledge, and to all the people who have done that with me.
To the local community – thank you.
To the volunteers who turn up on platforms like iNaturalist, and the ‘random’ researchers I have pestered, who have been supportive of someone with no quals but abundant enthusiasm, and who have patiently answered the daft questions – thank you. To all those young people who have launched a career working in nature, thank goodness for you. We are in good hands.
To the public service community who have listened, taken me seriously, and a few who have even championed my efforts (because not all have!), I have serious admiration for you and what you do under difficult circumstances. Thank you.
To the women I share a coffee with, who listen patiently as I chat endlessly about what I have found that week, and, yes, as I rant. You are a godsend.
To my three supervisors who backed my application to become a PhD candidate – I am acutely aware that you went out on a limb for me and for that I am very appreciative.
And to my husband who never planned to be a fish widower in his retirement! I can’t thank you enough for the way you’ve adapted to being married to a reef-obsessed snorkeller. Love your guts!
The journey
That first Out on a swim post was called The Elite Fleet, and it was about a small violet sea snail (Janthina janthina) that had captured my eye in the shallows of Emily Bay and as it washed up on the beach. Rather like myself, it had floated ashore on Norfolk Island.
I lived on Norfolk Island back in the 1990s. For nearly five years I swam in Emily and Slaughter Bays, often with one or both of my daughters in tow. On my return in 2018, I resumed my swims, but this time my children no longer needed me and I had time to revel in what I was seeing under the waves. And time to ask all the questions, too. Although what confronted me that year, when I first got back in the water, was different to what I remembered and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that ‘different’ was. Fewer fish? Not as many species? More algae? Different algae? I honestly wasn’t sure, but I do know that it bothered me. Things looked – well – sick. Was I right? Or was I mistaken?
The 1990s were still in the analogue era and underwater cameras were only for the dedicated or wealthy. But 25 years later technology had moved on. The Christmas gift of an underwater camera in December 2019, and some wise advice from a local Norfolk Islander, who is also a keen naturalist, who recommended I sign up to the citizen science platform iNaturalist to help me identify what I was photographing, were both game changers. I had begun taking underwater photos of anything I thought looked pretty from a zero-knowledge base. I quickly realised that not knowing what I was looking at wasn’t really that useful. I didn’t know the name of a single fish, apart from the aatuti (everyone who gets in the water on Norfolk Island knows this bitey bastard fish, commonly called the banded scalyfin, Parma polylepis). I thought all the butterflyfish were the same – yellow, white and black, right? I couldn’t tell a sea anemone from a coral! However, I was completely hooked when I took a closeup of a Lord coral, Micromussa lordhowensis and enlarged it on my computer screen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Its beauty, the colours and patterns – just stunning.
A close up of a Lord coral, Micromussa lordhowensis, Norfolk Island
I gradually put together a cataloguing system, sorting my photos into useful folders. But I couldn’t really find much to help me in the fish ID stakes, and corals were a complete blank. There were no handy fish ID guides tailored for Norfolk Island’s species, so instead I’d Google ‘black and white fish, horizontal stripes, yellow tail fin’ and see what images came up to at least give me a clue. It made identification a long process!
By July 2020, I had begun to tentatively upload a few of my photos to iNaturalist. My first post was of a colonial ascidian, otherwise known as a tunicate, Lissoclinum bistratum. iNaturalist invites you to at least guess what you think your photo could be of, so I suggested a seaweed! I honestly thought it was a plant. Well it was greenish anyway! That first kind comment from shelley_b suggesting that it was a colonial ascidian and encouraging me to keep posting was both reassuring and wonderful. It seems I had inadvertently stumbled across a bunch of people who are enthusiastic about nature, generous in time and spirit and who want to help others learn. Suddenly I wasn’t isolated; I had a global community to help. Many of the opportunities that have since followed – from research collaborations to this PhD – trace back to this community.
The first image uploaded to iNaturalist on 2 July 2020
That July, in 2020, was also the time something else happened that galvanised me on my journey. We had nothing short of an environmental disaster in the lagoon. Raw sewage from a malfunctioning pumping station in Burnt Pine hit that bay with devastating effect. The stench was unspeakable. Initially, there were no health warning signs to alert beachgoers. I alerted our local volunteer environmental group Flora and Fauna, to the situation, sharing my concerns. Fortunately, others felt the same way, so I persevered with lots of digging and asking around to find out what had happened. It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t the first to recognise and raise the issues – many others had done the same before me, and to them I give a grateful vote of thanks because it has made my job that much easier. Ultimately, I drafted a letter that I sent to whomever I could think of, including politicians, ministers and public servants, asking that the event be investigated.
What I didn’t realise then was that this event would completely alter the trajectory of the next few years of my life. The more I found out, the more horrified I became at what had happened. I noted everything down, kept copies of the stock standard ministerial responses and weathered the criticism from local administration for even daring to raise the issue. At this stage, I felt I really didn’t know enough about the reef, but I did know it wasn’t a healthy place to swim after that event. Nor was it healthy for the corals that soon began to exhibit all the signs of stress, including disease, and, as a result, death for some of them.
Cemetery Bay, December 2020, used to illustrate the blog post The state of play on Norfolk Island’s reef
I kept this information to myself and a few others. I wrote repeatedly to those with the power to act, but I was fearful of going public for so many very sound reasons.
Six months after this tragic event, I published my first blog post on my newly created website about the beautiful violet sea snail. It took me another six months, and a whole year after the terrible events of mid-2020, to finally find the courage to post publicly about what had happened. You can find that it here: The state of play on Norfolk Island’s reef. I would probably write that article differently today, but I stand by the sentiment of what I said.
Since then, as I have learned, I have shared. My Out on a swim blog has served as an honest diary of my journey thus far, of what is amazing and beautiful on our reef. I have explained, interpreted and done ‘show and tell’. It has catalogued the floods, the disease, the research articles that have ensued, and hopefully in that process has brought the underwater world a little bit closer to islanders and tourists. Norfolk Island’s reef is stunning, certainly worthy of celebration and important to save at all costs. With luck, I’ll still be in the water in another five years’ time, finding new things, learning about them and bringing the stories back to you. What I hope will have changed by then is not the reef’s ability to surprise me, but our willingness to clean up our act.
For now, I’m simply grateful – to the reef for being such an exacting teacher, and to all of you who’ve walked alongside me, shared your knowledge and let me share mine. It has been a privilege to do this.
Violet sea snails, Janthina janthina, Norfolk Island